Cycling (b)east

Hello! This blog is dedicated to a trip that I have been planning for some time now. In about a week I will go to the east. By bike.

Coast to coast; North Sea to Pacific Ocean. I thought it suitable to name this blog ´cycleeast´, but apparently there is/has been a blogger before me that cycles/cycled east, so I went with plan b: ´cyclebeast´. Since I will cycle alone, I hope cycleeast is still cycling, so that we can hook up and do some kilometres together. Cycling east, a simple plan: take compass, find east, hop on bike, set off. Once you get into the details, it does get a bit more complex. As soon as you leave Europe behind, there's a range of countries that are quite difficult to enter. I chose a northern silk route (southern routes will take you through Pakistan, which is not safe after the war in Afghanistan has spilled over), through the Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan and China. EU-citizens can travel without a visa to the Ukraine, so until the Russian border my passport will be sufficient. But then the going gets tough. For Russia you need an official invitation, which I managed to get after three painstaking weeks. The queues outside the Russian embassy in The Hague are reminiscent of a time long gone (hopefully; well, I'll find out in a couple of months). The Kazakh embassy was remarkably quick: you hand in the application and the Kazakh at the other side of the desk tells you to collect the visa in two days. Great service. China on the other hand, takes longer and doesn't date visas, so if you apply for a visa now, you can pick it up next week and it is valid from then onwards. Something they don't indicate at the form and so it could happen that I have exactly 30 days if I manage to get to the Kazakh-Chinese border in 5 months time to cross the whole of China. This will never work if I stick to the plan of cycling all the way. Have to find a solution for this time constraint. But visas are not the only complicating factor; there's vaccinations, gear, a cycle and the maintenance thereof, maps... Luckily it's not just a cycle that I'll be using. It's a strong, black stallion coming from the ´Diamant fahrradwerke´ in Chemnitz, Germany, called Saphir (must say it creates a cartoonish image in my head: "the Black Diamond goes east"). And traffic rules; let's not forget traffic rules as a complicating factor. I will have to be more mindful of them because quite soon there will be no more cycle lanes. But there will be traffic lights and when they are red you have to stop. Well, all this just to say that I plan to cycle for some time, and that I will use this website to write about it. Hope to hear from you! /K