Bishkek

A dusty legacy of crumbling Soviet concrete with a light garnishing of the same, albeit of the modern day variety, means that Bishkek is not what you would call a pretty place… it is, at this time of year, also baking hot. However there is good coffee and food to be found, and some excellent teas, and with mostly friendly and helpful, at worst indifferent, folk it is an easy place to be, with an appeal of its own. Just as well really, my journey here was not entirely plain sailing and I’m having to spend a day longer in town than originally planned.

Over the last few days this journey has felt curiously abstract, in a state of potentially happening or not happening… Schrödinger’s Bike Ride perhaps

I first thought about coming here almost 20 years ago.. sourced maps, mentally traced some routes and so on but somehow never got around to it – there were always other places, not to mention work and life things too. As my desire to spend time in airports and on aeroplanes, in order to explore a world facing climate breakdown and  increasingly infected with mass tourism, dwindles away I decided that perhaps I would make the effort or forever wonder how it would have been. It’s been five years since I hopped on a flight with a bicycle, and this may even be the last, who knows… I’ve been fortunate to have explored many interesting corners over the last 30 years or so, and find now that ferries to Western Europe represent a more appealing future of just riding bikes with or without friends. Of course in the intervening years Kyrgyzstan has flung it’s arms wide open to welcome the cyclist and trekker, not surprisingly given the possibilities for exploring the wild and mountainous terrain, which of course makes it a much easier place to explore these days with online mapping and so on.

Barely visible in the heat haze of dust and pollution, looming over Bishkek just to the south is a vast snow-capped wall reaching far into the sky and extending as far east and west as the eye can see… the Tien Shan, or Mountains of Heaven.

Over the last few days this journey has felt curiously abstract, in a state of potentially happening or not happening… Schrödinger’s Bike Ride perhaps. You see Turkish Airlines lost my bike and all my gear somewhere between London and Bishkek, a situation that proved maddeningly difficult to deal with in the face of startling indifference and incompetence… if I could even get to actually contact a real person. It was a flight that, from the off, reminded me of my distaste for flying, with a long delay at Heathrow, surprise…, and a long, long midnight sprint the length of Istanbul’s vast airport terminal to make a connecting flight that clearly wasn’t going to wait for transfer passengers, even a moment. Having suffered the additional insult of being told my bike had been found, only to be delivered someone else’s also missing bike with an entirely different tag ID,  my own stuff finally reached me around midnight yesterday by which time I was rapidly losing the will to continue. Now of course I’m just shattered, I barely managed more than a very few hours sleep over the last few nights, hence the extra day in town; I feel in no fit state to face the 100km of uphill riding on a rough dirt track that await me on day one of my ride. Barely visible in the heat haze of dust and pollution, looming over Bishkek just to the south is a vast snow-capped wall reaching far into the sky and extending as far east and west as the eye can see… the Tien Shan, or Mountains of Heaven. That’s where I have to go.

As I write I still feel somewhat disengaged from the journey and struggling to plan for food and so on for the next few days.. it’s a few days ride to my next supply point, and I’m not entirely sure how long it will take. It’s been five years since I was faced with a mega-climb of similar scale to the Kegety Pass, and of course I have no acclimatisation to altitude yet. For the same reason I have not particularly been able to bother with any street photography either beyond a few half-hearted snaps while wandering around trying not to dwell on where the heck my bike was. It is a situation that I know a few good night sleep will fix (jet-lag becomes a bigger bastard with each year that passes) and will be nothing more than a memory the moment I get on my bike and ride out of town. I also discovered my rain trousers have gone missing somewhere along the way. I should probably do something about that tomorrow, the mountains here are not entirely dry…. I do have some dirt cheap ones cut off just below the knee that I prefer for drizzly days and showers, but temps in the mountains can drop very low and it can rain hard all day… As if to confirm my hobo credentials, I’m pondering the idea of some bin bag gaiters, just in case it gets really bad; could be the ultimate lightweight solution… I have some 3mm bungee cord that would do the job of keeping them up. There is also an outdoor store at the other end of town, they may have something usable, after all everything you can buy in the west comes from China these days anyway.