Home » Russia » Some days in the life of a Siberian Cyclist (5000 km through a Siberian winter)

Awakening an hour before dawn to the sound of a digital alarm clock located in the layer between my 2 wooly hats, I remember where I am. A thousand kilometers from the nearest city, and (besides my fellow Siberian cyclist, Al) probably over 50 km from the nearest human being. Our tent sits in an icicle shrouded forest, half way across a vast glacial valley which stretches and winds its way westwards to the plains of Yakutia.

Some days in the life of a Siberian Cyclist (5000 km through a Siberian winter)

Rob Lilwall
2007-12-01 14:29:16

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KM cycled: 5,200
KM to home: 19, 800 (approx.)
Lowest Temperature: -40 Degrees Centigrade

Current Location: Wakkanai (small seaport on Japan's northern island of Hokkaido)
Awakening an hour before dawn to the sound of a digital alarm clock located in the layer between my 2 wooly hats, I remember where I am. A thousand kilometers from the nearest city, and (besides my fellow Siberian cyclist, Al) probably over 50 km from the nearest human being. Our tent sits in an icicle shrouded forest, half way across a vast glacial valley which stretches and winds its way westwards to the plains of Yakutia.

Every breath exhaled instantly crystallizes - beard, sleeping bag, tent roof - all is covered in ice. We stumble from the tent, gasping our way drunkenly through the bitter dawn to check the thermometer strapped to my handlebars. We are elated and awed to discover the temperature has now dropped right down to??minus 40 Degrees (Centigrade and Fahrenheit in fact converge at this point).

As we left the Gulag port of Magadan in September - the first leg of our 25,000 km bicycle ride from Siberia to England, we were repeatedly warned that cycling the `road of bones` in winter would be impossible (this is the same road which Ewan Mcgregor motorbiked 6 months ago - we ran into several people who had met him along the way). However, whilst the going was certainly hard, we came to agree with what Dostoevsky wrote after his stint in a Tsarist camp in the 1800s: that one of the defining characteristics of human kind is our 'ability to adapt'. It is astonishing how we did adjust to the cold. Yes, we wore a few more clothes, and ate twice as much food as normal, but in terms of actually feeling the cold, things were not nearly so bad as I'd imagined.

Whilst the human body does learn to cope, our human gadgets do not. Plastic ...