Oibek - tashkent - samarkand - bukhara
Going Solo
I couldn´t get a Coke without comment.
"Adin?" asked the old woman with the rheumy eyes. One?
She was standing on the footpath under an umbrella that covered a cardboard-topped chest freezer and a vat of homemade apricot juice. She looked at my bike leant against a light pole, down the highway in the direction I´d come from, then back at me.
Maybe she saw vulnerability. Maybe I was just friendless. My Russian didn´t stretch far enough to clarify, but I knew she wasn´t asking about my drink order.
Her eyes were cloudy but her gaze was steady. It was a familiar expression, halfway between pity and concern, like I´d just mangled myself on a machine that everyone else knew to avoid.
Dheiu and I had grown especially used to the look one country back, in Tajikistan, where our trip seemed designed to confirm the worst suspicions babuskas held about young Western* men. Unmarried. Unemployed. Unable or unwilling to buy a real vehicle, and probably infertile too.
But this question wasn´t about my frivolousness -- at least not directly. And it wasn´t for Dheiu. It was just for me because Dheiu -- or some other friend -- wasn´t in sight. She could look down the highway all she wanted. He was about 30 km back, probably still working over a watermelon breakfast^ near the border, with no plan on catching up. I doubted she would see him.
"Adin?" Literally: one. Meaning: alone.
"Da." I smiled, pointed at myself and held up one finger. "Adin."
Touring with others is a little like having a set of training wheels. They help keep you upright, share the load and improve your confidence. After seven months together, Dheiu and I both felt like it was the time to learn to ride on our own.
Uzbekistan had looked like the perfect place to start. An hour in, standing in the shade with an apricot juice, after the easiest stretch of riding since China, it was hard not to see Uzbekistan for what it -- in the best sense -- lacked.
It wasn´t Tajikistan´s brain-squeezing altitude. It wasn´t Mongolia´s Martian emptiness. Uzbekistan mightn´t offer otherworldly beauty, but it had flat settled steppes, passably sealed highways that didn´t always smell or feel freshly poured, and conveniently-placed vendors selling 50 c icecreams from freezers like the one I was standing next to.
Conversations over, I finished the cup. The vat´s handpainted illustration was raised and amateurish, but the drink itself was syrupy and sweetly delicious -- perfect for the heat, maybe simply perfect. I quickly drank a second cup.
The old woman had been right to steer me away from Coke. That would have been a fool´s call. But cycling solo?
The old woman saw something pitiful in the figure of a lone cyclist. I´d been looking closer. I saw possibility.
First, for silence.
Hell doesn´t have to be other people for solitude to be bliss.
Dheiu and I are old school friends who by July had shared 30+ weeks of close-quarters, sometimes plodding, sometimes intense experieces and a lot of immature laughter. It had been great but riding away felt good from the first rotation. That there wasn´t an echo of my own chain running across dust-caked casettes, that I couldn´t turn my head and see a friend in a country where few people spoke English and my Russian was only just enough to farewell the old woman -- this wasn´t loneliness. Loneliness is a crowd that wants to break. This was a welcome silence.
Then there was the highest promise of solo touring: a tyrant´s crown.
Like the silence, I had been looking forward to a time when the hundreds of small decisions that comprise a day of travel would be mine alone. Also like the silence, I enjoyed it instantly. From the moment I left Dheiu behind, I paused, paced, rested and ate with consensus-free ease the whole way to Tashkent. There I ran errands that required facing off against institutional stupidity, but I did it without mediation. When I wanted to socialise I did -- with easy hostel friendships -- but otherwise it was 10 days without timesharing, rotating or debating decisions. Amongst those I kicked around with were two cyclists who had met on the road and banded together for the company. It was a common configuration and I could understand the theory, but I held to my autonomy with the fervour of the newly converted.
Adin? Absolutely.
When I did leave Samarkand, I rode 100 km the first day, a normal enough distance on easy road. An unrelenting sun illuminated whitewashed homes and beat down on scenes that looked like the faded pages of a 1980s National Geographic article on Soviet agriculture. The rusted three-wheeled tractors, the donkey carts, the locals covered head-to-toe in scarves, robes and sleeves -- earlier in the year I would have enjoyed knowing that I was sharing the views, the spoken or gestured record of each newness, but by now I was content to register rural Uzbekistan on my own.
The next day I spent enough time in the sun to decide -- with no consensus, just a high-vis jacket and flashing rear light -- to ride into the night for a little while before settling down to sleep.
If Dheiu had never signed up, I would have probably planned a more cautious First World route. Back then, the idea of solo touring sounded almost too difficult, too fragile. By Uzbekistan, cycling solo at night -- like cycling around the world, taking a $400 motorbike over the Pamirs, building a raft to sail down the entire Danube or hitching all over Eurasia -- was just one more option in a world where unknown doesn´t mean dangerous, where the slings and arrows have turned out to not just be rare but glancing and blunt.
So, as an orange sun fell, pooled and drained away, I kept moving along.
The headlights of approaching trucks split over the horizon and the steppes stretched off flat into the distance. Closer to the road, the white-painted trunks of planted trees caught the near-full moon, brighter than the faint white shoulder marker I used to keep myself from straying onto the dirt. I couldn´t see my shifters. I mostly rode by feel.
It was a spectral reprieve from the heat. More than simply being content to experience it solo, I was enjoying it because I could hoard it. So I didn´t stop. I kept riding until, 200 km from where I´d slept, I arrived in Samarkand just after midnight. My own personal best, undiluted.
Of course, nothing´s perfect. Everything straddles a Pros and Cons list. The other side of greater freedom is greater effort, and if the achievement is all yours, well, so are the consequences.
After a few days of stiff-legged shuffling through Samarkand´s unexpectedly developed tile mosaic-and-dome splendour, I rolled away in the predawn, passing kids on bikes draped with bags filled with wheels of bread. I had started early for a reason. Boosted by the ease of cycling 200 km and looking for a challenge, I thought I´d see if I could ride the 270 km to Bukhara, where I would next spend a few days, in a single day.
The first 200 km was fine. I moved my legs up and down, consumed more sugar than is advisable and cooled my feet in irrigation ditches. By the time sunset was approaching I had finished a dinner of sardines and bread on the fringes of a small village. I was ready for the final 70 km, the cooler temperatures it would bring and satisfaction of clocking more than a quarter thousand km.
The first puncture had already struck.
When I went to wheel my bike back towards the highway I saw that the rear tyre was flat. Uzbekistan had the worst thorns I´d encountered so far, and although I´d tried to avoid them, I clearly hadn´t. In view of the man whose house I´d eaten in front of, I removed the panniers, checked the tyres and replaced the tube with my one spare. Watching me, the man had held an expression similar to that of the first old woman. With the sun now set, I declined his offer of a place to sleep and rode off.
The second puncture struck 10 km later.
It was distance enough that there were no longer houses nearby. Just trees and thorns. Struggling to balance the bike -- by this stage so heavy that I had recently removed the kickstand because it was crunching the chainstays -- I realised that I´d lost my chance at making the 270 km. Without Dheiu, there was no way I was going to patch a tube here. I would need to head back towards the village and find somewhere to sleep.
I wasn´t too worried. Sure enough, one long hour I would end up in a sort of truck drivers´ hotel near the original village.
And I wasn´t torn by regret. Inside, away from the barking dogs that had woken him when I went to sleep on the thorn-free ground of a gazebo, it was still a good way to end a day, even if the guy who took me in didn´t have the spare tube Dheiu was carrying -- the one that could have gotten me rolling again before I was too wrecked to consider patching my own.
I would arrive in Bukhara the next day. It was an easy ride, I enjoyed the quiet, but like the rest of my time in Uzbekistan it was tempered.
More than the assistance required to get my bike back to running and give me a chance at Bukhara, what I really wanted when my bike first sashayed side to side -- then every few hundred metres after that, as the air surely leaked out -- was not logistical support, paired cadence or even conversation. It would have been helpful if Dheiu could have been there to hold my bike, or shine his torch, or find his spare tube, but mostly I wanted something much simpler. An audience. A witness. Someone to hear me when I muttered ´Shit´ under my breath and reached for the pump.
It can take a nightime limp through Uzbekistan to remember you´re a social animal. Collect all the reasons to travel solo and you won´t have built something that can´t be pierced from time to time.
Adin? Could be.
_____________
* Dheiu, if you´re reading this, you´re an honourary Anglo-Australian guy.
^ Just.
I couldn´t get a Coke without comment.
"Adin?" asked the old woman with the rheumy eyes. One?
She was standing on the footpath under an umbrella that covered a cardboard-topped chest freezer and a vat of homemade apricot juice. She looked at my bike leant against a light pole, down the highway in the direction I´d come from, then back at me.
Maybe she saw vulnerability. Maybe I was just friendless. My Russian didn´t stretch far enough to clarify, but I knew she wasn´t asking about my drink order.
Her eyes were cloudy but her gaze was steady. It was a familiar expression, halfway between pity and concern, like I´d just mangled myself on a machine that everyone else knew to avoid.
Dheiu and I had grown especially used to the look one country back, in Tajikistan, where our trip seemed designed to confirm the worst suspicions babuskas held about young Western* men. Unmarried. Unemployed. Unable or unwilling to buy a real vehicle, and probably infertile too.
But this question wasn´t about my frivolousness -- at least not directly. And it wasn´t for Dheiu. It was just for me because Dheiu -- or some other friend -- wasn´t in sight. She could look down the highway all she wanted. He was about 30 km back, probably still working over a watermelon breakfast^ near the border, with no plan on catching up. I doubted she would see him.
"Adin?" Literally: one. Meaning: alone.
"Da." I smiled, pointed at myself and held up one finger. "Adin."
*
Touring with others is a little like having a set of training wheels. They help keep you upright, share the load and improve your confidence. After seven months together, Dheiu and I both felt like it was the time to learn to ride on our own.
Uzbekistan had looked like the perfect place to start. An hour in, standing in the shade with an apricot juice, after the easiest stretch of riding since China, it was hard not to see Uzbekistan for what it -- in the best sense -- lacked.
It wasn´t Tajikistan´s brain-squeezing altitude. It wasn´t Mongolia´s Martian emptiness. Uzbekistan mightn´t offer otherworldly beauty, but it had flat settled steppes, passably sealed highways that didn´t always smell or feel freshly poured, and conveniently-placed vendors selling 50 c icecreams from freezers like the one I was standing next to.
Conversations over, I finished the cup. The vat´s handpainted illustration was raised and amateurish, but the drink itself was syrupy and sweetly delicious -- perfect for the heat, maybe simply perfect. I quickly drank a second cup.
The old woman had been right to steer me away from Coke. That would have been a fool´s call. But cycling solo?
The old woman saw something pitiful in the figure of a lone cyclist. I´d been looking closer. I saw possibility.
*
First, for silence.
Hell doesn´t have to be other people for solitude to be bliss.
Dheiu and I are old school friends who by July had shared 30+ weeks of close-quarters, sometimes plodding, sometimes intense experieces and a lot of immature laughter. It had been great but riding away felt good from the first rotation. That there wasn´t an echo of my own chain running across dust-caked casettes, that I couldn´t turn my head and see a friend in a country where few people spoke English and my Russian was only just enough to farewell the old woman -- this wasn´t loneliness. Loneliness is a crowd that wants to break. This was a welcome silence.
Then there was the highest promise of solo touring: a tyrant´s crown.
Like the silence, I had been looking forward to a time when the hundreds of small decisions that comprise a day of travel would be mine alone. Also like the silence, I enjoyed it instantly. From the moment I left Dheiu behind, I paused, paced, rested and ate with consensus-free ease the whole way to Tashkent. There I ran errands that required facing off against institutional stupidity, but I did it without mediation. When I wanted to socialise I did -- with easy hostel friendships -- but otherwise it was 10 days without timesharing, rotating or debating decisions. Amongst those I kicked around with were two cyclists who had met on the road and banded together for the company. It was a common configuration and I could understand the theory, but I held to my autonomy with the fervour of the newly converted.
Adin? Absolutely.
When I did leave Samarkand, I rode 100 km the first day, a normal enough distance on easy road. An unrelenting sun illuminated whitewashed homes and beat down on scenes that looked like the faded pages of a 1980s National Geographic article on Soviet agriculture. The rusted three-wheeled tractors, the donkey carts, the locals covered head-to-toe in scarves, robes and sleeves -- earlier in the year I would have enjoyed knowing that I was sharing the views, the spoken or gestured record of each newness, but by now I was content to register rural Uzbekistan on my own.
The next day I spent enough time in the sun to decide -- with no consensus, just a high-vis jacket and flashing rear light -- to ride into the night for a little while before settling down to sleep.
If Dheiu had never signed up, I would have probably planned a more cautious First World route. Back then, the idea of solo touring sounded almost too difficult, too fragile. By Uzbekistan, cycling solo at night -- like cycling around the world, taking a $400 motorbike over the Pamirs, building a raft to sail down the entire Danube or hitching all over Eurasia -- was just one more option in a world where unknown doesn´t mean dangerous, where the slings and arrows have turned out to not just be rare but glancing and blunt.
So, as an orange sun fell, pooled and drained away, I kept moving along.
The headlights of approaching trucks split over the horizon and the steppes stretched off flat into the distance. Closer to the road, the white-painted trunks of planted trees caught the near-full moon, brighter than the faint white shoulder marker I used to keep myself from straying onto the dirt. I couldn´t see my shifters. I mostly rode by feel.
It was a spectral reprieve from the heat. More than simply being content to experience it solo, I was enjoying it because I could hoard it. So I didn´t stop. I kept riding until, 200 km from where I´d slept, I arrived in Samarkand just after midnight. My own personal best, undiluted.
*
Of course, nothing´s perfect. Everything straddles a Pros and Cons list. The other side of greater freedom is greater effort, and if the achievement is all yours, well, so are the consequences.
After a few days of stiff-legged shuffling through Samarkand´s unexpectedly developed tile mosaic-and-dome splendour, I rolled away in the predawn, passing kids on bikes draped with bags filled with wheels of bread. I had started early for a reason. Boosted by the ease of cycling 200 km and looking for a challenge, I thought I´d see if I could ride the 270 km to Bukhara, where I would next spend a few days, in a single day.
The first 200 km was fine. I moved my legs up and down, consumed more sugar than is advisable and cooled my feet in irrigation ditches. By the time sunset was approaching I had finished a dinner of sardines and bread on the fringes of a small village. I was ready for the final 70 km, the cooler temperatures it would bring and satisfaction of clocking more than a quarter thousand km.
The first puncture had already struck.
When I went to wheel my bike back towards the highway I saw that the rear tyre was flat. Uzbekistan had the worst thorns I´d encountered so far, and although I´d tried to avoid them, I clearly hadn´t. In view of the man whose house I´d eaten in front of, I removed the panniers, checked the tyres and replaced the tube with my one spare. Watching me, the man had held an expression similar to that of the first old woman. With the sun now set, I declined his offer of a place to sleep and rode off.
The second puncture struck 10 km later.
It was distance enough that there were no longer houses nearby. Just trees and thorns. Struggling to balance the bike -- by this stage so heavy that I had recently removed the kickstand because it was crunching the chainstays -- I realised that I´d lost my chance at making the 270 km. Without Dheiu, there was no way I was going to patch a tube here. I would need to head back towards the village and find somewhere to sleep.
I wasn´t too worried. Sure enough, one long hour I would end up in a sort of truck drivers´ hotel near the original village.
And I wasn´t torn by regret. Inside, away from the barking dogs that had woken him when I went to sleep on the thorn-free ground of a gazebo, it was still a good way to end a day, even if the guy who took me in didn´t have the spare tube Dheiu was carrying -- the one that could have gotten me rolling again before I was too wrecked to consider patching my own.
I would arrive in Bukhara the next day. It was an easy ride, I enjoyed the quiet, but like the rest of my time in Uzbekistan it was tempered.
More than the assistance required to get my bike back to running and give me a chance at Bukhara, what I really wanted when my bike first sashayed side to side -- then every few hundred metres after that, as the air surely leaked out -- was not logistical support, paired cadence or even conversation. It would have been helpful if Dheiu could have been there to hold my bike, or shine his torch, or find his spare tube, but mostly I wanted something much simpler. An audience. A witness. Someone to hear me when I muttered ´Shit´ under my breath and reached for the pump.
It can take a nightime limp through Uzbekistan to remember you´re a social animal. Collect all the reasons to travel solo and you won´t have built something that can´t be pierced from time to time.
Adin? Could be.
_____________
* Dheiu, if you´re reading this, you´re an honourary Anglo-Australian guy.
^ Just.
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