Learning to ride with a loaded bike can be humbling. The first time you set out on a tour it is hard to fathom what the bike will feel like under the load of all your gear. The unsteadiness you feel that first time mixed with the thought of the task at hand makes the whole undertaking seem for a moment unimaginable and you are given the opportunity to either quit, go insane, or focus on what you can do for the moment and forget about the future. That process, forgetting about the future, is an ongoing meditation. When you start [View Full Entry]

---

---

So a white guy, a black guy, and a Polock were on an airplane that was about to crash.................. and that was about all we knew about Poland when we crossed the border out of Slovakia. Growing up in the States most of us were exposed to a wealth of jokes where the unlucky Polish bloke always ends up doing the stupidest thing possible. After travelling for just ten days in the country it seems more likely that the joke was somehow on us. We heard stories of widespread pollution and indeed some urban areas in the south, where coal is [View Full Entry]

---

---

For the first 8000 kilometers of our journey we had few choices of routes in that, over most of the Eurasian Steppe there are few roads connecting any two places. We would pick our next destination and ride there on the only route we could find. Sometimes this meant small, remote tracks where we were excited to see another car, horse, anything that could confirm our choice at the last intersection. At other times, however, this reality put us in heavy traffic on the only through road across huge distances. Russia was particularly rough as only one main road plies the [View Full Entry]

---

---

Until a few weeks ago we had been riding through countries so massive that border crossings, when they so seldom happened, seemed interestingly quirky at worst. When we met with our dear friends in the Crimean, we knew that one way or the other we would be crossing several international boundaries in only a few days. We thought this quite irksome as Julie and JP had to be in Bucharest for a flight by the morning of the eleventh and delays were not needed. We planned to take a ferry from the Crimean to Odessa in order to skip the few [View Full Entry]

---

---

Riding across the vast plains of southern Russia we had a hard time imagining what any government could possibly want with all of this flat, dry land. As it stands now, the federation is the largest country in the world. Trying to picture all of this PLUS the former CIS states is mind blowing given that Moscow is closer to New York than the Russian Far East. Here in the Crimean Penninsula, however, it is easy to see how a superpower would want to lay claim to a destination so removed from its core. This place is truly gorgeous and different [View Full Entry]

---

---

When we studied the history of WWII in school we learned of the triumphs of the allies over the Nazi regime. We watched films and read accounts of the fierce fighting that raged for four years in the fields of central Europe and watched shaky black and white films of soldiers grovelling up the beaches of Normandy while warships launched barage after barage of cover fire and many of us came to regard "D-Day", rather by default, as the most critical event in the war. The role of the Russians was either largely left out or we missed it somehow as [View Full Entry]

---

---

When the Soviet empire collapsed in the early nineties it was heralded in the west. The thought of centrally mandated collectivism makes a capitalist's blood run cold and many (if not most) Americans view, or were taught to view this shift as a great victory in the name of the human spirit. The communists doubtlesssly had innumerable failings but, as western popular media triumphed through "kill-a-commie" films and the end of the "Cold War" was heralded, many Russians suffered and starved. The loss of a way of life that was a full two generations thick proved stifling and left many without [View Full Entry]

---

---

Kazakhstan is by far the largest and most prosperous of the former Soviet Central Asian states. Stretching from the 7000m+ Tian Shan to the Caspian sea it is longitudinally nearly as large as the 48 contiguous states. In the east, pipelines carry petros across the mountains into China. The western most regions, where much of these petros are mined, are technically in Europe. It is the richness of its resources that makes the young state a standout in an otherwise impoverished region and, as one might imagine, more than a few neighbor states are at length trying to get their hands [View Full Entry]

---

---

Definitions: gol -mongolian for river, nuur -Mongolian for lake, aimag -a mongolian state or province, asalam aleykhem -Kazakh for peace be with you. The Bohmoron Gol drains several lakes high in the boundary ranges which seperate Russia from Mongolia. It then flows through a large, wide (50 km +), rocky valley rimmed with 4000 m + peaks before dumping heavily turbid water into broad, shallow Achit Nuur. Along this course, the river devides Uvs aimag to the northeast from Bayan-Olgii aimag, the western most political division in the country. In dividing the two aimags, the mighty [View Full Entry]

---

---

A truck went by..... three hours ago. Smoke Creek Desert -Gary Snyder A few years ago a group of us were speeding across the basins of Northern Nevada en route to a remote hot spring. Sitting in the passenger seat of our rented Blazer was mama Vickie Wiles who was visiting from the Mid-Atlantic. As she watched the endless sage roll by and slowly internalized the [View Full Entry]

---

---