July 8, 2018 — Jay Austin
I am shouting.
Lauren is shouting.
These two men—the ones who have been stalking us and harassing us and just pushed me off my bicycle—are shouting.
Everyone is yelling at everyone.
We yell in English and they yell in Kyrgyz. "вы не хорошо!" I sputter in Russian, piecing together a few of the small, few dozen words I know. You are not good!
Their eyes glint with amusement. One man walks toward me and I yell louder. They seem eager for a fight, like they're just bored and this is a fun way to spend a late afternoon. Broken vodka bottles litter the roadside. I wonder if they've been drinking.
One can only shout for so long when those they're shouting at don't speak the same language. So everyone quickly tires of raising their voices and Lauren and I figure it's not very productive to stick around. Nyet! we yell once more as we straddle our our bicycles and pedal away. Do not follow us.
Predictably, they follow. One kilometer down the road, their gold sedan pulls up alongside. One man is filming us on his phone out the passenger window. Pozhaluysta, he sneers. I finally think to take out my own phone, snap a photograph of their license plate, and it's enough to scare them off. They peel ahead into the mountains.
***
Finally, we're alone. We're tired and cold and wet. We summit Ala-Bel an hour or two later and it's getting dark. We need to get as low as possible as soon as possible. We don all of our layers and as I'm buckling my pannier I notice another of my spoke nipples has broken on my back wheel. I am not about to change it up here. I pretend I don't see it and climb back onto my bike for the long ride down.
Brakes squealing, we descend. It's a gorgeous ride. We coast for a few dozen kilometers without turning the pedals once. The earth warms about one degree Celsius for every hundred meters of elevation lost (2.X degrees Fahrenheit for every 3XX feet), and we drop almost two thousand meters in a little over an hour. We are no longer freezing. In our jackets and hoods and mittens, we look a little silly.
Camping in the mountains can be difficult. We're deep within a gorge, flanked by cliffs just next to the road. There's a river to the left, swollen and flooding the few patches of flat land we can find. We descend lower.
Eventually we stop at a bee farmer's yard. Is it okay to sleep here? Lauren asks. Sure, he shrugs indifferently. There's space behind the hives. He points out a patch of grass and turns his attention back to the bee box he's carving.
We pack up our tent in the morning and I marvel at how lucky we are not to have been bothered by the bees, hundreds of them buzzing frenetically just a few feet away. As I lift a pannier onto my bicycle, I get stung in the back of the head.
The sting swells and my neck begins to cramp. We continue our ride downhill and I have to stop twice to take some ibuprofen. I think about our past few days and tally our recent misfortunes. Bee sting. A broken spoken nipple I still have not fixed. Mean men on the mountain. A delaminated Thermarest we have not figured out a solution for. It'd be really nice to make it to Osh without any more mishaps.
We ride another day or so. We're halfway around the pretty Toktogul Reservoir when Lauren's left pedal falls off.
***
It's odd for a pedal to fall off. But it's not really a big deal. You just screw it back on.
On the side of the road, in the rain, we screw Lauren's pedal back on. Good to go.
We make it another ten feet before it comes off again.
We take a closer look. The pedal isn't falling out because it's loose. It's falling out because all of the threading in the crank arm has been stripped.
This is a bigger deal.
***
There are bicycles in Kyrgyzstan but there aren't very many. There are a few bicycle shops in Bishkek but we are most definitely not going back to Bishkek. From here the next city is Osh, and Osh is both small (population 250,000) and far (still over three hundred kilometers). Even if we can find a bike shop, we need something specific: a crank arm compatible with Lauren's bottom bracket. A crank arm the length of Lauren's other crank arm.
Riding a bicycle with just one pedal isn't easy. Or so Lauren tells me once we've returned to the last village we'd passed, fortunately just a few kilometers back. That was difficult.
It's a small village, but there's an auto shop. We say hello to the two mechanics and communicate the problem, mostly by pointing. Suggestions?
The men confer in Kyrgyz. We help them remove the crank arm (that's the bit that holds the pedal in place) and one of the mechanics takes that piece and the pedal around a corner. We hear the buzz of a motor and the grinding of metal on metal. We walk to the front of the shop and he's seated on the cement, holding Lauren's pedal against the ground with his foot, sending a flurry of sparks into the air as he runs an angle grinder against the edge of the pedal. We sure hope he knows what he's doing.
Ten minutes later, he's fitted the pedal back onto the crank arm. For good measure he welds it all together, melted metal permanently fusing the two together. Lauren's left pedal will not be falling off again.
Спасибо! we say. Thank you! How much do we owe you?
Nyet, the mechanic dismisses the question with a flick of his hand. Don't worry about it.
There's a small booth outside the auto shop selling bread. We try to buy a few loaves, partly as a way of saying thank you, partly because we're very hungry, and they refuse to take our money for this, either. They hand us a bag of bread—for energy, they say—and wave us off. We pedal away, with four working pedals, looking back and smiling and the two friendly Kyrgyz men in their mechanic uniforms.
***
We ride for days. Along the reservoir, up out of the reservoir. We sweat up another pass and cycle through deep red gorges. We camp next to turquoise rivers and descend into the Fergana Valley.
The days grow hot and the roads grow bumpy. We skirt along the Uzbekistan border, a pair of barbed wire fences to our right. We're close enough to wave at Uzbek farmers and get barked at by Uzbek dogs.
With fifty percent of the roadside off-limits, it's a little tough to find a quiet place to camp. The left side of the road is densely settled, all small homes and concrete buildings and vegetable stalls and ramshackle shops. It's hot, and we've had a long day, and Lauren walks up to one of the homes to ask whether it'd be okay to camp in the forest behind the house.
The forest? comes the reply. If you'd like, we have a nice level spot in our yard right here.
***
The world is a big place. Travel around it long enough and you're bound to find something a little nasty. Maybe someone who thinks it's funny to follow you in his car, to push you off your bike because you won't take a picture with him.
You can choose to focus on these things, and you can say, See, the world is mean and scary. See, people are dangerous.
We have traveled the world for a year. We have cycled across three continents. And yes, this one single time, someone was a little mean to us. And yes, we are certainly a privileged pair, and probably the recipients of more generosity than most. Worse things happen than a man in a gold sedan.
But to focus on the bad is to ignore the good. We have traveled the world for a year and nearly every single person we've met has been wonderful and kind. For every pair of men blocking our path on a quiet mountain road, there have been ten thousand willing to fix our pedals, to fill our panniers with freshly baked bread, to offer us a safe place to spend the night.
We are fortunate to be on this journey we're on. To so intimately grasp the beauty and splendor of this world. We are fortunate to have shared so many special moments with so many of this planet's inhabitants.
Fortunate, but not lucky. To have luck is to beat the odds. To defy probability. To grasp the unlikely outcome. Yet here are the odds: it is a big world, and it is filled with many people, and most of these people are good. (You might say that, actually, all of them are good; some just make mistakes along the way.) Take a leap, trust the world, and chances are you'll receive much more kindness than malice. More likely than not, you'll be well taken care of. The probability of meeting someone wonderful is far greater than meeting someone not-so-wonderful. These are the facts of life.
And, well, that's not luck. That's just people.
***
We camp in the yard and we are given a bowl of tomatoes fresh from the garden. We're introduced to the family and the goats and the dogs and the chickens. Gul, our kind host, heats up a large bucket of water for us, and we're shown to a small wooden shack where we can wash off. We mix hot water and cold water and pour it over our heads, rinsing days of dust and grime from our sun-soaked bodies. It's a simple yet wonderful shower. We sleep.
We're woken early the following morning by the crow of the family's massive rooster, over two feet tall and rather mangy. He circles our tent at daybreak and screams.
We break down our tent and pack our panniers and, before we take off, are surprised by a lovely breakfast Gul has prepared for us. We sit outside and play with the children and do our best to communicate with our hosts.
Plenty of languages are spoken in central Asia: Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Tajik, ____, heaps more. Because we're traveling across a wide region, and because nearly all of the people we meet also speak Russian, I've been doing my best to pick up a little Russian as we cycle. It hasn't amounted to much yet, but it's getting better.
I never aspired to learn Russian. I never thought Russian would be my third-strongest language. Yet here I am, later that day, entertaining a few kids on bikes in a gas station parking lot with some basic, poorly-pronounced russki. Hello! What's your name? I like your bicycles! Do you live around here? Oh, us? We're coming from Almaty, headed to Osh, then the Pamir. Okay, bye!
Part of learning Russian is learning the sounds, and part of learning Russian is learning the alphabet. Russian is written in Cyrillic, which looks a bit like our Latin lettering but is actually quite different. Quite challenging. You look at a word in Arabic and, unless you speak Arabic, you think, I do not know these letters and thus I do not know this word.
But Cyrillic is tricky, because it looks a bit like Latin. There are familiar characters, old friends like A and M and P and C and near-doppelgangers like the backwards R (я) and the upside-down h (ч) and the boxy W (ш). And so you see a word like ресторан and you think, Well, I'm not sure what that means but it's definitely pronounced "pec-to-pah." Except it's not, because the Ps are Rs and the Cs are Ss and the Hs are Ns. And so this word is actually pronounced "restoran"—restaurant. Cyrillic is like this: though there are some letters that are the same as our alphabet, there are even more that look like they're part of our alphabet but are actually pronounced totally differently. And then, of course, there are some characters—д, ж, щ, и, г, з, л, plus a few more—that are just totally new.
For a while I avoided learning Cyrillic. I didn't plan on writing any Russian, just speaking it, and it seemed a whole lot easier to just learn a language through podcasts while cycling than to internalize a whole new alphabet.
But everything here is in Cyrillic. Road signs, soup cans, menus, types of petrol. I start simple, just guessing at the meaning of billboards while we pedal, and before long I know half the alphabet. I look at a шоколад bar and read chocolate or catch пицца on a menu and order pizza. By the time we're pulling into Osh, I see Ош on the big welcome archway and know that we've arrived (though certainly the big welcome archway made that clear enough on its own).
Osh: older than the Bible, ancient crossway of the Silk Road. Osh, the official start of the Pamir Highway and the long, uphill journey to Tajikistan. Osh, the biggest city (population: 250,000) we're going to see for months. Osh, Ош, however you spell it, pretty much the last time we'll be under three thousand meters for weeks to come.
We have reached Osh, and now it's time for some rest.