OMSK - city of Hardcore Partying!

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Day 86, 25th August

Isil’kul’ - Moskalenki - Mar’janovka

A nine o’clock start and rain immediately. The wind had made a 180 turn too and was blowing directly into our faces. It was utterly miserable. After 25 miles there was the first very welcome café, then after another 30 miles, the next - we were totally soaked through. Our goal was Omsk to meet Rory who was waiting for us. There were no phones to establish contact, so we decided after 60 miles to leave the next 20 or so to Omsk for the morning. I was glad to get into my tent and into some dry clothes. It was 6pm. The prospect of another month or so of this across Siberia and then Mongolia didn’t relly appeal to me. I got into my warm sleeping bag and curled up. Ate some noodles later and wrote the last of my postcards to friends, what a bind compared to email!

Total Miles: 4892.24 Todays Miles: 65.49 Average speed: 11.4 Time on bike: 5:41


Day 87, 26th August

Mar’janovka - Omsk

There was a big storm in the night, lots of rain and wind, I thought at times that the tent would be ripped into shreds! By morning the weather was truly miserable, but we all gritted our teeth as we slipped into our cold and wet clothes. We packed our sodden tents and set out on the road to Omsk. One plus was that the wind had completely changed and was now behind us.

There were no cafes to get a nice warming coffee, and 20 miles later we were on the outskirts of Omsk following the confusing road system to the centre of the city. After asking a friendly guy for directions to the ‘Hotel Omsk’ where Rory was staying, we were on our way past communist posters to the riverbank.

Once inside the hotel, a smiling Rory was there to meet us and to tell us wild stories about his stay in Chelyabinsk - albeit, not as wild as our stories in Kaz! We all checked into our single-rooms then went for a meal at the bowling alley next door. Afterwards, we had a walk into town to do some food shopping and to get some cash. Later on, the guys went to the bowling alley again to play pool and drink beer. I was the tired sad guy who stayed in and went to bed early.

Total Miles: 4921.70 Todays Miles: 29.45 Average speed: 14.0 Time on bike: 2:05


Day 88, 27th August

OMSK

My hotel room, number 518, is typical of Soviet design - nothing works properly and everything is made from the cheapest of materials. The door is too big for the frame and won’t close properly, the mattress won’t lift to tuck the sheets in, my mammoth wall-radio needed a constant whack to keep it belching forth Russ-pop music, the windows needed a mathematician to work out how they opened, and upon trying to work the latter out the curtain rails fell off whacking me on the head and leaving me running with an open head-wound! Still, the view was nice! A part of the Russian Experience…

Later, I went into town with Scott - the mission; to buy some waterproof gear. We found shops with confusing arrays of expensive stuff, eventually, I ended up with a thick pair of Polish socks and a pair of trendy Russian combat-trousers with a label that claimed that they had been manufactured on a space-station? I used the internet and then went back to the hotel to snack on yummy food.

Toby was there this time, and I went to town with him, this time to buy some good boots. In a shoe shop, we met two young girls who heard us speaking English and wanted to practice theirs with us. They led me to a good shoe shop where I bought some great Russian boots. They also invited us to a disco later…

Later on, Kate - the one who fancied Tobes, met us in our hotel foyer, except Scott who had the shits, and we caught a minibus 5 miles out of town to a disco called “Kristall”. I fancied seeing a Russian disco, but this, was going to be something else!

It was 50 roubles to get in and the atmosphere was nice and relaxed. I’d decided to stay pretty sober just in case dodgy things started to happen, and they did. We were offered cocaine, pot, ecstasy, and Russian-girls by the most slimeyest of geezers. I danced for a while, then suddenly, at the sound of a klaxon, the whole disco turned into a lurid strip club with girls from the audience competing in raucous lesbo acts with eachother for the prize of a cheap bottle of plonk! One of the strangest things was that the audience mainly consisted of ‘Whooping’ girls, the guys just didn’t seem interested? It was mind-blowing, and by 5am I was ready to leave, Rory was wasted, Toby stayed with Kate. We took a taxi back to the hotel, the driver and his mate were smoking dope - man! This is Omsk. Back at the hotel Rory still wanted to booze and he did just that, I had to crash out.


Day 89, 28th August

Omsk - Kalačinsk

After only two hours sleep I was wide awake, packing up and ready to leave - I don’t know why? So was Scott actually, he was feeling better. We banged on Toby’s door and after a while a twitching corpse appeared spouting profanities, then returned to its resting place. We banged on Rory’s door - not even a corpse appeared! We left a note saying that we were going ahead and headed off with a new map given to us by a taxi-driver.

Going east there were two M51 roads, the old wiggly one to the north, and the new straight one to the south with followed the straight track of the Trans-Siberian railway - a lifeline if anything should happen to us.

The city of Omsk was dusty and very busy to leave, but once on the M51 it returned to the same dead road we’d been used to days before, flat and boringly straight. The weather was great, blue skies and warm. A perfect day for cycling. We’d left a note under Rory’s door this morning saying we’d leave messages at the bottom of kilometer posts in multiples of 50, which we did. There was a few good cafes we stopped at, and after 80 miles we called it a day and camped in a small birch forest, ate and slept.

Total Miles: 5002.45 Todays Miles: 80.75 Average speed: 11.9 Time on bike: 6:45

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