Tom and I are now in Ulaan Baatar. The bus journey here was arduous. We expected it to take around seven hours but it took the entire day. However, one day was nothing compared to the four days on the train.

The bus had extra springy suspension and Tom and I were lucky (sarcastic) enough to sit in the back seats. This meant that we were sitting directly over the suspension (comprised of a soviet mattress) and the engine. I realised we were sitting over the engine when my feet became very hot. I took off my boots and socks and noticed, when I put my feet down, the the metal fittings in the floor were red hot which was somewhat uncomfortable. Thankfully, we reached the city and were dropped off in the centre.

I travelled by bus (Eurolines and Ecolines) from London to Moscow. Tom came from Yerevan on trains and buses and took the ferry from Trabzon (Turkey) to Sochi (Russia). We met up and hauled our kit across Moscow on the tube to the train station. We have travelled 5600km on the Trans Siberian train, which took 4 days. Now we I are in Ulan Ude.

The countryside from the train looked mainly forested. The settlements I saw consisted of wood houses with tin roofs.  Further east, the countryside seemed bleaker and the temperature dropped. Snow was still visible in scattered patches. The trees had no foliage on them and in places the grass was burning because it was dry. It was possible to see many areas of blackened grass. I don’t know if this is a natural occurrence or a perhaps controlled process next to the rail tracks.

Tom emailed me last week to tell me he was going to follow an old man on a horse to a hot spring at 3000m. That sounded like my idea of fun so I decided to go to Yerevan and do it. I went to the bus station in Ortachala in Tbilisi at 9.30 am and cycled practically straight onto a Marshrutka (transit van minibus). This dispelled my fears of being able to take the bike in the cramped little bus. I was lucky this time whereas the previous time I had taken a Marshrutka, I had waited for 6 hours for the bus to leave because there were not enough passengers.

On 24th October cyclists, walkers and skaters gathered outside the Philharmonia theatre in Tbilisi to parade down Rustaveli as part of Climate Week combined with the ‘Tbilisoba’ or Tbilisi’s day- a yearly traditional celebration.

Meeting new people on the ride.

People with banners and placards.

Walking with the Georgian flags and Merabi local biker in the foreground.

Georgia, Tbilisi - November 2009 - Critical Mass Bicycle Ride (10) Georgia, Tbilisi - November 2009 - Critical Mass Bicycle Ride (3)

I returned via Public transport back from France to Tbilisi. I met Tom in Venice and we spent a long and strange evening drinking wine with two German girls and an American / Iranian guy. One of the girls had a Georgian name from her ancestry. Then we slept on a bench.

It was one of those trips where it seemed we had to wait for a day for anything to turn up. We had to wait for the boat to leave the port in Venice. That delayed the connection in Greece so we slept in the greek port of Igominitsa before taking the bus on to Thessolonika, Istanbul and back to Tbilisi. From there Tom went back to Yerevan.

I got the bus back to Tbilisi. I arrived back and realised that I’d had such a good time and also realised a few things through my experience and change of scenery. Namely that I needed to get out of Tbilisi on a wild mountain bike adventure in the mountains (as you do), and also that I would return back to England again at Christmas to spend it with my family even though it would mean another arduous 6 days of public transport, intensive meditation and further draining of funds.

Tom’s wedding happened on the 19th September. I went off to Yerevan on the 15th in the hair-raising Marshrutka (minibus). Continuing the theme of having to wait for public transport I sat 6 hours for the Marshrutka to leave when too few people turned up. I moved between 3 different Marshrutkas, and saw the world through the eyes of a Marshrutka driver, hanging about in the dust outside the train station.

After Isfahan the landscape between the big cities was bare and remote but the roads were extremely good quality. I choose to take the highway because I wanted focus on my goal of getting to India.

After cycling a one of my longest days and being towed the last thirty kilometres by a guy and his girlfriend on a motorbike I was dropped off at a big mosque on the outskirts of Yazd. I was happy, excited, thrilled, although exhausted, and the mosque seemed to be an oasis of calm and peacefulness. I asked about accommodation, and after first being given a spot in a gravel-covered car park to camp, ended up with a fine room in the residential accommodation.

At Agarak on the Armenian-Iranian border, I remember cycling next to the border fence. I felt scared continuing over the river bridge to the border crossing. Guards looked down on me from towers above, guns in hand.

After tentatively pedalling across the ‘No man’s land’, I entered the administrative building. The border officers tried their best to nullify my visa by claiming it was fake because it read ‘Great Britain’ instead of ‘England’ and ‘Ireland’ which wasn’t England either. Anyway, I felt relieved to be through and was rewarded with an incredible descent along a windy valley surrounded by steep-looking mountains.

The ride out of Tehran was a leap into the unknown for me. I had been killing myself worrying about the crossing from Iran to Pakistan and the perceived danger of Southern Iran. Now I was actually making tracks towards that point, it didn’t feel that bad. Life was carrying on. No groups of terrorists emerged from the desert. No one tortured me because I was English. No Americans bombed me or water-boarded me. I didn’t die of thirst or starvation. I did managed to cycle huge distances through ghostly plains on the edge of the Dasht-e Kavir desert.