Russia / Siberia 2004

Mike Kneebone, Bob Higdon, Steve Attwood, John Sartorius

(by way of colour, Mike Kneebone is the President of the US Iron Butt riders association, Bob Higdon is their lawyer and motorcycle travel writer.  Steve Attwood is a former Triumph factory test rider and winner of the 1993 Iron Butt Rally.)

Collated from emails on the web, sent out en route.  I believe Bob Higdon wrote a piece on the trip for "Rider" magazine in the US ... but I could be wrong.

July 2004

Mike Kneebone and I will be flying out of Los Angeles just after midnight next Wednesday for Sakhalin Island, Russia. It is due north of Japan. The bikes we shipped over there a couple of months ago have made it out of customs and are waiting for us. We intend over the course of the next few weeks to cross Siberia, Russia, and Europe, eventually sticking the front wheels of the bikes in the Atlantic ocean on the coast of Portugal.

We're meeting with two other riders in Sakhalin: John Sartorius, an American who lives on the island and is fluent in Russian, and Steve Attwood, an Englishman who in the last few weeks has ridden from his home north of London all the way across Russia just to hook up with us for the trip back. If you think the ride that we will be taking is an adventurous one, consider what Attwood has already done. These guys are world-class riders. I am honored to be in their company, at least for as long as they'll have me.

I will try to send e-mail reports of our progress as often as I can, but it won't be easy. In Russia, for example, I imagine the first thing I'll have to find is an internet cafe that has an English, as opposed to Cyrillic, keyboard.

In the meantime, wish us luck. We might need it.

Bob Higdon

- - -

Thu Jul 01, 2004
Incheon International Airport, Korea

It is going to take some work to do this ride, I fear. I didn't make it out of Baltimore's airport security without having to take my boots off twice. Some of the things I had hoped to carry on were bounced (motorcycle chain, two spark plugs, and a few other things). Then it was a 5.5 hour flight to LAX.

I managed to find Mike Kneebone and Lisa Landry there. She was the rallymaster of the last Iron Butt. We hauled seven bags weighing 4,100 pounds into her SUV and spent half an hour trying to maneuver through laughably dense traffic over to the international terminal for the flight to Korea. More security. More boots coming off. More lines. The check-in guy at Asiana Airlines said it was a 13-hour flight across the Pacific.

It wasn't quite that long, but it was endless nonetheless. There was an Adam Sandler movie --- can anyone tell me one good film he's ever been in? - --- followed by some Scooby-Do crap. I finished off six bike mags and slept for a few hours.

We hit this airport at 0440 local time, both of us utter strangers in an even stranger land. More security. More boots off. I expected to begin hemorrhagic bleeding from the eyes and ears at any moment.

We shoved our luggage carts through these empty, cavernous halls, weary from time zones and wearier still anticipating what lies before us. When we decided upon Honda Nighthawk street bikes for this ride, there was no road between Khabarovsk and Chita, a distance of perhaps 1,200 miles through an otherwise impassable Siberian swamp. But a couple of months ago Putin, seeking to buff up his re-election campaign, managed to have the road completed.

"Completed," however, may be too strong a word. Steve Attwood (and before him some Finns) came through on a bike in the past couple of weeks. He (as did the Finns before him) pronounced the road to be in "very bad" shape. It is gravel, not well compacted, varying in size from marbles to golf balls. He's on a KTM 640 dual-sport bike, the one that has won the Paris-Dakar rally in the past two years. Our Nighthawks have street tires. It is one thing when an American rider tells me a road is crap; it is quite something else when European riders say it.

What we should do is stick these poor machines on the train at Khabarovsk and begin drinking vodka sours for three days until we dock at Chita. But since Attwood has gotten through, I am confident that the consensus will be that we at least have to try to slog down that nightmare road until the blood starts pouring out of my ears for real.

The airport was empty at 0500. Mike idly said as we staggered along, "You know, this is the good part of the trip."

Lordy, lordy.

- - -

Yuzhno, Sakhalin
Saturday, July 3, 2004

Russia grabbed this island, which lies directly north of Japan, during the reign of Catherine the Great. In the Sino-Soviet war in 1905, Japan conquered the bottom half of it and held on for dear life until the end of World War II when the Russians reclaimed it for keeps.

Oil --- lots of oil --- has drawn Exxon/Mobil, Shell, and others here like flies recently. Half the people on the plane from Korea to Yuzhno were American engineers. Prices have escalated as well to accommodate Western standards. You can find hotel rooms that cost about the same as the Hilton in Beverly Hills.

It took 35 hours to make it from Washington, D.C. to the airport here. The weather has been cold and foggy with only occasional appearances of the sun. That should change when we hit the mainland, where it will turn hot and muggy. There will also be 1.2 million mosquitoes per cubic meter.

We have the bikes packed, more or less, and will be leaving here for the ferry to the mainland later this afternoon. It sails at 2000 tonight and should dock in Vanino twelve hours later on Sunday. It's an all-day ride from there to Khabarovsk over roads that Steve Attwood says will be a preview of the sorts of stuff we'll be facing in the 1,300-mile section between Khabarovsk and Chita. There the pavement resumes for the remainder of the trip.

There aren't a lot of road choices on a journey like this. The highway essentially parallels the Trans-Siberian railway all the way to Moscow. I'll be interested to see if that city treats me any better than it did the last time I was there in 2002. Then I had a bike that had broken down to the point that Mike Kneebone and I had to retreat to Europe. Moscow can be a tough place to visit. Ask Napoleon and Hitler.

It is a long, long way from here.

- - -


July 3: Ferry from Kholmsk to mainland at Vanino

We are four: John Sartorius (American, Salt Lake City, working in Yuzhno, Sakhalin Island, Russia); Mike Kneebone (American, Chicago); Steve Attwood (Englishman, north of London); and moi, Bob Higdon (American, Daytona Beach). Our plan is to ride our bikes --- John’s BMW R1000GS, Steve’s KTM 640, and the two Honda Nighthawks --- from the Pacific to the Atlantic across the width of Mother Russia.

We traveled over to the Pacific side of Sakhalin on Saturday morning, took some obligatory photos in the 49F drizzle, and headed back across the island to the port city of Kholmsk. The ferry was due to sail at 1800. It left at 2200, screwing our hopes for an early departure from Vanino to Khabarovsk the following morning.

By Russian standards the ferry’s cabins were opulent: TV, shower, refrigerator, and telephone, though nothing worked very well. It was an easy crossing, but it would not be an easy day.

We rolled off the ferry just after noon and cleared customs within ten minutes. Just beyond Vanino, when we banged into the dirt road that led west toward Khabarovsk, life became a little grimmer. Steve had warned us that this road would preview everything that we would face on the unpaved section between Khabarovsk and Chita. I’ll make this simple: The road out of Vanino was the worst dirt I’ve ever seen. Mike rolled up to me within the first two miles and said, “We ought to turn around right now.” We didn’t.

Steve was right. The road had everything: Gravel, sand, hard-pan dirt, dust, washouts, potholes that could swallow small trucks, and bridges that had been condemned by the last czar. It took 7.5 hours to crawl through 186 miles, at which point we intersected with the pavement to Khararovsk at sundown. You drive at night in foreign countries and you’ll be burned. We had no choice. We reached the Hotel Versailles in Khabarovsk at 0130 on the July 5.


July 5: Obluche

We gathered at 1000 in the hotel lobby for a meeting. I was ready to put my bike on a train to Chita right then and there. I told Mike, Steve, and John that I had just found the intersection of my two worst fears: riding impossible dirt on the one hand or losing John’s ability to speak Russian on the other. Hamlet faced a similar choice. In the end John’s linguistic skills trumped my fear of the dirt that lay before us, but not by much.

We took off just after 1100, loaded down with bottled water and diet Pepsi. The road was paved, clean, and fash to Birobidzhan, where we stopped for lunch. A couple of hours later I came to a stop. A mile in front of me was an incredibly large cloud of brownish-gray dust. It hung above the road like a permanent feature of the landscape. I rolled up to it cautiously. The pavement had stopped.

I turned to Steve, who had come through this area a week earlier. “So this is where it begins?” I asked glumly. He nodded.

“This is the good stuff,” he said. “One day we’ll get to the road works. That’s where things really turn pear-shaped.” I looked at the dirt, gravel, and dust in front of me without enthusiasm. It didn’t look “good” to me. It looked like a strip of pain without name or mercy. I thought about the train again, just as John shot by on his BMW. “I can’t let that man get away from me,” I mumbled, launching my poor Nighthawk into the dirt.


July 6: Belogorsk

The dust on the first day had been the worst part of things, although the gravel and potholes weren’t far behind in the pantheon of horrors. If a truck passed you, it would cover you with so much dirt that you couldn’t see for half a minute. If you were behind a truck that was going approximately your speed, passing was impossible. I felt like a Paris-Dakar competitor.

The road conditions were about the same on the second day as they had been leaving Khabarovsk: Huge chunks of pavement interrupted by large sections of hard pan and potholed dirt. The weather had changed dramatically, however. We were in rain suits from Obluche to Belogorsk. It rained every inch of the way until early evening. At one point in the morning, as I struggled along a stretch of mud in first gear at 15 mph, a car passed me. The passenger rolled down the window, stuck a camera out, and took a photo of me. That’s when I knew that I was doing something a little out of the ordinary.

My Givi top rack came apart, shattering itself hopelessly. We strapped the bags with tie downs as a temporary fix. An hour later Steve’s left saddlebag bracket broke. We limped into the town of Savintsk and found a welder. Soon we were the most famous people in the region. Video cameras appeared and friends began dropping by to see the Brit and Americans. They told us we’d be on the evening TV news. After a couple of hours they’d patched up our broken equipment and took us to lunch. They didn’t want any payment, but I insisted that they take something for all their efforts. So much for the Cold War that scarred my childhood soul.


July 7: Magdagachi

We faced endless dirt. Mike, Steve, and John could plow through anything. They were all riding bikes in dirt at the age of five. I never set butt on a bike before I was a junior in college. I can’t ride in dirt at all. I hate the crap. And if I ever get home, I’m buying myself a “Nuke and Pave” t-shirt from Aerostich. It sums up my feeling, though perhaps not exquisitely enough.

Since they could easily ride two or three times faster through the gravel than could I, when they’d stop for morning or afternoon breaks, I’d just keep riding. Even at that, they would have spent hours by the end of the day just standing around, waiting for my slow, sagging ass to show up.

And we hadn’t gotten to the bad part yet. By early afternoon today I asked Mike at a gas stop whether he thought that Steve had accurately described the condition of the highway. He agreed that what we had seen so far had been nothing like what we’d been expecting. I was getting through it, albeit slowly, but it wasn’t killing me. We didn’t know it at the time, but at that moment we had just seen the last of the asphalt we would see for the next four days.

Things turned hellish immediately. I was stuggling even more than I had been in the first two days. Where I used to be able to count on some pavement for relief, there was now nothing but dirt, sand, and gravel. Between Sivaki and Ushumun the road deteriorated into a sand pit with broken rocks. Mike and I stopped three times to make sure that we were really on the “highway” to Chita. I’ve never seen anything so bad. I was essentially in first gear for more than 15 straight miles. Mike commented later that night, “It wasn’t a construction zone; it was a war zone.”

Not long after Ushumun, coming into another small town, I noticed that Mike was in the corner on the opposite side of the road, wilding motioning to me. That was the last thing I saw before the bike low-sided on its left side in a foot of sand. There was no real physical damage to me or the Honda --- maybe because the damned sand was so deep --- but the psychological hit was something I’d be thinking about for the next week.

If you ask any of us where our personal low points on the ride have been, we’d all say the same thing: Magdagachi. Mike was so sick he couldn’t join us at dinner. John was furious at having been overcharged by a low-rent hotel. Steve wasn’t quite as sick as Mike but was having his worst day of the trip. Me? The fall had wrecked what little confidence I had about navigating through such conditions. Although Steve had reduced my air pressures to 20 and 30 psi front and rear, it wasn’t enough. I was still sliding all over the place. I couldn’t imagine continuing. If I got two hours of sleep that night, I don’t remember any peace at all. All I could think about was putting the bike on the train. I stuck ear plugs in to drown out the incessant noice of the city. I could hear my heart banging away in its cage. Why doesn’t the poor thing just quit, I wondered.


July 8: Yerofey Pavlovich

When Mike woke up, I told him I wanted to bail out. I could take the train to Chita and stuff the bike in a baggage car. He looked at me blankly as if I’d lost my mind. “There may be no train through here for a week,” he said. I knew it. It was an ignorant idea, borne of fear and frustration. This son-of-a-bitch road wasn’t going to let me go so easily. I walked off disconsolately and told my tape recorder, “I am going to have to bungle through this long, long road somehow.”

So alone I went again. By the end of every day I had spent two or three more hours in the saddle than the others had. I hated making them wait, but I simply couldn’t go any faster than I was already going. I looked back on the road from Vanino and the 25 mph average I’d made. Now I was lucky to make 25 kilometers in an hour, particularly in the ugly sections with deep gravel. Steve dropped the pressures to 17 and 25. I slogged along.

In mid-afternoon one of the mounts on John’s Jesse saddlebags broke. He and Mike spent a couple of hours patching things back together. Steve was still sick. He lay on his back on a concrete slab with gloves and mosquite netting covering any exposed skin. The flies were man eaters. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see one of them make off with a little kid.

The first section of the big road works that Steve had warned us about showed up before Skorovodino. It was so bad that I began to laugh. You had to tip-toe the bike through rocks the size of footballs. There was no road bed. There was no rumor of a road bed. A guy on a bulldozer pointed us over to the left of the slag pile where a road might show up next week or next month and we dabbed our way over there. It was a kind of preview of hell for me. It took an hour to go five kilometers. I remembered one of the workmen who was watching John fix his bike earlier in the day say, “I’ve never been to Germany, but I’ve heard that the roads are so smooth that you can read a book while you drive your car.” Yes, we said, they have some fine roads there, much better than the one near Skorovodino.

By late afternoon John once again saved us from having to camp with the flies by finding a dormitory for working men in the village of Yerofey Pavlovich. We hiked over to the community shower (with the largest boiler I’ve ever seen), paid a few rubles to get half the dust off our pasty bodies, and had a few beers over dinner. The highlight of the day had been a bridge detouring through the village of Urusha. Mike thinks a photo of the structure first appeared in Dave Barr’s book. I had gone over it by myself while the others were having a tea break. I couldn’t bring myself to look down.


July 9: Highway work camp at Kilometer #432

The dust, which had always been bad except when it rained and turned the road to vicious mud, turned even worse on this endless day. In late morning we managed to regroup --- a rare occurrence, given my inability to keep up with the others --- and discovered that only 80 octane fuel would be available from that point to Chita, a distance of hundreds of miles. A refinery had closed, we were told, and nothing better would be available before August. John refused to put such swill in his BMW, but Mike, Steve, and I filled up with it. The Nighthawks ran fine. Later that day we found that the refinery hadn’t shut down at all.

I rolled along, sometimes making such poor progress that flies actually overtook me, flew up under my face shield, and bit me on the nose. I thought it couldn’t get any worse, but the rain changed my mind. It became very difficult to see through the visor with the onset of rain. My view of the road’s surface, never very good in the best of times, was even worse with raindrops smearing dirt and mud around in front of my eyes. But the rain soon stopped and the dust returned within ten minutes.

We had hoped to be able to make a town with a hotel by the end of the day but my palty average speed --- barely 17 mph for 14 straight hours --- precluded any chance of that. Even though the sun wouldn’t set until almost 2300, we were definitely in for our first night of camping. Then John yet again pulled a rabbit out of a hat and got us invited to spend the night in a trailer in a highway work camp. The road crew cranked up the generator for a sauna, fed us dinner and booze, and refused to take a dime for their efforts. The one thing that they required was that we stay up until amost 0200. John wearily said as we were finally able to crawl into bed, “Russian hospitality can kill you.”


July 10: Chita

The previous day was my slowest. I never once got the bike into fourth gear. I didn’t think it could possibly get any worse. We now had just 300 km of crap left until we could recover pavement for the final 130 km shot into Chita and civilization. But The Road wasn’t through with me just yet. On top of everything else it had thrown at me, now it cranked up the sand. The gravel I could handle, even when it piles up and makes you sick at the thought of it. Even mud I can waddle through. I can’t do sand at all. Not one damned foot of it.

Today I spent 16 miles in first gear, trying to find my way out of the hundred miles of sand that surrounded the countryside of Chernyshevsk. The scenery had changed from the usual Wyoming/Montana/Colorado-like vistas to the sand hills of Nebraska. My progress, always slow, came almost to a halt. To make matters even worse, Mike, who had been shepherding me though this long road for nearly a week, had disappeared ahead of me. I felt like crying.

Hour after hour I watched the GPS grind another kilometer away. “I have just 80 to go,” I would tell myself. “It will get better soon.” Then 75. Then 70. “Soon it will be pavement,” I’d cheer myself. And then the sand would get deeper and I’d go more slowly and I’d hate this motherless road and I’d hate what it was doing to my pretty motorcycle and I’d hate most of all what it was doing to me. It was 95F. The sun burned a hole in my soul.

At five minutes to five this afternoon the pavement appeared. Mike, John, and Steve were waiting for me, smiling and clapping. I parked the bike, got down on my hands and knees, and kissed the asphalt. They took photos of me. With a plug, Mike fixed the hole a two-inch nail had left in my rear tire. A couple of hours later we checked in at the Panama City Motel in Chita. I reflected with low mirth that the namesake “Panama City” is just a few hundred miles from my condo in Daytona Beach, and is a lot easier to reach.

For my woeful inability to make any sort of time on that awful road, I paid for the motel, dinner, and beer that night. Mike worked on the bikes for a while and discovered that my air filter had become so clogged with dust and dirt that the poor machine couldn’t pull more than 4,000 rpm. He knocked a half-pound of grit out of the filter and the Nighthawk ran like it had never heard of Skorovodino at all.

Do I feel a sense of accomplishment about such a ride? Yeah, some. But I wouldn’t do it again under any circumstances. And I was particularly unhappy that I had caused so much delay to the others. Still, we all knew that it would be a difficult ride. I’d said in Khabarovsk that it might take me a week, realizing that Steve had bombed through there in half that time. They said that they didn’t mind, and they never yelled at me once.

The choice of the bike to take on a ride like this --- a Honda Nighthawk is almost a Platonic ideal of a street bike --- didn’t really matter. Even the street tires (Battlax BT45s) weren’t really an issue. There wasn’t that much mud or sand in the grand scope of things, where dual-sport tires might have made some difference. I am so poor in off-road conditions that no single-track vehicle can possibly help me. No, this was a failure of the singer, not the song.

The next time I come through Siberia it will be in a first-class sleeper on the Trans-Siberian railroad. I’ll be knocking back a vodka or two with a smile as I watch one of the world’s great highways being built. It isn’t quite there yet, but one day it will be. And, as I watch the scenery float by from the club car, I’ll recall --- possibly with some fondnest that I don’t quite feel right now --- the week that I was on that hard, bleak track, muttering darkly to myself as I scratched along in first and second gear.

- - -

A Momentary Backtrack

My fellow travelers have read my description of the road between Khabarovsk (hah-BAR-offsk) and Chita (chee-TAH) in my last post. They complain that it did not accurately describe what we had faced. They say that I made it sound too easy.

Maybe, but I didn’t want to be guilty of overdramatizing the conditions we encountered. That notwithstanding, there is no getting around the fact that it is a bike-breaker road of the first rank. On the first section from Vanino alone we saw more than a half-dozen vehicles pulled over with punctured or trashed tires. Inner tubes are the most common kind of road debris in the region.

I think we were lucky to get to Chita in one piece, and especially so because we had unusually good weather except for one day. John’s and Steve’s bikes took terrible punishment during that week. The BMW lost a right fork seal --- Steve observes that an Englishman’s fork seal leaks but an American’s fork seal is always blown --- in the first hour. The shock was next. The instrument panel almost rattled off. A Jesse bag mounting bolt broke in half. A sub-frame bolt unscrewed itself. The sub-frame itself is bending. John rides hard and fast. The BMW R100GS is paying the price.

Steve’s KTM 640 has been beaten like a red-headed stepchild as well. His left fork seal leaks. His shock is finished. His tail light bulb hasn’t worked since we left Sakhalin. Twice he has had welders repair a saddlebag mount. In fairness to the machine, most of its problems have surfaced on the return trip.

And how are the Honda Nighthawks doing, you ask? Not a single part of original equipment manufacture has failed on either machine.

Not every attempt at making the ride between Khabarovsk and Chita ends happily. Two Finns made it through both ways earlier this year but shattered a shock spring in the process and took longer than we did. A motorcyclist from Los Angeles headed east from Chita, ran into the gravel, couldn’t continue, returned to Chita, and stuck the bike on the train. A Japanese rider went down hard in the dirt coming from Khaborovsk, hurting himself and wrecking his bike. That is the known toll so far this year in the wilds east of Chita. You might beat the road, as we were fortunate to do, but it will hit you right back every inch of the way. You can count on it.

Then there is the problem that never was far from our consciousness: If something goes wrong, it will go wrong in the worst possible way and in the worst possible place. An injury that would be treated in an emergency room in the U.S. within one hour can kill you in Siberia. You could bleed to death before a helicopter might ever reach you. I told myself one hundred times each day: Remember where you are. No chance, however small, is worth taking out on that lonely, God-forsaken road.

John said it best. One of the local policemen asked him what the road was like east of Chita. John replied simply, “What road?”

Steve had repeatedly warned us that our troubles would not be over just because we had left the dirt behind us. Russian pavement, he said, would be a mixed blessing. It could go from an excellent surface to something that could break a wheel in a heartbeat. The potholes would be worse than the ones on the dirt because they would be just as deep and much, much sharper on the edges. In the rain they would fill with standing water and become indistinguishable from a tar repair. You wouldn’t miss them all. You could hope only that the one you eventually banged into wouldn’t be The Big One.

Signs are written in Cyrillic. We would travel almost 6,000 miles before ever seeing English words. Steve’s practice was to write in Cyrillic the names of the major towns he would pass through and stick the list in the map case of his tank bag. After watching him do that for a few days, I told him I thought it would be easier if he'd just learn the Russian alphabet. I can read Cyrillic, but a five-year old child can not only read it better but can actually understand what the word means when he’s finished sounding it out.

In the U.S., honoring a requirement set forth in the 9th Amendment to the Constitution, the local highway departments vacuum the streets at dawn every day. That is not the customary practice in Russia. You will see things on the street that you simply will not believe, like an eight-foot length of pipe and a tire chock the size of a Volkswagen. South of Irkutsk I thought I would have a heart attack when I saw a toddler run out into the middle of a highway. Cars were coming at him at almost 70 mph. His mother was nowhere to be seen.

On the ride south into Chaikovsky a few days ago we saw some teenagers raking a pile of new asphalt over the road. A mile farther south a truck had dumped several hundred pounds of the same material right across the width our lane. It was late afternoon, the shadows obscured the view, and the mound of this material --- three feet high and six feet deep at the base --- was the exact color of the highway. There was not a worker or warning sign to be seen. The mass of that material would have stopped a tractor-trailer in its tracks.

Then there are the things that are supposed to be on the streets but aren’t, such as manhole covers, light bulbs in traffic signals, and deer. We never saw a single animal larger than a cockroach coming anywhere near the highway. It is almost as if wildlife in Siberia has been hunted down to the point of extinction.

If tension has not made every muscle in your body tighter than a banjo string by the end of a twelve-hour day, you haven’t been watching where you’re going. You can see just about every traffic hazard that David Hough has written about in his book, “Proficient Motorcycling,” before noon on your first day on a Russian highway.

The coup de grace is the Russian driver. We four are in disagreement about whether these guys are skillful, incompetent, or merely drunk. One thing is indisputable: They can be the most aggressive people you’ve ever met. I don’t know how many times I’ve been riding toward the left side of my lane and had a car shoot past me to my right. It is a constant torment.

Oncoming cars will pull into your lane to make a pass. They know you’ll move and by God do you ever move. Steve has been run into the dirt five times in such situations. If overtaking is too difficult, they’ll undertake on the shoulder and cut back in front of you with inches to spare. It is like being involuntarily caught up in a NASCAR event where all the racers are on drugs. In one incident last month three riders from Helge Pedersen’s tour (which followed the same roads we would be taking through most of Siberia) were involved in a catastrophic accident. They were evacuated by air back to the U.S. There is no safety net anywhere, and you can never, ever relax.

That’s what we faced when we left Chita for the Phase Two objective: Moscow. It lay 4,300 miles to the west.


July 11: Ulan-Ude

If you have just one day to ride in Russia, do it from Chita to Ulan-Ude. Admittedly, since you’re probably halfway around the world from these towns, it won’t be an easy trip to arrange, but it will be worth it. In terms of spectacular scenery, it is the best that Russia can offer.

The day’s objective was Fred the Red’s Dead Head, a massive bust of Lenin in Ulan-Ude’s town center. The day had gone beautifully, right to the point where it turned belly-up in the late afternoon. I had somehow gotten ahead of the pack and stopped at a fork in the road to wait for the others. A few minutes later two German bicyclists rolled up to me. They had been on the road from Berlin for four months and 5,100 miles. We could have learned a thing or two about economical packing from that pair.

As I was talking to them, John came by and said that he was going to continue on into town. He wanted to get to the motel early, check us all in, and start a load of laundry. We would meet at a place that Steve had stayed at on the outbound leg. John knew where it was.

Mike and I followed Steve into town a few minutes later, became temporarily lost, but eventually found the motel in the southwest suburbs. John wasn’t there. Mike took off to look for him. Five minutes later John showed up. He and Steve, it turned out, had not been talking about the same motel. Eventually Mike returned. That night at dinner we had some serious words about what we would have to do in the future to keep from being separated or how to recover if it happened nonetheless.

The next morning, in better moods, we stuck our bikes in front of V. I. Lenin’s scowling face. If there is a photo of the man with a smile, I have not seen it. They say that compared to Lenin, Stalin --- who was responsible for upwards of thirty million deaths during his psychotic career --- was as gentle as a kitten.


July 12-13: Listvyanka, Lake Baikal

Mike’s bike was the first to experience a problem this morning. At a tea break, he noticed that a small nail had found his rear tire. He slowly pulled it out. It caused an almost imperceptible leak. Rather than ream the hole and plug it, Mike took some glue and smeared it with a toothpick into the tiny hole. We chuckled at his optimism, but within ten miles the tire had sealed itself completely.

Before you can even see the world’s largest lake, you can feel it. So large is it --- 400 miles long with an average depth in excess of one mile and containing 20% of the planet’s fresh water --- that its very mass affects local temperatures. As we closed in on Lake Baikal, the temperature dropped fifteen degrees in five miles. I stopped to put on the Aerostich fleece jacket.

There are huge, steep mountains at the south end of the lake, the largest we had yet seen. I had been watching them casually as we came into a small town just before turning due north for Irkutsk. I saw John’s bike pull off to the side of the highway near a bus stop. The machine was dead. When he turned the ignition key to the run position, there was no battery light. That is an absolute sign of a failed charging system.

A quick inspection confirmed what we’d all suspected: the alternator’s rotor had crumped, the second one to fail in the bike’s first 30,000 miles. It has never ceased to amaze me that BMW, which prides itself on technological expertise, can put its name on such worthless parts and not have its arrogant socks sued off by justifiably angry customers.

Fortunately, John was carrying a complete charging system upgrade that he’d bought (but had not had the time to install before the trip) from Rick Jones’ Motorrad Elektrik. He pulled out the replacement rotor, voltage regulator, diode board, connecting wires, and stator. It was that last part that was worrisome: It had been badly hammered by a week of hard-pan dirt and countless potholes. Could it possibly still work?

Miraculously, it could. Steve and Mike swapped out the parts on the side of the road, turned on the ignition, happily stared at a glowing battery light, and cranked the machine over. It ran like a top. It was another nail in BMW’s deteriorating reputation for reliability and another feather in Rick Jones’cap.

We stayed that night and the next in the Baikal Terema Hotel, a gorgeous place on the southwest edge of the lake. Mike and Steve worked on the bikes on our off day, John ran into Irkutsk to mail a package to Germany, and I spent the afternoon writing the trip report on a local guy’s computer. I don’t much care to dwell on what happened next, but after spending two hours putting the story together, I managed to destroy the poor fellow’s connection to the internet. He didn’t have a spare floppy to save the text, so I printed it out and wished him the best. His computer consultant would be able without difficult to undo the problem I’d caused, just as soon as he returned from a vacation in the Canary Islands in a week or two. Sigh.


July 14: In a field 38 miles north of Nizhneudinsk

This day started badly for Steve and ended up worse for me. His bike began sputtering with a fuel problem before we’d gone even 20 miles. We sputtered into Irkutsk and pulled the machines off onto the sidewalk. Steve bypassed what we thought was a croaking fuel pump. That seemed to alleviate the problem.

This sort of story was becoming routine: We couldn’t seem to get through a single day without being stopped in our tracks with a failure of one kind or another. By noon we’d barely made 60 miles. Our average picked up during the afternoon. At 9:30 that evening we had a decision to make in the city of Nizhneudinsk. There was a hotel there, but it was almost certainly of the old Soviet style, which meant Spartan at best and perhaps much worse. At that point we’d gone almost 400 miles in 13 hours, even with the 90-minute delay in Irkutsk. We knew there was dirt ahead, but Steve thought it was just a “short stretch.” We knew there was a roadhouse about 55 miles ahead. Steve had stayed there on the trip east. We had just over two hours of sunlight left. The decision was made to keep going.

With just one hour of sun left, we hit dirt --- bad dirt and sand --- at 28 miles. I came unhinged. This was just like the old days. If there were really 27 miles of this crap left to do, it could take me two hours. We were rolling straight into a setting sun. It was very difficult to see anything at all. I let some air out of my tires, but it didn’t help much.

I did my best, but it became obvious that I wasn’t going to make it off the dirt before dark. I pulled Mike over and told him I was calling it a day. He stayed with me as I pulled off into a field and began setting up my tent. The insects were intolerable. I soaked myself in repellant and hopped into the tent as fast as I could. Mike went ahead to find John and Steve, came back to me to give me directions to the roadhouse, and left to ride for a third time over a stretch of road that had stopped me dead in my tracks. I don’t know how he can ride the way he does. He makes it look so easy.

I killed all the flies and mosquitoes that had slipped into the tent with me, ate a banana, and drifted off to sleep by myself in a tent in a field in the very middle of Asia.

- - -

July 15: Achinsk

I was up at 0630, packing the tent away. I’d told Mike that if I wasn’t at the roadhouse by 0800 that they should start looking for my blood-soaked remains. I pointed the bike back to the road. The dirt lasted just under five miles, with another eleven easily handled on fine pavement to the roadhouse. I took a shower and waited for the others to get ready. It had been dense fog when I started the day; now it was blistering hot.

The road immediately degenerated back to hideous dirt, some of the worst I’d seen since before Chita. I couldn’t understand why Steve had not remembered any of this. The conditions were so bad that I’ll never forget what it was like. Then it occurred to me that people don’t remember things that don’t interest them. This grim dirt was of utterly no consequence to Steve. He could sail through it without a care in the world. I could only struggle along in first and second gear. By noon we had not gone 40 miles.

We stopped for gas in the early afternoon. I was so depressed that I thought I might start crying and never stop. John was jabbering away at a trucker. He turned to us and said, “The guy says that we’ve got a great highway ahead of us all the way to Moscow.” I didn’t believe it, but it was true. My sorrows, at last, were behind me.

The farther west we traveled, the more traffic we encountered, especially heavy trucks. Highway engineers in Russia don’t concern themselves with subtleties like switchbacks in crossing elevated terrain. They plow straight ahead, create a 12% grade, and sit back to watch the fun.

The trucks have a horrible time making any speed up such a hill. They jockey for position constantly, spewing out clouds of black diesel smoke that completely obscure both sides of the road. Overtaking is hopeless in such conditions. If they make the top, then they have to hope their brakes will hold on the 12% descent. There are very few runaway truck lanes, and one of the ones we saw was perpendicular to the highway. Good luck making that corner at 85 mph, Sergei.

By early evening we had cleared the city of Krasnoyarsk and found ourselves on a superhighway that was the equal of any interstate highway in the U.S. We cranked it up and made it to a hotel in Achinsk, exactly twelve time zones displaced from my condo in Daytona Beach, Florida. The only way I could get farther from home would be to go to the moon.


July 16: Novosibirsk

I cannot recall exactly where the hills stopped, but by the time we were halfway to Achinsk, we had come onto a plain that with but a minor interruption for the Ural mountains would continue all the way to eastern Europe, a distance of 4,000 miles at an elevation of 200-500 feet. I think it must be the ancient bed of an unimaginably vast body of water.

As usual it was hot, reaching the mid-90s by early afternoon and staying there until very late in the evening. Although we generally tried to steer as far away from cities as we could, I desperately wanted to find an internet connection to send out a trip report. We reached Novosibirsk in late afternoon, threading our way in dense traffic, and found a good hotel with a dial-up connection. After a quick dinner, I hustled up to the computer room and retyped the story I’d originally written back at Lake Baikal.

At the same time I was happily punching away at a keyboard and drinking a cold beer, Mike was on his hands and knees, trying to tighten up a “Paralever drive housing support bearing” --- I’m using their words since I have no idea what they’re talking about --- that was loose on John’s bike. Whatever was done apparently worked. John’s rear stopped wobbling, at least for a while.

We are in Novosibirsk the capitol of Siberia. About 2,500 miles to Moscow to go, roads are better, but the KTM and BMW have been having problems. We had to change the COMPLETE charging system on the R100GS on the side of the road (what is amazing is that John had decided to carry a complete charging system with him!) and tonight, the rear wheel started shaking, so I attempted to adjust the bearings in the shaft drive system. I am hopeful the GS will make it.

The Hondas just keep taking the abuse. NOTHING broken yet (except for Bob's Givi bags) and the Hondas handled the dirt amazingly well.

The road from Vanio to Chita is best described as a war zone. I have never seen anything like it. It is beyond description. We did get some pavement here and there, but sometimes it was so bad, I would ride the Nighthawk off on the shoulder to get back into the dirt. Someone wrote me a note that is a week or so behind us asking what it is like. I guess I would say imagine riding an AMA dual-sport run. Make that a 200 mile dual-sport ride (do they even have them that long?)

Loaded with all your long distance gear and clothes for a few weeks of riding.

Loaded with all the tools and spare parts you can possibly carry.

Riding a heavy four cylinder Honda Nighthawk

with street tires (very exciting in the sand and mud!)

For 9 days straight, 14 hours a day (yes, to make 200 miles, sometimes you could only go 5 mph for 10 miles at a time).

If you get tired and want to stop, well, you don't. When you stop and need to talk or try and take a deep breath, you will swallow either mosquitoes or flies (and surprisingly, after a week of it, you don't even notice that you are eating flies anymore or the welts from all the bites on your face and hands).

If you are ready for that, this is the adventure you might want to tackle.

From Chita to the west, the road gets better each day. Right now I think it is a matter of the bikes not breaking or tires making it. There is nothing in the way of shops yet, but we are creeping back to civilization.


July 17: Omsk

The weld that had been made to Steve’s left saddlebag bracket back in Savintsk broke, causing another delay this morning. Mike and I rode ahead slowly. Eventually Steve and John caught up with us. Steve and I then took the lead. In mid-afternoon I noticed an apparition coming at us on the opposite side of the road. It resembled a woman in a tank top and running shorts shoving a baby carriage down the road. Steve immediately motioned for me to pull over and stop.

“I know who that is,” he said. “She’s the woman from Wales who’s running across Russia.” We turned around, just as Mike and John rolled up. I beheld an apparition before me.

We, like Gulliver, had seen some unusual people in our travels: German bicyclists, Polish dirt bikers, Marek Michel (the father of Miss Poland-USA), four teen-aged hippies who came straight out of the ‘60s, and some other motorcyclists bound for Mongolia. But Rosie Scott Pope had the best story of all.

Following the death of her husband, this 55-year-old grandmother decided to run across Russia, raising money for the Trans-Siberian railroad hospital and another charity. She was, I think, the happiest person I’ve ever met. Everything she needed was in the pram that she was shoving through eleven time zones. In the summer she could make about 25 miles/day. She hoped that when the winter came she would be near Magadan, the coldest place on Earth. She thought she could make 12 miles/day then.

Travelers like that, especially Her Majesty’s subjects, have a sort of insouciance that protects them like a titanium bubble. Nothing bad is going to happen to Rosie. She couldn’t conceive of such a thing. And if she can’t conjure up the idea, then the idea cannot possibly occur. We gave her some water, bug repellant, and our best wises. We turned back to the west as Rosie aimed east, smiling all the way.

That night we found rooms in a Russian country club on the west side of Omsk. Some serious money had been behind this project. I thought I saw an occupancy certificate made out in the name of Anthony Sopranoskaya, but as I said, my Cyrillic is a littlerough. We did meet a young man who claimed to be a three-time Russian kick-boxing champion. He didn’t look nearly as happy as Rosie Scott Pope, so I decided not to test his skills.


July 18: Talitsa

This day was hot and humid, just as every other day had been. John said that in 20 years of living in Russia he had never seen such a string of dry days. The flat, straight plain continued with a monotonous sameness. If you lost track of what day it was, it didn’t matter. It was like yesterday and tomorrow would be like today.

In the late afternoon today --- on the fourteenth day after we had entered Siberia --- we passed by a marker indicating that we had finally put the area behind us. I smiled when I thought about the 880-mile marker on I-10 as you enter Texas. Siberia can put anywhere on Earth into a far smaller perspective.

We stayed at a trucker’s roadhouse that night. We took the four best rooms in the place, each costing about $28. That might be a week’s salary for the ordinary Russian long-hauler, so he sleeps in a windowless room on the ground floor with seven other guys. It’s a tough country. It always has been.


July 19: Chaikovsky

After endless days in a flat plain, we crossed the Ural mountains today and immediately returned to the prospect of endless days in a flat plain. They are pretty, these hills, and there are a couple of curves here and there, but they are “mountains” only in the loosest sense of the word. The highest elevation I observed on the GPS was about 1,300’. Still, if you can call the pimples between San Antonio and Austin “hill country,” then I guess you can call the Urals “mountains.”

I think the national speed limit is about 55 mph, though it may be higher. No one seems to know. The highway patrol, whose initials are DPS, man checkpoints on the road. They carry black-and-white striped sticks. If they point it at you, you pull over. Most of the time they’re just curious about the bikes, who you are, and where you’ve been. It takes a few minutes to clear such a stop. It’s just the cost of doing business.

Other DPS guys are in cars with radar guns. One of them stopped me this afternoon. I couldn’t have been going much over 35 mph because I was trying to reattach the stupid tank bag after a buckle had loosened up. He pointed the stick at me and I dove over to the shoulder.

The only real Russian sentence I know is, “I don’t speak Russian.” So I said that and he shook his head. I took out the emergency phrase paper that one of Mike’s Russian employees had prepared for us. The basic one says that I’m riding from Sakhalin to Europe and would you please help me. I showed it to the guy. There are others for use at the gas station, the hospital, and Madame Olga’s House of Bondage and Pain.

He looked at the paper, laughed, and showed it to his partner. Then I reached in my tank bag --- the damned thing was still loose --- and grabbed a package of beef jerky that I’d bought in the Winn-Dixie back in Daytona Beach about 400 years ago. He took it, laughed again, and let me go. Case closed.

We are celebrities on the highway and have been since Day #1. People take our pictures, ask for our autographs, and jabber away at us with real admiration. If that were all we had experienced, that in itself would have been unforgettable.

This was our highest mile day, just short of 500, and we wound up at a former Soviet hotel in the city of Chaikovsky, named for the composer who had spent a few years of his life in the area. They don’t see many foreign visitors in the hotel; it took us 50 minutes simply to be registered.

It was warm until the sun finally set around 11:15 p.m. John operates only in a temperature range of 72-74F. Below 72 and he’s putting on the Widder vest; above 74 and he’s looking for wet towels. We know he’s not of our kind, and is almost certainly being monitored by the Men in Black.


July 20: Cheboksary

My first encounter with the DPS today was a typical checkpoint yank. They waved the stick and Steve and I stopped, dragged out the passports, and Mike’s emergency explanation page. There were four of them and it was obvious that they’d all been drinking. We told them that there were a couple of other motorcyclists behind us and they were wanted by police in seven countries. Stop them and search them, we warned.

The next close encounter of the DPS kind wasn’t as cute. They got Mike and me with the radar. We contributed about $17 each to expedite our departure. It was a valid pop, though it’s a little disheartening for me to recall that John’s average speed through Siberia was about double that of mine and he hasn’t been dinged yet.

A dark, cold front began moving in toward the end of the day. Normally we might have tried to run until 8:00 p.m. or later, but no one wanted to be soaked cold through and through, especially John. We stopped at a motel that looked horrible, told the restaurant manager to put ten beers in the freezer, and wait for us in an hour. The motel turned out to be fine. Appearances really can be deceiving in Russia.

At the appointed time, we were back in the restaurant, telling the waitress about our frozen beer. She said that no one had put any beer in the freezer. Excuse me? It was prototypically Russian. Every conversation follows the same course. You begin by asking them for something and they instantly say, “Nyet.” You think this means “No,” but what it really means is, “Let’s negotiate,” or “I need to think about this.” In 90 seconds the “nyet” will turn into “da” and life is sweet once again.

John went out to talk to the restaurant manager about the missing, freezing beer. Someone looked in another freezer, found the Baltikas, and, as I said, life was sweet again. Da.


July 21: Moscow

The rain had blown through during the night but the cold had decided to stay for a while. Today we aimed to reach Moscow and we did. The traffic was ugly, the strains were enormous, and the usual road accidents and disasters seemed to be growing like Topsy. Steve counted nine accidents involving fourteen vehicles in 450 miles. That was salty even by Russia’s cold standards.

When I was last in Moscow two summers ago, I was on a BMW R80G/S that was falling apart under me. I left the city with my tail between my legs, just as Napoleon and Hitler had done before me. Today I returned with a light heart. For the next two days and three nights we would be holed up in the gorgeous home of some old friends of John’s in the suburbs west of town.

Phase Two was officially over. Phase Three, reaching the Atlantic Ocean, would come along soon enough. But first I think I’ll scratch around in the freezer and see if I can find a Baltika. Life is sweet. Da.

- - -


July 22-23: Moscow

I am not going to try to describe the house in which we stayed for three nights in the Moscow suburbs, other than to say that it bears a modest resemblance with its variety of secret passages, in its size, and in its imagination to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. Our hosts, who prefer to remain mysterious as well, could not have treated us any more generously than if we'd been blood relatives who could not legitimately be turned away. After almost three weeks on the road, we were in desperate need of a refuge. We could not have found a more congenial one.

The day was devoted to cleaning up bikes and, for the less mechanically inclined (moi), cleaning up the trip log for posting on the web. To that end, I happily left Mike, Steve, and John to their duties while I reviewed notes and tape recordings. I think the principal difference in our respective labors was that when we were all through, I didn't have to wash my hands.

When Steve changed the KTM's oil, he noticed that parts of a bearing came out with the old oil. He had heard reports of similar problems on other bikes of the 2002 vintage. Worse, it was a special kind of bearing that appeared to have gone bad, not something you could find at a local bearing shop. Worse yet, if the bearing disintegrated completely before Steve could get the bike back into a EU country (where his insurance would cover a tow to a dealer or even repatriation back to England), it might destroy the engine. Various options were discussed. In the end, Steve decided to make a stab to the closest EU border at Finland and hope for the best.

That night, following a bizarre evening of ten pins at an extraordinarily expensive restaurant/bar/bowling alley, Steve and I sat up after the others had gone to bed. It was not the first time we'd tried to put the ride into some sort of meaningful perspective, but it would be the last. He could not understand why I was having difficulty in taking any credit for having made the ride over those wretched dirt roads.

"I've explained this before," I explained again. "This entire trip had been predicated upon Mike and I using street bikes to ride from Sakhalin to Khabarovsk --- I didn't know at that point that there were almost 200 miles of dirt in that section --- and then put the bikes on the train to Chita. Once there, we knew that we had pavement the rest of the way to the Atlantic, except for some construction zones. That's why we bought Nighthawks last fall and had them shipped to Sakhalin. When Putin declared the road 'open' this spring in time for his re-election campaign, Mike and I were caught in the switches. Once you and the Finns had ridden the length of that road, such as it is, I had to do it too. The train was no longer an option."

"But you did the ride," Steve said. "Take credit for it."

"I don't think people ought to take credit for things they do when they have no reasonable choice to do otherwise. If I'd had a reasonable choice about putting that bike on a train in Khabarovsk, knowing what I know now about what sort of shape that alleged road was in, I'd have done it. But the road was there to be crossed. I had to ride it, just the same way some poor bastard has to jump out of the window when there's a fire behind him. You don't think about it; you just jump. All I did was jump. I'm just happy I don't have to jump again."

And I was. Deliriously so. We had another shot of Russian Standard Platinum vodka to celebrate the completion of a ride that I still felt I'd done under duress.


July 24: Glukhov, Ukraine

We hit the road early to pose the bikes for a photo-op in front of St. Basil's at the Kremlin. The day was brooding and overcast. If any of the pictures is worth a damn, I'll be amazed. After that, we had breakfast at an American-style cafe with Laura Brank and her two kids. She's an old friend of John's and the wife of my college roommate. She shuffles her law practice between London and Moscow. Two years ago, when my trip across Russia was coming apart, she was there to help in any way that she could. This morning my mood was a lot brighter than it had been the last time we'd met here.

We said goodbye to Steve. He was taking the road northwest to St. Petersburg and we were going southwest toward Kiev. Our road turned into a vicious construction zone on the outskirts of Moscow that seemed to have no end. In the late afternoon we stopped for gas about an hour from the Ukrainian border. A motorcyclist walked over to Mike and asked him if we might be able to help diagnose a problem with his girlfriend's bike. Mike readily agreed.

The guy was on a beautifully-equipped Honda Africa Twin. Her bike was a Kawasaki Duster 800. The problem was a metal sound of the clanking kind, the sort of sound a bike makes just before your trip turns to rubble. Mike didn't like what he heard and told the agonized couple that they might have to return to Moscow (where their two-week holiday to the Black Sea had just begun that morning). John thought it might be a counterbalancer chain. I stood by the machine while they revved it and said to no-one in particular that it didn't sound like a chain to me.

In the next six seconds, the following things happened in this sequence:

1. Mike lifted the right floorboard up so that it lightly pressed against the muffler guard;
2. As soon as he did that, the clanking sound stopped;
3. The young woman heard that the clanking sound had stopped;
4. Since I was the last one who had said anything, she ran over and kissed me on the cheek.

All of this, of course, mightily pissed off Mike, who had actually figured out that the problem was in fact a trivial muffler baffle (or something similar) that was loose, and yet I was the one being rewarded. So we made her kiss Mike on the cheek while I took a picture to even up the scales of justice.

But I was the one who was kissed first.

Our entry into Ukraine was not as dramatic as Hitler's had been. The Ukrainians had never had a warm relationship with Russia; they had taken to being absorbed by the Soviets with even less enthusiasm. In 1941, when the Reich marched into the region, they were met by people eager to be liberated from Stalin's domination. They offered the Germans bread and salt and welcomed them with open arms. In response, the Germans shot them down like dogs. Stalin didn't deserve this kind of stupidity, but he took it gladly.

Years of Soviet spending on missles and no spending on infrastructure have left the Ukraine with some of the worst highways I have ever seen. The main road from Moscow to the capital in Kiev is worse than the worst paved road in the poorest county in your home state. At times I was doing under 20 mph, just to spare the poor Honda further mistreatment. An hour before sunset we stopped at a motel in Ghukov --- it means "the village of deaf people," though the waitress took our orders without any significant problem --- and found for the first time on the trip a room with an air conditioner. We had a good dinner on the restaurant's veranda, knocked back a couple of beers, and watched the sun go down in a country other than Russia for the first time in weeks.


July 25: Brody, Ukraine

Today we reverted to the old pattern: I rode ahead while Mike and John stopped to eat breakfast. I didn't want to push the Nighthawk that hard on the sub-marginal roads that we were facing. As I came into a tiny village, the cops pointed the stick at me and waved me to the side of the road. One of them came over up to me and showed me a radar gun's readout: 76 kph. It was ridiculous. I might have been going 50 kph (in a 40 kph zone), so I started arguing with the guy. It was clear that they'd shot some other vehicle and were blaming the speed on me. My righteous indignation sometimes worked in Russia. It wasn't going to work in the Ukraine. They were spending too much time and energy to let me walk away.

I tried to ask them what the fine was. One of them wrote down a figure that in the local currency translated to about $450. I pulled out my wallet and showed them that I had about $15, all of which Mike had given me before I'd left them behind. More talk. More gesturing. More bullshit. Finally they decided to take everything I had and waved me along with a smile. Not one vehicle coming into that checkpoint escaped a fine while I sat there. When Mike and John came through there thirty minutes later, they were popped as well. John was admittedly speeding a little, but Mike was 100 yards behind John, well under the limit, and yet was forced to cough up a fine as well. It didn't matter: If you went through that town on Sunday morning, you paid for the privilege, period.

It doesn't do a bit of good, I have found, to get angry or irritated at countries like Russia and Ukraine. They are far too large to care. But the Ukraine was wearing me down with its lousy roads and its thieving cops. I needed to see Europe, quickly.

One short way from Moscow to Europe is via Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland, but that requires crossing a bunch of borders and no experienced international traveler will ever cross a border that he doesn't have to. The shortest way is through Belarus, but that country has a bad, bad reputation. I don't know anyone who has ever gone through there except Lee Harvey Oswald. The final way is to run southwest through the Ukraine, then turn west into Hungary, and Austria. That's the route we chose. I also wanted to see the killing field at Babi Yar.

At the end of the day we managed to find a roadhouse just at sunset. Had we not stumbled upon it, we might have a 90-minute ride after dark into L'viv. My hands were shaking when we stopped. At dinner I told John that we were going to have to stop earlier in the evening than we'd been doing. I told him again that riding at night in countries like Russia and Ukraine was suicidal. "Never again. I mean it. I am not driving one goddamned meter after dark."


July 26: Monor, Hungary

The Ukraine was the breadbasket of the former Soviet Union. It looks like Kansas --- well, maybe two of Kansas and half an Iowa --- but with rolling hills. As we continued southwest, we ran into the foothills of the eastern edge of the Carpathian mountains. To the south of us lay Romania, home of Vlad the Impaler and Count Dracula. I needed another week on this ride to take that country in, but we didn't have another week to spare. We pressed on.

Somewhere in the no-man's-land between Ukrainian customs and the Hungarian checkpoint, you can see Eurasia disappear in your rear view mirrors. In front of you lies modern Europe. The change is instant and dramatic. At the first large town we came to in Hungary, we took an afternoon break at a McDonald's, the first we'd seen since Moscow. Behind us was a Suzuki motorcycle dealer. Next to that was an Esso station. We might as well have been in downtown Milwaukee.

We had hoped to make Budapest by nightfall, but an afternoon storm rolled in with a northern cold front, effectively ending our day 25 miles short of the capital. We turned in at a roadhouse with a good restaurant, had a huge bowl of Hungarian goulash soup, and went to sleep listening to the rain hammering the window.


July 27: St. Valentin, Austria

It rained all night. It was raining when we woke up. It was raining when we headed into Budapest. It looked for a while like it might be raining forever. I had been looking forward to seeing this ancient city that the Danube splits in half. But the day was so awful that I just mentally crossed it off. I could happily spend a month just wandering around in eastern Europe. I love the atmosphere of these countries. They're beautiful, quiet, non-threatening, and cheap. I'll be back in Budapest one day. The weather will be better and the Danube will not be muddy but blue.

In order to ride on the superhighways in countries like Hungary, Austria, and Switzerland, you have to buy a pass called a "vignette." I think they shoot you on the spot if they catch you without one. So, with vignettes in hand, we headed west toward Austria. When John and Mike stopped for their customary breakfast, I soldiered on at a leisurely 90 kph pace, watching the big Mercedes and BMWs come by me in the passing lane at twice that speed. There is a theoretical 130 kph limit on the autobahn, but as usual there is a huge difference between theory and practice.

At a little after 2:00 p.m. this afternoon, we stopped at the last gas station before the Austrian border. Mike said that he was going to press on as he had to get back to work. John wanted to turn south at Vienna to see some old roads that he had last ridden many years earlier. I was intent on heading straight for Stefan Knopf's house in Heidelberg, the home-away-from-home for a lot of American motorcyclists. After one of the most incredible months of our lives, our trip was finally going to split into separate ways. We shook hands and agreed to meet in Heidelberg later in the week.

Mike disappeared at the border. John and I crossed into Austria together but soon he too was long gone. I, always the slowest one, motored on, now alone for keeps. That night I sat on the balcony of a Landzeit Hotel, drank a beer, and watched the sun set in the mountains to the west. We had begun with four in Yuzhno, Sakhalin Island, almost one month and more than 8,000 miles earlier. Now the winds had scattered us.

So this is the way the trip ends, I thought: Not with a bang, but a whimper.


July 30, 2004: Heidelburg, Germany

Mike Kneebone, unsmiling, stared at me. "You take your brother and you head straight west tomorrow, got that? The only thing you will think about is
the Atlantic. That's west. It's not south or east or anywhere else. West, comprendes? You swear to me that you'll go due west?"

"I swear it," I swore.

"On your mother's eyes?"

"Those too," I said solemly.

"OK," he said. "This is important. You will finish this Pacific-to-Atlantic ride. I mean it. Straight west. Do it before something prevents you from doing it."

"Consider it done," I vowed. I could almost feel my mother's lifeless eyes urging me westward to France.

The next morning my brother and I rode southeast toward Munich.


August 2, 2004: Disentis, Switzerland

What can I say? I'm whimsical. The Atlantic could wait. First I needed to see the hateful, the ridiculous, and the sublime: Dachau, Castle Neuschwanstein, and the Alps. Do the camp first for a dose of depression that might clear up in a few days, then drive by Mad Ludwig's villa for a well-deserved smile, then motor on south to the foothills of the most beautiful mountains on Earth.

South of Nauders, Austria you crest an easy pass into Italy. In the old days you'd be dragging out passports and changing money and doing all the busy work that borders always require. Not now. This is the new European Union, a sort of big, fat, happy family floating like a ping-pong ball down the peaceful river of eternal tranquility. This is almost too good to be true, you might think, and there's some gnawing part of me that wants to agree with you. Still, waving at an empty customs building is an improvement over the old days when you'd be spending an hour filling out meaningless forms that grim clerks would stamp, file, and forget as quickly as yesterday's breakfast. Next. Next. Next.

The pass dumps you into a valley that Maxwell Parrish should have painted. A long, clear lake is on your right. In front of you, miles to the south, are the snow-covered Alps. If this were the only scene you could ever have of this magnificent part of the planet, it would be enough. An hour later we were winding our way up the forty-one hairpins of the amazing Stelvio pass. Like everything else for 500 miles in any direction, you have to see it to believe it.


August 3, 2004: Chamonix, France

I grew up in San Francisco, so I know something about beautiful places. Chamonix is one of them. It has my vote as the prettiest place on Earth. It has my second, third, and fifth votes too. So spectacular are the views of the mountains in the Mont Blanc massif that the weather hardly matters. But if you're living right and the fates bless you, the views in the late afternoon sun will take your breath away. I've never seen anything to equal Chamonix.

Generations of Alpine guides have come from this small valley. Perhaps the greatest of them, Lionel Terray, is buried in the cemetery on the outskirts of town. He died in a fall during what should have been an easy climb on a wall near Grenoble in 1965. I always pay my respects when I pass through town. He and some good friends climbed Annapurna --- over 26,000' and at that time the highest mountain ever scaled --- without oxygen. They left some fingers and toes up there. I stood at the foot of his grave and asked him what he thought about guided tours these days of Mt. Everest for bored rich people. Monsieur Terray did not answer. I don't blame him.


August 6: Foix, France

I started worrying today. I worry about falling off the bike. I worry that my brother will fall off his bike, or that we both will fall off or that it will start to snow or that an engine will explode or that I'll lose my passport or that Cuba will invade Daytona Beach or that I'll crack my head open in the shower and have to be buried in the Pyrennes where the Basques live and speak an incomprehensible language that has far too many Xs and Ks in its words to suit me, even though I'm now dead from six different subdural hematomas and couldn't be caring less about any language, particularly, as I said, an incomprehensible one. So I sit on the bike with a death-like grip on the handlebars and worry.

That is no way to ride, I have to say. To ride safely, one must ride tranquilly. If you carry a bunch of psychological baggage with you on a ride of any significance, you won't have room for the stuff that you really need to carry, like toothbrush, passport, and your detailed notes regarding an alternative solution to Fermat's last theorum. Furthermore, spending all one's waking moments in a highly-charged and vibrating field of negative emotions is a virtual guarantee that one of the worries --- to wit: the subdural hematoma --- is not far from becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Today is a Friday. When we headed south toward Barcelona on the motorway south of Avignon, I worried that every car in the south of France was heading the same way we were and that wherever we were all going they would get there first. I decided to turn inland, toward Toulouse, then south toward Foix. I worried that there would be no room in any hotel, so I called a stop at just after four in the afternoon. Ten minutes after we checked in, the desk clerk hung a "No Vacancy" sign on the door. I began to worry that the next day, when we would cross the Pyrennes with those awful signs with so many Xs and Ks in the words that it would be raining like awful hell itself.

But it didn't.


August 7: Pamplona, Spain

I will do pretty much whatever it takes to avoid going into an unfamiliar city on a motorcycle, whether in the U. S. or anywhere else, but the truth is that a city is the safer bet to find a hotel on a weekend. So I led us into Pamplona and the first hotel we found had no vacancy. Damn, and double damn. It wasn't even 3:15 p.m. and my various worries (see above) began to pour down on me like rainwater. But we soon found a three-star hotel, which in Spain will usually have a two-star price, and not long afterwards we were following the path that the bulls do when they chase men through the streets of the old part of the city in July of each year. Everything winds up after about ten blocks being funnelled into the main ring, passing below a large, stone bust of Ernest Hemingway, a great friend of Pamplona in general and of bulls in particular.

My brother asked me how many toros were involved in the run. I had no idea, so I said 100. It sounded like a reasonable number, since I seemed to recall about forty-seven thousand men being gored to death in an average year. Finally, uneasy with my glib estimate, I went to a knowledgeable source and asked a woman in a shop how many bulls had run past by her window a few weeks earlier.

"Seis," she said. Six? That's it? I began to worry that I was losing my mind. I asked someone else in the following block to confirm. "Seis," he confirmed. But I showed him a photo outside of his door that plainly depicted at least eleven bulls in the street. He agreed that there were eleven animals in the photograph, but only six of them were bulls. The others, he said, were not quite bulls.

I concluded that my level of Spanish was perhaps not up to the task of discovering the solution to this mystery of Pamplona, so I decided to shelve the question and take it up with Greg Frazier the next time we should meet. He has actually been in the blood-soaked streets with these creatures --- men, bulls, and not quite bulls. If anyone can figure it out, he can.


August 8, 2004: Saintes, France

At 9:53 a.m. on this date, at 43.32502 north latitude and 1.98216 west longitude, in the presence of and photographed by two witnesses of unimpeachable rank and trustworthiness, my bike and I arrived at the edge of the Atlantic ocean in the city of Donastia (the Basque name) / San Sebastian (the Spanish name), Spain. I therefore claim membership in the Iron Butt Association's newly created 50cc (i.e., 50 days or fewer, Pacific coast to Atlantic coast) club. The third part of the mission has thus been accomplished, and my mother's eyes are no longer hostage to a cruel, merciless fate.