Bike Tour Eurasia

They told me I was goin' down to Vietnam. Up until that moment I had never heard of it before. Had to go look at a globe to see exactly where that was. -John D. Recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, Vietnam. John D. worked as a ski lift operator in the winter months and ran a fishing boat out of San Diego in the summer. He had a mild manner and a sometimes distant look when he talked about the past at the twelve-step meetings I drove him to a few times a month. He seldom talked about the war at all, but the more he exposed about his life leading up to and following a certain event, the more I was curious about the scars, the rumors, the medal, the moment.... I wanted ... read more

Note (again): This blog is also photoless thanks to the myriad of incompatibilities between Travelblog and your average Chinese computer. We are presently unsure whether this relationship is the intention of some saavy censorship body or merely innocent technical difficulties. Assume what you will but, as we will endeavor to highlight, censorship in China is broad spectrum and actually quite lacking in intention and daftness. Reading a map is a martial art. It is easy to understand the idea of cartography, but difficult to replicate that ideal on the surface of a spheroid. Add to that the complications of rivers and mountains and major pieces of information become obscured on the surface of the paper. Multiply that with the changes of human development and false information enters the fray to make navigation something not so firmly ... read more

"There once was an old farmer with one son and one horse. The horse ran away and the man was unlucky. When the horse returned it had found a mate, now the man had two horses and was very lucky. His son tried to ride the horse and fell off, breaking his leg. Now the man felt unlucky again but soon the nation went to war and all of the young men were called to fight. Luckily, because of his recently broken leg, the farmer's son was excused and he was again lucky" A swiss man told us this story at Chinese customs the other day as we were receiving a bit of unexpected news. The Irkeshtam pass bridges the border from Kyrgyzstan into China's wild west in a gap where the Tien Shan technically meets ... read more

"Humankind is the only creature that refuses to be what it is" -Camus Winter never seems to last very long. No matter how many days we get out in the cold, there never seems to be enough hours spent on frozen water of some sort. The more one becomes informed about and examines the finite crystals that fall from the sky, the more it becomes clear that snow is basically a miracle. This year saw less of these miracles falling on the Sierra but it did not prevent the making of some epic days. Sunrise to the beat of a pounding heart, long skin tracks scribe a human line in a wilderness of white. Tools sink into supple ice, soft as plastic, rare as gold in the state of eternal sun. Blue hardwax grips but barely, ... read more

Istanbul has a history of being a great crossroads. The ethnic blend of the Turkish people in general is reminiscent of our own country and in the urban center-of-it-all this becomes even more distilled and obvious. Of course, this idea of "east meets west" is heavily marketed and commercialised in a city overflowing with tourists and, following a sojourn through more authentic places, this quickly rubbed us the wrong way. We have learned from living in a tourist area that every such place has a more realistic side where day to day life rolls on and the beauty of banality lies in open display. One day, while eating baklava and watching the throngs of tourists march by, two folks came along and opened the door to such a culture in Istanbul . Because the city ... read more