Route
The original planned route was Tallinn - Riga - Smolensk - Voronezh - Volgograd on bike, then take the ferry on river Volga to Samara and continue through Ufa over the Ural mountains through Siberia to Irkutsk, around the Baikal Lake to Ulan Ude (completed the 14th of August) and Chita. Part of the route after Chita (1000 km beyond Baikal Lake) is not accessible by road so cars (and bicycles, I suppose) are carried about 6-900 km by train or boat and after that, in the Russian Far East, the route continues along the Chinese border via Khabarovsk to Vladivostok.
BUT unfortunately I got sick with appendicites and after operation + 5days hospitalisation in Ulan Ude, I had to give up on the 15th of August. However, Affi and Fredrik made it to Vladivostok.
Why? Background
- The challenge. To see if it is really possible (or to see haw far we get). In the beginning of the trip we really did not have enough experience to judge whether is was possible to make those nine or ten thousand kilometres. After a few thousand kilometres I was confident that most likely nothing would stop us from reaching our final goal, Vladivostok. I have dreamt for long about doing a really long bicycle tour, but never did, not even a short one.
- Previously I have seen Russian big towns, but never seen much of the countryside and provincial Russia, with some exceptions (three months in Pskov in 1993 and few days at the Baikal in 2000)
- At a party in St Petersburg last summer I asked Affi, in front of a huge map of Russia decorating my wall, if he thought it was possible to go by bicycle all the way from the Baltic's to Vladivostok. At two o'clock in the morning and after substantial amounts of vodka, it actually seemed like the most natural thing in the world! Well, I did ask some of the others at the party as well, but from what I can remember they were not as enthusiastic…
- The "every-day-is-the-same-life" might sound boring, but it is a completely different kind of boredom than experienced elsewhere. I like it. Makes you think about things you don't think about other days.
- Why not? Kul grej!