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Published: August 30th 2006
"Hey good lookin - What ya got Cookin"?
First: Take the freshly picked herb and separate from the stem. Pop in a pot with water and olive oil.Day 90, 29th August
Kalačinsk - Tartarsk - Čany
It was a cloudier day but warm and dry. There was no dampness on the tents at all. I made porridge for breakfast for the first time, with halva in it, it was yummy! We were on the road for about nine, there was another time-zone change after leaving Omsk Oblast (region), making us seven hours ahead of GMT and directly north of Delhi!
On the brand new M51 road east, there was therefore no old communist stuff, signs and monuments, to be seen. The road is flat, smooth, straight, and fortunately for us, has very little traffic which enabled us to cycle side by side. We “gossiped” about Toby and Rory (sad really) but came up with some interesting conclusions: Scott coundn’t travel alone with Toby, he’d require a “buffer” guy, to prevent them from fighting! Probably, the same with Rory as he can be so “hyper” at times. And the things he does with his toes too… whinge, whinge! Come to think of it, I’ve discovered that I’ve only cycled with Rory for one day since Volgograd… one day in the last 1,800 miles!
Anyway, the
Secondly:
Bring to the boil, then simmer for 10 mins. Drain, and add to noodles or rice. Sit back and enjoy the movie... guys never caught up with us today, evenso, we kept leaving notes for them every 50 kms at the foot of the Km posts. The weather was changeable, the wind, and quite a bit of rain. We stopped at three cafes to drink coffee and to shelter, then finally pitched tents after 80 miles in a clearing surrounded by birch - and mosquitoes! We had to litres of the strange “Bagbier” to consume before watching a beautiful sunset.
Total Miles: 5082.49 Todays Miles: 80.03 Average speed: 11.5 Time on bike: 6:55
Day 91, 30th August
Čany - Barabinsk
There was another storm last night and it rained all night too. Woke at 8 to mixed skies and a wet tent. It’s that time of year when dark and light are almost equal - equinox, I think they say? The mornings are therefore getting colder, mistier and damper. The trees too are rapidly changing colour, many golden yellows and a few bright red leaves.
It was a good days cycling, 85 miles, without any rain, the skies were pretty bluish. The road was still a smooth continuous concrete ribbon through the increasingly marshier countryside. We
Nice sunset
Why do you need stimulants when you have wonderful sunsets like this? found no “Interbred-Café” like yesterday where every family member looked strangely similar, ever the animals! We did find slightly better kept cafes, though, each one with its collection of mangy cats, cracked cups with handles missing, aluminium cutlery, and colourful assortments of different plates. We also noticed the abundance of flies and wondered what it must be like in the kitchen?
Scott had the squirts again today which meant that he had to keep leaping off his bike to find a cluster of trees or small bush. No sign of the other two guys today.
Then… at the end of the day we found it, stretching as far as the eye could see in the rays of the setting sun…. it was the infamous “Marijuana Fields of Siberia”! We never expected to see this in Russia… marijuana… but there it was. The mature plants were as high as us. The budding top sections at least a foot long, each one with a UK street value of about a hundred quid! I grabbed a plastic bag and trimmed off about 800 quids worth of the sticky sweet-smelling heads and then we set off to find a place to camp.
Siberian Crown
The beer of the moment from Omsk. We found a place in birch forest. I set up my Trangia stove and boiled up a few heads of the weed with olive oil for ten minutes until the liquid was dark green. As this cooled, I made some noodles. When these were ready and strained, I poured on the green oily substance and we ate our concoctions. We felt the effects shortly afterwards - our faces tingled with a warmth, and started to ache with the anticipation of laughter. We began to laugh uncontrollably. Then the music of the forest sang in our head, and as we lay in our tents the canvas became a screen for the most amazingly psychedelic light-shows I’ve ever seen!
Total Miles: 5168.73 Todays Miles: 86.24 Average speed: 12.1 Time on bike: 7:06
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Tot: 0.368s; Tpl: 0.027s; cc: 26; qc: 105; dbt: 0.149s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.4mb
same guy as yesterday
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situation
what do you think - is the situation same/worse/better today for a traveller like you in Russia?