The guy on the left is Konstantine, the guy in the middle is the kidnapper, and the other guy is an Ukrainian who, along with 5 others, disappeared for a 4 hours to hunt mini lobsters. We feared they had drowned.
For the full story you need to check out Friendly Kidnapping: A Russian Pastime
I started this post last week. We spent 4 nights and 3 days on the island Olchon in Lake Baikal. I wanted to write a series of posts that I could then autopost once I had Internet again. But I was simultaneously writing my next two articles for my Chasing Summer column, and I ran out of battery, so I only managed to get the following 2 paragraphs written:
My friends are awesome. When my status update on Facebook was merely “Chelyabinsk” I got two reactions: one was the title of this post, and the other “xyctzusbsjnj! See I can punch the keyboard too!” Followed by “Just joking, how is Russia?” When I read comments like that I always feel a pang of homesickness. I miss my friends, both the ones that are in both my homes, (Newfoundland and Germany) as well as the ones scattered around the world. It is what I call part of the curse of travel. As fantastic as it is, you are never completely happy in any one place again. I will be in downtown Stuttgart missing Suzanne, at my favorite coffee shop in St. John's and wish Caroline or Aimee could be there, and then in the middle of Siberia wishing I could introduce Anna to Daniela or Erisa. Travel has brought so many wonderful people into my life, I get greedy and want to keep them!
My newest article in my Chasing Summer series is out, and it is the aforepromised article on our encounter with the Russian immigration police. Enjoy it!
My newest article in my Chasing Summer series is out, and it is the aforepromised article on our encounter with the Russian immigration police. Enjoy it!
Our days were spent in the fair city of Samara enjoying the use of free wi fi at the hostel. With the temperature hovering at 40 degrees Celsius (sometimes 38, but sometimes 42), even without our full gear I was afraid of doing a witch of the west impression. Add to that that we had also been almost a full week without Internet, and staying inside and having an internet day was not the worse of fates for us. ;-)
The early evening however, when everything cooled down, meant that we could venture about in comfort and enjoy strolling along the Volga river,
appreciating the church (which overlooked the parking lot where our bikes were parked)
and we could cool off with beer! Beer that was purchased at one Euro per liter, and was injected straight into our 5 liter bottle that awaited it, allowing the beer to complete the bottles reason for existing:
And making someone else incredibly happy as well:
I never saw him that happy again until his girlfriend arrived in Novosibirsk!
Me, I fell in love with the salty stringy cheese, that the German is seen above enjoying, that at first he had to push down my throat, me the entire time screaming about how disgusting it looked (and the fact it was just hanging there in the stall did not go far to endeavoring its case). One taste however and I became a cheese fiend! Going so far as to snap at fingers that tried to pull a stringy piece of love off for themselves!
Our ride into Samara was not planned. We had thought it would be better to stay at a pension or the like in the town prior to it, as we hoped to be able to avoid the traffic of another major Russian city. But the people of the town laughed at us when we asked for Internet. (Literally, we asked like 10 people, 3 ran away shaking their heads, 2 looked horrified at the prospect, and the other half laughed). Even the nice guys who gave us tea leaves they had just collected in the part, (insisting a little too adamantly that we were not to smoke them, just drink them) told us that if we needed internet we were to go to Samara.
Tea leaf family:
The traffic was as bad as anticipated, worse in fact. I wanted to grab a picture of the city sign for my friend Samara, but I valued my life a little too highly to stop. I also discovered I had no idea how to work Russian roundabouts, and the fact that Russians also have no idea how the round abouts worked did little to put my mind at ease over my inadequacy.
A quick search at an Internet cafe turned up JK Hostel, the one and only hostel in the city. They also had Internet, it was good enough for us. Turned out to be one of our best discoveries in Russia.
We pulled up in front of the door (a rather scary looking door in all honesty, that promised nothing good inside) to be greeted with a cry of “ Are you a friend of Peter??? Will you be staying with us?” Turns out that there was a Dutch biker staying there, and the overlap was pure coincidence. But what Peter had discovered and we were about too was Samara's best kept secret.
Through the dodgey door and up the creepy stairs led to a hostel of absolute luxury. Everything was brand new, the dining room and kitchen amazing and the bathroom had a shower that I did not want to come out from.
Not your normal hostel shower:
Dining room:
But perhaps the best part were the owners themselves. A wealth of information on where to find the best beer (next post), and best restaurants in town, rather than feeling like we were paying guests I felt like we were staying with friends, except friends who did not mind when you spent the entire day on the Internet.
Creepy door but coolest hostel owners ever:
If you are in Samara, with or without your bike, I can not recommend this place highly enough! And they are biker friendly!!!
We have been in Mongolia for almost 2 weeks exactly and the only thing I can say is that it is wonderful. The landscape is amazing and the roads an off roaders dream. (But it can quickly become a nightmare if it rains too much, we luckily have avoided the rain for the most part. One rainy day meant one wrecked bike. But easily repaired thanks to multi-purpose ties! But that story is coming later).
The only real problem with Mongolia has been the food. ARGH the food. I will cut this part of an email I sent to my childhood best friend Tracey:
So now my birthday is being spent at a British owned cafe that we spent 2 days riding towards because Lonely Planet said they had real food. (I am not joking, the past 2 weeks my diet has consisted of apples when we find them, pasta, and mutton pancakes, which is basically crepes with sheep or goat inside. Which one is a surprise!). Even I am starting to turn my nose up at cookies and chocolate, because that is the only thing we can buy besides pasta and the occasional apple in these shops. I think Mongolians are completely self sufficient so the only things they need to buy are sugar based junk food.
So for me, this is an ideal birthday in Mongolia. Having our bikes here means we can see the best part of Mongolia at will. But a proper breakfast of scrambled eggs, pancakes, toast, fried tomato and bacon with REAL coffee (not the 3 in 1 kind we have been drinking since the Ukraine) means I am in birthday breakfast heaven. (We have not had that kind of breakfast since Germany). And that they have wi fi means I can start uploading all my pictures to Flickr so they are backed up safely. And I can write everyone those long neglected emails! And I can update Unleash, and I can have coffee the whole day, and I can eat a meal of Burgers and french fries for supper! (I have no qualms about eating happy animals, it is industrial meat production that I have a problem with, and all the animals in Mongolia seem pretty happy. Apart that is from the last 5 minutes when they are whacked onto the back of a motorcycle, sped to a location away from the others, and they are cut open and a man reaches inside and flips their heart upside down. But since the whole thing lasts all of 5 minutes and the death part the goats and sheep do not even get a chance to let out a full bleaaaaa before they are dead, I count it as a good death after a great life of frolicking on the open steppes).
And I can pass on that the next article in my Chasing Summer series is also out, on our time in Romania. The naked comment is not entirely without basis, check out the discussion in Toytown!
Now I go to try to update the blog to now, lets see how far I get! :-P But I will post them over the next few days, so again even though posts are going up they were written today and autoposted for a future date!
