Reset

Up around the bend. Up to Almaty, square city of apples. 9 days and 200 kilometres around town.
The Bend.

Almaty, 10 November 2009

Winter in China. I was going to cycle in winter. In China. That was my plan. A straight line from coast to coast. North Sea to Pacific. Friends waiting.

Then it got cold. A little. Couple of degrees above zero. No problem. Have a good sleeping bag, way too warm for Germany, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, but comfortable for cold nights on the Kazakh steppe. Then it got colder. -2, -3. Sleeping bag's still comfortable (according to the label the comfort zone ends at -7, don't trust that). Need insolation underneath and inside. Put waterproof bag under my mattress, wear my thermowear as pajamas (thank the manufacturer of thermowear for thermowear!). Feel good.. wait.. Cold nose! How to deal with my nose? You can cover everything, but your nose has to be exposed. The nose's comfort zone ends with coverage. Maybe light coverage. I try my sleeping bag liner. It has a hood and is made out of silk: subtle in summer, warm in winter. Light as a feather. It covers my nose without being too much of an obstacle for breathing. OK, this will do.

But what when it gets really cold? Cycledad had sent me a document mapping out the winter in China. Here is what it says about the northwest:

"Winter across northwest China is as bitterly cold as the rest of northern China, but a lot drier. January temperatures in the desert regions of China's northwest and western interior range from -11 to 1°C (12 to 34°F). In Urumqi, in central Sinkiang Province, the average high temperature in January is -8°C (there goes the comfort zone), with minimums down to almost -30°C (-22°F). Temperatures in the Turfan Depression (150 kilometres southeast of Urumqi, and 150 m (-492 ft) below sea level), are only slightly more favourable to human existence."

Slightly more favourable to human existence.. What am I doing? Winter over there obviously is not a joke, and I am thinking of cycling in freezing arctic winds and camping out with a comfort zone that ends at -7? By day it will be colder than this, let alone by night. The cog wheels inside my head are turning full speed. What to do? The beauty of my route is its simplicity. Cycling east: straight line, 6 countries. And China's remote parts, how interesting they must be? I've got time to figure this out, I tell myself. Until I get to Almaty, where I have to see about getting extra Chinese time in the form of a visa, I can think of a solution.

Trains are an option. Make my way to Urumqi - if I'm fast I can do this within the month that I've got on my current Chinese visa - hop on the train, couple of days and 'bang': Beijing. Wait a minute, let's check the airline connections... 6 hours? I can be there in 6 hours! From Almaty, no stop-overs, straight to the Chinese capital. I would still have bags of time to go around the east of China and who knows what would come up. Good food, reasonably mild weather. Maybe even a visit to Japan. Japan sounds good too. Which country personifies 'east' better than Japan? The sun rises in Japan. Must be a magical place! Do they have cycle lanes in Japan?

But is that really what I had in mind when I set out on this travel? How I'd loved the flowy movement of the cycle. The easygoing. Gradual changes as opposed to jet lags and culture shocks. Going from GMT+1 to GMT+6 all by myself. No 'mashyna's'. Short-cutting like this would defeat the purpose of all that with the swipe of a credit card.

Arrival in Almaty.

Koen: "No, forget trains and planes. I'm cycling. But how, now that the winter is about to close in on me?"

кун: "You want to feel warm? You do as people of the northern hemisphere do: you go south."

Koen: "Going south.. Yes, I guess I could go south. Good idea actually.. Spaseba!"

кун: "Much obliged, you know you're always welcome."

So south would be the new direction on my keyring compass. But there are borders in the south. Difficult borders.. (Bloody borders always!) Uzbekistan that requires an official letter of invitation (LOI in jargon). Turkmenistan that doesn't allow independent tourism and only gives you a tourist visa if they can also sell you a guide that will accompany you 24/7 (coming at a rate of 100 dollars a day). How tiresome that would be: a Turkmen sitting on my back carrier, yapping the names of Merv's mausoleums in my ear. And then Iran, that requires an offical authorisation for a visa... I started to feel weak-kneed, even before I'd made the first stroke of south on the pedals. OK, take it easy. One step at a time. First the Uzbek visa.. obtaining LOI.. filling out forms.. schedule visit to embassy..

And this is how I pressed 'reset'. There's no hurry, no deadline, and China will still be there by the time the season's more welcoming and I get to its border (provided that nothing goes wrong with the new space weapons that General Xu announced the other day). Besides, there were more silk routes than one, and traffic went both ways. Let's go back a little and see what the first East-West connection brought to the countries that lie smack in the middle.

(Picture: Tuesday)

(Picture: Thursday)

It seems as if I am not the only one that has pressed reset. Last Wednesday I climbed up to Medeu in a T-shirt, on Thursday came the rain showers and on Monday the snow storm. 5 days of autumn. Enter. Winter. Now that I have my Uzbek visa, I am awaiting the right moment to head back. I can cross the border to Uzbekistan at Shymkent, from where it's not far to Tashkent. I've got a good week to make these 600 kilometres, but at the moment it's below zero with icy roads. BBC's 5-day outlook forecasts sunny intervals for tomorrow and sunny weather on Thursday. I see a window of opportunity.

(Pictures: autumn in Almaty)

(Picture: Maria, Inanc, Selcen and me. Maria and Selcen are on their way to Kyrgystan on Maria's moped. Inanc works as a civil engineer and is busy preparing the city for the 2011 'Asian Winter Games'.)

China fades out (for now), Uzbekistan hopefully fades in some time soon. Radiohead's album 'The Bends' brought this magnificent song. 'Street Spirit' for after the U-turn: 600 kilometres back the same road.