The Great Bike Ride

A month ago, I went to a used bike market in Tbilisi and left with a pretty decent looking $180 bicycle. A couple days later I boarded a train to Baku with my new bike and all of my most important belongings. Baku would be the starting point for a casual three month bike ride across Central Asia. Until that point, I had almost exclusively traveled by hitchhiking, but I had always been curious about cycling. I was enticed by the idea of powering myself across a continent and having the freedom to go down any road no matter the traffic. Additionally, traveling Tajikistan’s Pamir Highway had long been a dream of mine and this was a perfect opportunity to make it happen. But the main reason I bought a bicycle was because I met a girl on a bike 2 weeks earlier who invited me to join her. All of these factors were capped by a conversation with a friend and experienced cyclist who told me it’s the ultimate dream to meet a solo woman cyclist who’s heading the same direction. The opportunity just fell into my lap. I was in.   I had never biked more than about 40 km (25 mi) before in my life so I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. What I did have was travel experience, so apart from spare bike parts, I had exactly what I’d need to live on the road for a while. Luckily, Detti, my new travel partner, had all the necessary spare parts and tools. I just had to figure out how to attach everything to my bike without buying expensive panniers. A couple backpacks, several zip ties, three wooden spatulas, and a bit of creativity did the job, at least for the time being. A week later in Azerbaijan, I found a guy with a welder and extra rebar and asked him to make a little rack to bungee the backpacks to. Thanks to the combination of Detti’s blueprint drawing skills from her pre-travel life as an engineer and my Russian finally being at a pretty decent level, we were able to evenly distribute the weight on my bike while keeping the price for the whole setup under $200.

My first 250 km or so were in Azerbaijan, doing a little loop up to the north and then riding down to the ferry port south of Baku. It was a lot easier than I had imagined. The terrain was flat, we had a tailwind some of the way, and it wasn’t so hot. A season of high elevation ski touring had apparently put my legs and lungs in good shape; at sea level my pedals felt as light as feathers. The next stage – the Kazakh desert – turned out to be a lot more difficult. It’s always possible to bike slowly without using much physical energy, but I found it impossible to keep calm while facing a strong headwind, rarely seeing the speedometer go above 8 km/h, and having every other car honk in our faces or roll down the window, demand to know where we’re from, and then drive off. The utter lack of progress and the feeling of being seen as a zoo animal was really getting to me. That, coupled with the 85 km strip of rocks and ruts that somebody once decided to call the international highway between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and then forgot to maintain for the last century, a mouthful of dust every minute or two when a truck passed too close, and blazing desert heat, made me ready to throw my bike under one of those reckless trucks and curl up in a ball and cry. My positive start in Azerbaijan had reversed and I was really questioning my decision to travel by bicycle. I beg you, any aspiring cyclists who are reading this, please please please save yourself the misery and take a train or hitchhike from Beyneu, Kazakhstan, to Kungrad, Uzbekistan. You won’t regret it.

Finally, 20 km after the Uzbek border, we boarded a train through the next 300 km of desert, took a few days off to hitchhike up to the former Aral Sea and back, and got back on the bicycles for a fresh start. During the last few days we’ve only been riding in the early morning and late evening due to the extreme heat, and I’ve had plenty of time to reflect on this unfamiliar means of travel. I certainly can’t say I enjoy biking more than hitchhiking yet, but I can see the potential. Here’s what I’ve learned in the last 1000 km:

1. Slowly pushing the pedals one after another day after day through a flat desert is really boring
2. Bike seats suck
3. Cycling is harder mentally than physically
4. Bicycle travel leads to superficial interaction with more random people than hitchhiking, but very rarely the kind of deep conversation you get from spending hours in a car together (typical interaction: “Hi, Where are you from? Where are you going? How much does your bike cost? What’s the average salary in America? Selfie? Bye)
5. It feels good to go somewhere by your own human power
6. Carrying stuff on a bike instead of on your back is really nice
7. The freedom to travel on any road that I had hoped for doesn’t really exist in Central Asia because there are simply not so many roads and anything but highways are too rough for a road bike (highways are often also too rough for a road bike)
8. I’m gaining a much better appreciation for distances, road conditions, and wind direction than ever before

There are some positives that I try to focus on, but in order to really enjoy cycling, I need to find a solution to the boredom and frustration that I feel every day. Practicing meditation is the best solution, but I’ve also been thinking of a few ideas to keep my mind active and positive while pushing the pedals. These are my thoughts from the last few days, and if you have any suggestions, please comment! I hope that this can be helpful to myself and to future cyclists, or at least be an interesting view into the daily thoughts of a bicycle traveler.

• Ride alone more often
  • I feel more free when I ride alone – I can go fast when I want, rest when I want, and focus fully on my own needs and desires without having to constantly put my partner first in my mind
  • It’s easy enough to simply set meeting points on the map with my partner so we don’t lose each other but do more of the actual riding alone
  • When I don’t think about keeping the same pace as someone else, it frees my mind to focus on other things, for example, what will I write in my next blog post?

• Challenge myself
  • Push my physical limits in order to feel the satisfaction of a good workout
    • Being in good shape simply feels great
    • Improvement is exciting
    • Do sprint/relax intervals where I count to 500 pedal rotations in a foreign language in order to make my brain work a bit more than usual
  • Solve mathematical/physical problems in my head
    • Can I solve 48592/43.8 without a calculator?
    • Can I use a 3D mental solar system model to figure out what time the sun will rise in Uzbekistan on the 27th day after the spring solstice?

• Learn something
  • Listen to a podcast about blockchain
  • Listen to the news in Russian
  • Practice my skills at identifying roadside plants
  • Teach myself how to whistle loudly
  • Learn moving meditation

What do you think about in order to entertain yourself when you’re doing a repetitive motion over and over? Comment with your suggestions below.

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