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The Bicycle box

UZBEKISTAN

Mar
2004-09-14 15:10:54

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the variant of seasick. And guess where we pitch the tent? In the middle of the cotton fields. Nobody cares that we place our tent here, a man on a horse passes by with lots of grass on the backside and nods kindly.

Angren is an extensively stretched city, or town. It is not easy to find a hotel, everyone points to another corner of the street but in the end we are offered a full apartment that we may not even pay for. The owner invites us to spend some time at his home but after a short while the electricity fails and he takes us to another place, his club /disco.

(27-7-2003) The distance to Kokand is 130km and we decide to split this up in two days, as well because we need to climb towards 2275 meters. We have named this our baby-hill as an exercise to get ourselves in good fitness, we haven’t really trained before we left. At the beginning of what looks like three U-turns above each other climbing the last couple of kilometers, we buy and eat another of the 50 water melons we have already absorbed en we tap fresh and cold mountain water. Luckily this is ‘biz gas’ (not sparkling), the only water you can buy is sparkling, not so nice for cycling. 200 Meters are taken away from our 2275 baby-hill by the just in use tunnel. Our sunglasses are replaced by headlights and on the back we place two lights that we have bought from the Police in Amsterdam when we got pulled over for a bicycle-light check. You can choose, paying the fine or paying for new lights, its up to you, Amsterdam rules. Its quite dark in the tunnel and the road is not yet tarred. At the entrance people are painting the bricks and halfway the one kilometer there are other people working in the tunnel. Even in the dark I can see them thinking... ‘Is it a bird... is it a plain...? Its two bikers!’. We must look like mine workers with our head lights. When going down we speed up to 40 km/h and could have easily done more if it wasn’t for the potholes. The kilometers ...