Now we are truly nomads in nomad’s land! Arriving in Mongolia, the first thing that struck me was a great sense of freedom, the ‘land without fences’ shows that actually you don’t need to trap or hobble your animals in order to farm them. (apparently pigs are resistant to herding but horses, goats, cows, and sheep all seem to stay within range of the ger and can be moved each day by a horseman (dogs do not seem to play any role in the herding, and just act as guard animals for gers). A ger is the traditional white round tent [View Full Entry]

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Sept 21 Back on the road towards the Mongolian border. Once we had paid our (dis)respect to the giant Lenin head in the town square, we were off. It was 7 degrees C at 10am in the morning, and there was a bitter wind blowing (fortunately in our favour). We stopped to visit the Ivolgolinsk datsan, built in 1955 as a concession by Stalin to ‘religious tolerance’. For this reason, it had a decidedly 1950’s look, made from bricks.but with colourful wooden rooftops. The many buddhist temples that used to be in the area were destroyed in the early years of [View Full Entry]

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Arriving in Irkutsk at 4am Moscow time (9am local time) it was just 7 degrees. It seemed a small miracle that we and our bikes had made it 5000km without even one revolution of the pedals! I instantly had the feeling I was in Asia, a feeling that was further confirmed once we re-loaded the bikes and headed up the hill into the general chaos of the traffic and past a local flea market, where second hand goods were spread on the roadside. And finally after a couple of days relaxing in Irkutsk and catching up with Angie and Pete, and [View Full Entry]

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3 days and 4 nights - that’s how long it took to get to Irkutsk on board the Baikal express. Plaskarte (3rd class) is the class that most Russian travellers use and most guidebooks warn you to avoid, describing it as resembling a refugee camp after several days onboard. In plaskarte you have a bunk bed and the cabin is open plan, so that all the passengers can move about freely. In each section, there are 6 beds, separated by partitions. Sharing our compartment, were 4 women, Kalina, Oxanna, Alex, and Oliba. Oxanna (18) had been on holiday to Moldova with [View Full Entry]

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First impressions What a crazy experience it is to be in Moscow. Firstly arriving off the train from Riga at midday and making our way the 12km across Moscow from north to south to our couch-surfing host. The city has a feel quite unlike anywhere I’ve been before and you get the sense that it is throbbing with life (we did happen to arrive just in time for Moscow’s 860th birthday!) Moscow is not cycle friendly, and we ended up walking our bikes most of the way, all up it took us a good couple of hours to get across town. [View Full Entry]

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We’ve spent the last couple of weeks cycling the Baltic Sea Coast, and stopping to relax on its beautiful white sand beaches in between Nida and Riga. Nida is on the Curonian spit, a small strip of land covered in forest and sand dunes. This Unesco region is shared between Russian owned Kalingrad and Lithuania. From Nida you can’t walk more than a kilometre south over the dunes without meeting Russian border guards with machine guns (apparently!). The villages are built on sand dunes and due to shifting sands many villages on the spit have been buried several times in the [View Full Entry]

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We discovered today that ever since we entered Lithuania we have been living out of sync with the rest of the nation, by one hour that is. Finally it dawned on me today as a big digital clock in a town suggested that the time was exactly one hour later than what I presumed it was. Funny indeed, as for over a week we had been going around indignant that shop keepers would shut their shops one hour early (just for the sake of it obviously), and that buses did not behave according to their timetables. It had even gone so [View Full Entry]

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With our eyes firmly set on the coast we rode north from Warsaw with the hope of some beach bumming before heading into the depths of Siberia. On route we passed through Biebrza National Park, a large river delta area, and Poland’s largest national park. Our plans to take the scenic route through the park and spot the elusive black stork (czarny bochin) were foiled when the road we had intended to take was under flood. Nigel attempted to prove to me that it was in fact ride-able, and took his first tumble of the trip, which would have been very [View Full Entry]

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The last couple of weeks has been busy catching up with friends, and organizing ourselves for the next leg of our journey. We met Angela and Paul in Kazimierz Dolny, an artists retreat town not far from Warsaw. Angela was teaching English to children on a school camp just up the road in Pulavy, and Paul had been visiting Belarus and decided to pay us a visit as part of his trip (he also rescued us from melting to death in our caravan and whisked us off for a night of luxury in the hotel next door!). Then it was off [View Full Entry]

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Poland so far has been a fascinating country, and a country that we've been able to give real time to. We spent our first night in Zakopane, a favourite destination of Polish tourists for its accessibility to the high Tatras mountains. As we approached we entered a realm of intricately carved log houses, and small wooden churches against a backdrop of the craggy limestone mountains. We then cycled to Krakow, where we had the humbling and chilling experience of visiting Auschwitz, before heading to the least populated and least developed region in the south east of Poland, Podkarparckie, whe [View Full Entry]

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