24 hours with Edward Genochio
I never had a plan as such, didn't know how long it would take, what kind of roads I'd encounter, if I'd get lost or what distance I would accomplish in a day. But as I settled into a routine, I became obsessed with clearing 100km a day.
There wasn't much else to motivate me, so I got into this unhealthy situation of feeling like I could never stop. Some days it was easy if the wind was behind you or it was flat. But some days it was raining, the wind was in your face and you're tired ... it would have made more sense to stop at 87km, but I felt I was driven to get past the 100 mark. Some days would crawl by and I often used the analogy of being in the office. If you find yourself clock-watching at 9.30am then you know you're going to have a bad day. If you don't look at it until about 4pm then it's not so bad.
Some days I wouldn't look at my milometer until it was on 90km, and that would be a good day because the last 10 sailed past. When I got within 20km, I always felt I'd broken the back of the day and sometimes I would go on beyond 100km if I was feeling good. The kilometres after 100 were always a pleasure. It sounds silly, but then in these situations, you sometimes feel as if you're going a little crazy and your sense of proportion and perspective is a little askew. Up to 100 always felt like a chore, unless there was spectacular scenery, lakes and mountains.
Other than that, it was nose down, knocking the kilometres off. In terms of when I started my day, I talk about before China and after China because China was different; I didn't camp as much there. I stayed mainly in roadside bunk-houses or motels and guesthouses, but most of the journey before that I was in a tent.
Before I arrived in China I got up when the sun rose, particularly in Siberia, because of the mosquitoes and heat. That combination meant I had to ride during the day because the tent was like an oven and you had to keep moving because of the swarms of mosquitoes. I was there in midsummer, which has long hours of daylight. The sun had set enough to get into the tent about 9.30pm, but the sun would rise at 6am. I would get up at that time to get a good start to the day. During other seasons, I spent more time in my sleeping bag because there were fewer daylight hours. The sleeping arrangement consisted of finding a nice little patch off the road and setting the tent up for the night. I would weave the guy ropes from the tent through my bike for safety. But that didn't prevent it being stolen when I was asleep in Mongolia. Luckily, my plight was widely publicised and I was sent a new bike to complete my journey.
The worst part of the trip was the swamp, especially the 2,000km stretch between Chelyabinsk and Novosibirsk [the capital of Siberia], which took me about two-and-a-half weeks. If it had taken any longer, I think I would have started to lose my marbles because it was really unpleasant. As soon as you get beyond Novosibirsk, the mosquitoes and horseflies don't completely disappear, but become more tolerable.
The psychological torment of being surrounded by the flies was worse than being bitten. You could either wear too many clothes, but that would make you hot and sweaty, or you could dress lightly and spend all day beating them off. After a while I stopped reacting to the bites; I became immune. The horseflies didn't bite often, maybe only three times a day, but they're always there, following you, on your hands, orbiting your face. One of the things that kept me semi-sane was killing them.
I stayed with some friendly locals on the way. One couple had me for the night, and the man sat me down and told me Russia was the way it was because of people like me. He said it with a glint in his eye though, but he lectured me for the best part of an evening. On another occasion, I was interrogated by some guards at a border crossing. They softened up after a couple of hours and even gave me some official trousers to wear after they noticed a rip in mine. One even gave me the belt from his waist.
Food was never much of a problem because I was never more than a day's ride from a village. Plus, sometimes food packages would fall off the back of a truck so I'd score a meal. I ate things from borsch to yak cheese to pasta with tinned tomatoes. My budget of US$3 [$23] was easy enough to stick to. It was hard to spend more than that in Russia as I was camping and cooking my own food. The only temptation was to pop into a roadside cafe along the Trans-Siberian Highway. In the mosquito zone, I cooked less because being outside was intolerable. So I tended to go to cafes for borsch or something. It wasn't necessarily expensive, but sometimes I went over my budget. The US$3 a day, in retrospect, might have been too meagre. Thinking back, I could have managed on US$5 a day, but I didn't know it at the time.
During the mosquito period I didn't dare take many clothes off. I found a lake before Novosibirsk that
was clear and, at that stage, it might have been just over two weeks that I hadn't washed properly. That was one of the nicest feelings of the whole journey: being able to strip off and jump into that lake after two weeks of fly-infested swamps. Typically though, hygiene wasn't too much of a problem. I would usually stop by a river and rinse my things. I then put them back on because it was a welcome relief during the summer. During the winter, I didn't wash my clothes too much.
I normally had about two litres of water with me, but cycling through the Gobi Desert I had 20 litres to get me through.
I don't remember feeling lonely as such; it was more a question of boredom. Maybe they're related: if there had been somebody to talk to, maybe I wouldn't have felt bored.
I felt pretty down the day I set off from Exeter. I remember cycling past the local supermarket and thinking, 'What am I doing?' My lowest ebb, apart from that first day, was when I was almost mugged. The day after I left Novosibirsk, I was attacked by some guys on motorbikes [but in the process they knocked themselves over and drove off in a huff without any of my belongings] and that left me quite shaken when I realised how vulnerable I was. Even now if I'm on a quiet road and I hear a motorbike come up behind me it triggers alarm bells.
The day after it, though, I was lucky as I met a couple of cyclists from Europe who were going in the same direction. We ended up riding together for the best part of a month, which, looking back, picked me up at a time I needed it. It was nice to have people to talk to and share jokes with. In retrospect, when I tell people what I did, I sometimes think I might have been going slightly mad.
However, I think if I'd been camping in my back garden I'd have been more afraid than when I was on the road. For some reason, I never felt too afraid. After a hard day cycling I fell asleep quickly anyway.
My bike became a part of my soul; it's what I do now.