OMSK:

I had to start being realistic about what I could afford in terms of bikes. Anything remotely appropriate for a trip across Russia was simply way out of my price range, but by this stage, suitability wasn’t even a factor in my decision making; I just needed something with two wheels and an engine. And then I had a stroke of luck – a common occurrence when among such people as the Russians.

Whilst inquiring at a travel agent where I might be able to find second-hand scooters for sale (scooters were now my object as they were all I could afford) I met a guy called Palzha who spoke perfect English (which he’d learnt working as a male stripper in New York!) and offered to search the internet for me while I went off to explore the town. When I returned a few hours later, he had not only found a place where I might be able to find a scooter, but also insisted on taking me there and putting me up at his place afterwards. At the market even the scooters were out of my price range, but we resolved upon further searching tomorrow. Palzha spent the rest of the day showing me around town - if it’s now remotely similar to how it was 150 years ago, Dostoyevsky made a big fuss about nothing when he was exiled here in 1850.

Trying out my new scooter in Omsk

With Sergio and the Poche

After a wonderful evening where I was warmly welcomed by Palzha’s parents and given a big enough meal to last me for the rest of the week, we resumed the scooter search the next day with the help of our personal chauffeur, Palzha’s dad, Sergio. After a couple of fruitless excursions to scooters which were certainly not as advertised on the internet, we stumbled upon a trader who imported his scooters directly from Japan via Vladivostok.

In a rainwater bath after a Banya in Omsk

The day’s excitement, however, still wasn’t over, as Palzha’s family were insisting that I try a traditional Russian ‘banya’, basically a very intense sauna, in their little cottage out of town. This was rustic Russia at its best - we collected the wood to fire the furnace and drew water from the local well, then, when the wood had burnt to smokeless glowing cinders, we proceeded to strip off and jump into the sauna, giving ourselves third degree burns as Sergio relentlessly threw water onto the coals like a man possessed. As if blistering skin wasn’t pain enough, we then proceeded to beat each other all over our bodies with venik, a bunch of old birch branches tied together with string to form a kind of vicious whip. So, after cooking for about ten minutes with faces screwed up against the fierce heat, then being given a good old thrashing and turned the to colour of an over boiled lobster, we fell out the wooden chamber and jumped into bathtubs of freezing rainwater complete with bird droppings, mosquito larvae and the odd drowned rat.

OMSK – YEKATERINBURG:

The kindness of Palzha and his family and their readiness to give up their time to help me out was my first real introduction into this characteristic of Russian people, and I couldn’t thank them enough for all they had done. As they led me safely onto the western road leading out of Omsk, I rejoiced at being back on two wheels and finally regaining the freedom of the road. Bobbing up and down on the pot-holed tarmac, with a 10lt fuel canister gripped between my legs and my rucksack and tent bouncing up and down on my back, I waved farewell Palzha and continued full speed ahead (60kph) on the 4,500 km road to St. Petersburg.

Riding a scooter on Siberian roads is not the most omfortable or relaxing activity. The small diameter of the wheels and the pathetic single-spring rear suspension meant that big pot holes were as good as fatal to the bike and the smaller, completely unavoidable ones jarred my spine and dislodged the bag on my back with every little bump. The over-weighted suspension made it feel as though I was on a pogo-stick with a broken spring; even running over a penny would send jolts down my spine.

Church in Yekaterinburg - site of the Romanov murders

The landscape was beautiful but monotonous with forests and grassy meadows spread over an enormous flat horizon, just as it had been all the way from Vladivostok, but despite the monotony and discomforts, I was definitely enjoying the riding. Considering my speed limitations I made a fair amount of progress until evening, when the sky suddenly became overshadowed by black storm clouds. It was only 8 and I’d planned to keep going till about 10 as dusk was around midnight, but, as I felt the first heavy drops of rain, and the storms real muscle seemed to be dead ahead of me, I decided to stop at the first suitable campsite and set up my tent as a shelter.

It was a foolish mistake. By the time I’d found a camp site on raised ground, the very worse of the storm was directly overhead with deafening thunder and a dense torrent bursting down on me.  Although the drenching rain was soaking through my bag

The Poche in a Siberian storm

and flooding the ground where I was trying to hurriedly erect my tent, it wasn’t nearly the worst of my troubles. I’d heard of Siberian mosquitoes being some of the very worst pests a traveller in Asia could come across, but I’d never even bothered to get any repellent.

It was a misjudgement I lived to regret as, as soon as I’d parked my bike, my face and hands, the only parts of me left uncovered, were set upon by hordes of mosquitoes so thick and bloodthirsty that it sent me running away from my unmade tent, writhing around and slapping at any piece of open skin. They were so bad that I had to run in circuits, each time rounding on my tent and putting another pole or a few pegs in before the cloud of mosquitoes engulfed me once more in their dreadful feast. I tried to ignore them and just get on with my tent, but the natural abhorrence of seeing around twenty of the creatures sucking my blood if I gave them just a few seconds undisturbed, meant that I spent most of my time trying to rid myself of the plague. When I finally got my tent up and jumped in, closing the zip as quickly as possible to cut off the mosquitoes, it was full of puddles of water.

As I mopped up my waterlogged bed with some clothes, the agitating itching on my face and hands started to come into effect and, reflecting that only the arrival of a hungry bear could worsen the situation, I let out a sudden yelp as a spider crawled from my mop onto my hand. I instantly shook it off and stared closely at this particularly gruesome specimen. It was only the size of a 50p coin (massive in my book), completely hairless and absolutely white in colour, with thin jagged green and red stripes and a most grotesquely swollen abdomen, resembling a half sucked gobstopper. After a little trouble, I ejected the thing (letting in another whole load of mosquitoes at the same time) and settled down to rest in my damp little prison, just as the rain calmed and bright sun came out.

The morning brought the same trials with the mosquitoes and I frantically rolled up my sopping tent, had a hurried breakfast and shot off into the safety of 60kph winds. Ten minutes into my ride, the Poche suddenly cut out. I couldn’t explain it so I tried to ignore it, but at the same time I couldn’t help feeling a familiar sense of mechanical doom looming over the Poche. Early in the ride the previous day, a worrying red light saying ‘speed’ began flashing whenever I rode above 30kph, it made me anxious but, as there was no way I was going to go down to 30kph, I just ignored it. Back the next day, the flashing red light began to torment me as I was sure it must have something to do with that mysterious cut out. As my thoughts were continuing on this thread, the engine suddenly stopped again, and I free-wheeled slowly onto the grassy roadside, cursing my luck with bikes.

After a number of kick-start attempts I was off again, pessimistic at my chances of reaching Tiumen, the next town, over 200km away. Unfortunately, I was right to be pessimistic as in only another half kilometre the scooter’s gentle rumble quietly disappeared once again. At this rate it was going to take me days to reach Tiumen. Another five minutes spent trying to start the machine and another break down only a few hundred meters up the road. With two more identical incidents and the distance travelled only getting smaller, I gave up my futile hope that the Poche would somehow magically correct itself, and made a new plan.

Broken down....

One of the best advantages of travelling on a motorcycle, or, even more so, on a scooter, is that when you become stranded you can quite easily load it up onto a passing truck and get dropped off at a garage.

...and loaded onto a truck!

I had plenty of experience in this activity from riding around southern Africa on a very temperamental XT500, so, with a practiced expression to inspire the most pity, I began trying to wave down passing trucks. Sure enough, it wasn’t long before I was sandwiched between a jovial old truck driver, Ivan, and his son, who happened to speak a smidgen of English, in the cab of an old lorry on the way to Tiumen, with the Poche safely tied down in the back.

After going round to various warehouses all over Tiumen’s industrial sector, and helping to load up pipes and other plastic items into the truck, Ivan insisted on treating me to a hearty meal before he would let me go. Through his son acting as interpreter, I was offered to be taken either to a mechanics or put on another truck to Yekaterinburg, the next city about 350km down the road, and my original destination for that day. Thinking that I might from now on possibly be restricted to an agonisingly slow 30kph, I opted for the lift and we drove to the beginning of the Yekatirinburg road where Ivan asked the checkpoint policemen to wave down a lift for me.

In Russia hitchhiking is not generally free but Ivan would not accept anything for his time and efforts and only shook my hand warmly and wished me all the luck. The police finally found me a lift at around nine o’clock, a very flashy truck owned by a young guy who was driving with his girlfriend. I felt good to be on the way to Yekaterinburg but unfortunately neither of my companions spoke any English and I wasn’t able to charm them into offering me a place to stay the night – something I thought I could almost bank on, and a crafty part of the reason why I was willing to catch a lift so late at night. Looking back on it, it seems terribly presumptuous to expect hospitality off complete strangers, but travelling in Russia, for even a short while, can leave you thinking everyone you meet will want to help you out as much as possible. As it was, this couple did everything they promised me and I had no right to be disappointed.

Having arrived in Yekaterinburg in the small hours and not really in the mood for urban camping, I found a possible hotel in my guidebook in the centre of town, but un- fortunately the area was inaccessible to trucks so I had to be dropped off a fair walk away. Luckily though, I managed to get the Poche running after a few minutes of kicking, and scooted round the empty streets (the engine seemed to keep running if I kept below 30kph) in search of this elusive hotel, which I finally discovered at 2.30 in the morning extremely thankful to find that it not only had a 24hr reception, but also an available room for me to collapse in.

YEKATERINBURG:

Unable to get any information out of my hotel on motorcycle mechanics, I rode around town in the hope of spotting one. I asked at numerous other hotels and in shops and petrol stations but the language barrier meant I didn’t really get anywhere. After a while I gave up my search in favour of a bit of sight-seeing in Yekerinburg.  The city is quite historical, it’s most notorious claim to fame being the place in which the Romanovs were murdered.  With plenty of elaborate churches and monuments, Yekatirinburg was also the first place I came across the Russian phenomenon of queuing brides.

Yamaha mechanics- Yekaterinburg

It seems that every young couple in Russia decides to get married on a narrow band of summer weekends, and that their very first action as a married pair is to rush round every prominent site in their city on a manic, champagne-fuelled photo shoot. The result is that, at every grand church and city monument, you have a queue of at least five or six wedding parties, identifiable by their respective brides in their bright white billowing
dresses, waiting in line to have their wedding snaps taken. I found it quite comical and heart-warming to see so many brides at every place I went, each one of them seeming to be full of the belief, as of course they should, that the day had dawned solely for them.

As far as my own affairs went, I’d decided to forge on to Perm the next day, positive that if I kept below 30kph, the Poche would make a seamless journey, especially if I rode it over two days. In reality I wasn’t sure how I’d maintain 30kph as well as my own sanity but the concept was simple enough, and I couldn’t be bothered to spend another day in Yekaterinburg, fruitlessly looking around for mechanics.

YEKATERINBURG – PERM:

The next morning, before I’d even left the city, I was already getting frustrated at the sluggish pace I was limited to, with cyclists zipping past me on my outside and queues of traffic on my inside, pushing me into the gutter. In a continent where traffic is generally quite slow, I was used to being king of the road. My old bike had acceleration for dashing in and out of cars and power to leave them in my wake - being now reduced to 50cc and a top speed of 30kph was a hard pill to swallow, and, as it happened, it
wasn’t long before I choked on it, or at the Poche did. Before I’d even cleared the city, the bike had once again cut out for no apparent reason. I turned round, knowing it would be foolish to try to push on to Perm as there simply had to be a mechanic in Yekatirinburg and besides, going on the recent performance of the Poche, I’d never even get close to Perm anyway.

With a good stroke of luck, I stumbled across a spanner sign when just heading back into the city - they couldn’t help me but showed me on a map where I could find a Yamaha shop, possibly with a workshop attached, on the other side of town. After much stopping and starting (despite making sure I kept below 30kph) I eventually found it, only to discover the place closed for the weekend. Just as I was reluctantly turning round to try again the next day, I heard voices round the back and went to investigate.

There were a few guys fiddling around with an outboard motor but as soon as I commun- icated that my scooter was having difficulties they stopped what they were doing and came to inspect it. They spent the next hour taking the Poche apart and thoroughly cleaning each component, concentrating on the carburettor which they seemed to think was the problem. I also mentioned, with the aid of my phrase book, that I needed a jerry can if they could sell me one (I’d left my one on the truck which took me to Tiumen) – they made a call and simply motioned that it would be taken care of. After the bike had been put back together they were confident I shouldn’t have any further
problems, and just as I was about to remind them about the jerry a guy turned up with a brand new 10lt can and funnel for me. When I began to dig into my wallet they waved their hands in earnest and I simply couldn’t force them to accept anything for their time, or even for the brand new jerry. I thanked them heartily and rode away marvelling once again at Russian generosity.

The ride went well for the first few hours with the Poche behaving admirably, but, in the late evening, as I was searching around for a place to camp, the scooter once again lost power and all my doubts about of its chances making it to Russia’s north- western borders came flooding back.

The next morning I set off in gloomy weather, hoping once again that the scooter’s problem, whatever it was, would simply have righted itself during the night. It seems ridiculous that at this late stage of my trip, praying was still all I could do when faced with a mechanical problem. For the first hour, however, my prayers were actually answered and the Poche did well, clearing Perm without any significant trouble. Of course though, it didn’t last, and I was once again reduced to half kilometre bursts in between tiring efforts on the kick-start. The next city was Kazan, about 450km away;
it seemed silly to try hitching there when Perm was only 40km behind me.

As the Poche hobbled back to Perm, I ruminated over the sense in getting the car- burettor cleaned once again if it would only leave me once again stranded, half way to Kazan. I still had thousands of kilometres to go and had to think seriously whether the Poche was ever likely to make it. It seemed that the relentless long distance riding that I was putting it through was simply beyond it - it wasn’t, after all, what it was designed
for. As I finally arrived in Perm, I decided that, if I could find someone who would take it (not an easy task considering its current state), I should sell it and revert back to trains.


End of Part 2……………..