Altai Bike Expedition, 2006

June 14, 2006:

From July 1 to September 7, my daughter, Noey, and I plan to ride our mountain bikes across the Altai mountains, from northeast Kazakhstan into northwest China. We will then pedal south toward the northern edge of the Takla Makan Desert, and return along the old Silk Road route to Almaty, Kazakhstan.

The map below wouldn't be a real plus on my resume for art school, but I'm crazy busy getting ready to go, and it's the best I could come up with under the circumstances. Expeditions aren't about having everything perfect, they're about getting the job done somehow. Anyway, it's a crude map of Asia with an outline of where we are planning to pedal. The random loops indicate that we actually don't know where we are going, and will probably be lost when we get there. But then again: You can only be lost if you have a preconceived idea of where you want to be.

I will phone my friend and office assistant, Nina Maclean once a week and she will post weekly updates of our adventures.

Tune in starting early July.

After two months on the land we should have known better. But when a Kazakh cowboy with his wife and son, pitchfork and scythe, all mounted on a Honda 125, told us about a shortcut, we took it.

The roadbd was eroded down to bedrock and loose stones. It was so steep that we would take a step, plant both feet in small fotholds like a rock climber, push the heavily laden bikes up like doing a horizontal bench press, lock the brakes, take another step, and so on. After two months on the land, it was just another day at the office.

When we got to the top of the pass, a Kazakh jeep was grinding up the other side, strips of old, red, worn-out underwear tied on to make it look jaunty. We stared at the driver. The driver leaned his chin on the steering wheel and stared at us. "Who are you and what are you doing here?" No, who are YOU and what are YOU doing here?"

Then we dropped down into the desert grassland. The river was a muddy muck of cow-shit soup and I was mentally prepared for a thirsty night with 3/4 of a liter of water. But another Kazakh motorcycle driver showed us a pure fresh spring gurgling out from beneath a yellow, lichen stained rock outcrop.

It was our last night on the land. From here the mountain road leads into Mongolia, and Noey and I are committed to continuing our circumnavigation of the Altai next year.

We took the night bus to Urumqi, a noisy city of over a million. Now we'll take care of some business and get on the jet plane. We're heading home. This is the LAST POST. Tune in next year for round two.

Mr. Ma Lu Bin joined our entourage for this last leg of our journey. He's thin and frail looking, 54 years old, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day for most of his life, and he's never been to an exercise physiologist or a personal trainer. Although he worked as a bank clerk for most of his life, he's an oddball, intellectual, self-taought scholar -- living alone, an outsider in Chinese society. But, as he said, "I am strong in my basically."
On a $20 Chinese bicycle, Mr. Ma Lu Bin led us deeper into the Altay mountains that we had been so far, to a land where people still haul their yurts around by camel, where most people don't speak Chinese, and where one curious couple had never heard of America.
At the campfire at night, Mr. Ma Lu Bin told us stories of the Cultural Revolution, how the Red Army "imported" his mother to Xinjiang when she was 16 because the men there needed wives. How even in today's fast paced electronic China, fear lies just below the surface.
If anyone wants to learn Chinese, either here in Xinjiang or in America, Mr. Ma Lu Bin will teach for free in exchange for English lessons and access to American literature. Contact me and I will make arrangements for you.

We are still in Alai city, this is the last day before we go back into the mountains.
Here people have the gardening concept down. There are big community garden spaces on the edge of town where each person has a hoop house and little squares
of onions, cabbage, corn, and then trellises with cucumbers and beans. It smells like manure, and the soil looks rich.

The kazakhs are highly carnivorous - the basic meal is mutton and noodles with raw onions scattered over the top served onto a big plate in the middle of the table and everyone eats with their fingers and chews on the bones. The main farming acivity of the Kazakhs is to come out of the mountains in August and cut hay for the animals for the winter so it is kind of a relief to come into towns with chinese people where we can have a plate of vegetables and a bowl of rice.

You would have to be reincarnated as a goat tied to the back of a motorcycle many times to repay your karmic debt for being a Kazakh carnivore.

We are ready to get out of the city though, and have passed up the offer to stay for the winter.

Of course our guide only knows about a dozen English words, and we are still working on some of the more difficult phrases like - how many K M to Fuyun? and - Fuyun, buy food? and technical terms like: camping; water; firewood. But we all need to eat and sleep, so at the end of the day we manage to figure all these things out.

He is 52, very strong and has carried many watermelons up absurdly steep roads. He shaves his legs and wears a colorful bicycle jersy. He wears his helmet religiously, sometimes even during lunch, but never to bed. He has faithfully followed us off into the unknown, possibly terrorist camps of Islam Kazakh hordes, down unreasonably bad roads, flash floods and other sorts of hardships, but thank god there are NO MOSQUITOES or other evil biting flies in the Chinese Altai because I think that would be too much for him.

There's a line in an old Kurt Vonnegut book that reads:
"A lion hunter in the jungle dark;
And a sleeping drunkard up in Central Park;
A Chinese dentist and a British queen;
All fit together in the same machine....."

I thought about that the other night when someone offered me a rooster head to eat, because, of course, I was the patriarch, the honored guest.

Noey and I were partying down in Altai City with our faithful Wang Jein, a lonely Chinese bachelor named Mal Lu Bein, who quotes the bible, Hemmingway, and Tolsty, and two young Phillipine women who were hoodwinked into coming to Altai City to teach English by modern era slave traders from Nigeria and Ghana. A Simon and Garfunkle tape was going around for the seventh time.

The next day we hooked up with the Chinese filmmaker we met a few weeks ago in Jeminay, rode into the mountains without our Bobs, ate a gutload of dead sheep, and staggered back to town to party again till midnight.

Missing the open steppe and mountains.

Tomorrow we take off to parallel the Mongol border, working south toward Urumqi.

There are a few technical problems with the phone connection, so there will not be a weekly post next week. Look to hear from us in about ten days.

A week ago, on the evening of the climb to 6,000 ft in the Altai Mountains, ominous rumbles could be heard above camp. Since there had been thunderstorms earlier, Jon, Noey and Wang Jein rushed to get things to higher ground. Noey was in the tent handing out visas, cameras, sleeping bags,diaries, maps and satellite phone. As she was about to scramble from the tent, her hair got caught in the zipper. The flash flood was upon them. Boulders roared through and that moment of being caught nearly brought a devastating tragedy. Trash and multiple trails gave evidence that their campsite had been occupied many times before, but that evening, three lives and all important items were barely pulled to safety.

Craig Childs writes, "There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning."

Another shock came when they arrived at Kanas Lake. Jon counted 75 tour buses in one spot. Thousands and more Chinese tourists took in the beauty (and the 3 bicycle travelers) with their cell phones and video cameras. Over the firm objection of their guide Wang Jein; Jon and Noey planned to escape from being run over by the herds of tour buses by heading off across country using the GPS and compass as their guide. Wang Jein eventually followed. They found motorbike, goat, and herder trails, some too technical for the bobs and others a joy to ride. When they came to a small town they again said no! to asphalt and took off along the front range at 4,500 feet on roads and trails not on the map. In this arid country they were able to find springs, surprising Wang Jein, who had no faith in the GPS and compass, when yes, they did come to a river in 3km.

Now they are above a river valley, looking down on 16 grazing camels and farmers cutting hay. According to the GPS and compass, they will drop elevation, cross 2 more ridges and within a day arrive at the large modern city of Altai.

At 2pm today, (which is 19 hours ago in western Xinjiang Province, China), Jon, Noey, and their Chinese guide came to a river crossing and they just had to stop. Water, shade, firewood, and beauty. They had been pedaling hard for four days through endless hot desert on flat paved roads. Twenty to forty pounds of watermelon was their source of daily food and water. Making a long u-turn, they are now back in the Altai Mtns.

Their guide does not speak English, they have seen no Europeans, nor Americans, not a single non native since stepping off the plane in Almaty, Kazakhstan 5 weeks ago. The American dollar has no value here, not even a black market to exchange currency... they are truely in a culture isolated from the frenzy of globalization. They met a 20 year old Chinese filmmaker who was very hungry. In exchange for some meals, he took them to a native Kazakh rodeo festival. For one of the many sports, men and women in bridal dress raced on horses with the object being for the woman to catch up to a man and beat him with her whip.

Here in China, Jon saw original Kazakh embroidery that he recognized from his travels in Mongolia. Much more true nomadic Kazakh culture remains in Xinjaing Province than they saw in Kazakhstan itself. There are lots and lots of camels along with horses, goats, sheep, and cows. The land is arid, overgrazed and very populated.

Although it is still arid, they are grateful to be back in the mountains at 4,ooo feet with rivers and trees. Tomorrow's climb to 6,ooo ft will take them into a landscape of lakes.

Noey and her father Jon have had to choose to laugh and go along with the daily disasters. If they get a few meals, some sleep and some miles of riding in, it is considered a good day. This journey has been difficult, but with the unique landscape and culture, it is a spectacular experience for a father and daughter to share.

The call comes in on schedule with Jon saying that they had five days of "glorious cross-country mountain biking." The Kazakh roads were mildly technical, defineltly not for passenger cars, but would be OK for medium clearance 4-wheel drive. They crossed 3 mountain ranges, riding up 4,000' ascents over high passes through extensive larch forests, pristine meadows of wildflowers and crystal clear streams to drink from.

This part of central Asia is so remote that they saw no horses nor cows, only one passing vehicle. Then Jon's rear wheel began to break spokes and he went through five spares. In Zaysan they hoped to find "the gold pieces that would allow them to ride on". The golden rule of remote journeys is that something, large or small, becomes the key to being able to continue on the journey. In the town bazaar, they hunted among the stalls displaying pastic dolls, hats, cheep clothes, and some tools when they spotted a couple bike tires hanging on a wall. With his heart in his throat, Jon asked the woman if she had any bike spokes. She rose, went into the back and pulled out a bundle. Paying 5 cents apiece for twenty spokes, they were overjoyed that this dollar purchase allowed them to resume the journey.

On the big grade down to the steppe, a drop of 2,500 feet from 4,500 feet elevation, the friction from Jon's front brake heated the rim to the point that the slime boiled out from the base of the tube stem. (Slime is a product that is injected into the bike's innertubes to seal small punctures.) "The problem is you have an American bike on Kazakh roads" was the joke with locals.

The kindness of strangers in this huge, remote, and subsistance existance land has been very generous. People share the best they have, fresh cream from the cow, eggs and garden vegetables. They give these three odd travelers anything to help them on their way. Kazakhstan has been beautiful beyond the hardships. Next week we will hear from them after they cross Jeminay pass into China.

The time for Jon's call comes and goes. Then finally: they had three days of riding decent roads through villages and farm land, getting invitations to share meals with a beekeeper and farmers living in yurts surrounded by a chorus of goats and horses. On the third night they camped near a village, had their bikes tied to their tent(as must be the custom there to tether your ride when in camp!) when in the middle of the night a rope was cut and someone made off with Noey's bike. In the small village of Katon Karquay, they filled out the police forms and set about to buy a bike. They found a small shop with three new bikes. It took all day, but they were able to make one bike that would work from this inventory. With miles to go, the bottom bracket fell apart not far down the road. Some horsemen came by and rebuilt the bearings with a screwdriver, pocket knife and hydraulic hose. Noey, Jon, and their 14 year old guide Stas spend the night with their saviors and set off the next AM. Whereupon the crank falls off. So they walked, rolled, pushed and pulled into Uryl. Some new friends stop by and know of a farmer-mechanic. At the farm, they try bearings from a sewing machine-too small; then bearings from a starter motor of a military vehicle- too big. Five hours later they find 2 low end bearings at 30 cents apiece. They repack the bearings, load them with grease and weld(!) the crank on. There, it won't come off again. For 60 cents and half as many hours they are off again.

The police find Noey's bike and take Jon, Noey and Stas to prison to meet the thief, Marat of 21 years. The court needs the three travelers to accuse this thief, but the court won't be held for 2 months, in which case it is necessary for the police to detain them. While in detention, Jon thought it wise not to pull out the satellite phone for the scheduled update, not wanting to complicate this delicate situation. All the relatives and the vllage elders begin to arrive and negotiations are started lasting a full day and night. Finallly an agreement is reached: the thief's uncle would pay Jon $150 for all the trouble caused and Jon would drop charges against Marat. Then they all go off to the relative's house for a feast that lasts till 11PM.

Today they have a 4,000 foot climb and Noey is fixing the spoke on her retrieved bike. On a previous trip, Jon had said to his wife Chris, "When all these hassles are over we can begin the trip." She gave him a hard look and said, "Jon, this is the trip." This thievery brought them into the culture and exposed them to much more than an infallible, impeccably equipped excursion would have. All Jon's journeys leave him exposed; this is Jon's invitation to us to let down the walls, air conditioning, sound proofing and insulation, and open the door. It is a rich experience out there, come on out!

Jon Turk is making this posting, not Nina. Noey and I and our 14 year old guide, Stas are in Zyryanovsk: Lat 49 degrees, 44 minutes North; Long 84 degrees 16 minutes East.
We finished leg one of our bike ride -- five days of hard technical mountain bike riding. I am totally, completely, and utterly worked.
The ecstasy:
Unspoiled mountain wilderness; richest cacaphony of wild flowers I have ever seen in my life, eagles overhead, drinking straight out of gurgling mountain streams, camping out, closeness with my daughter Noey, lush forests, rolling alpine meadows.
The agony:
Up trail so steep once that we can't push our bikes and load, so we have to double trip, once with bike and Bob and once with bag of gear. Down trail so steep once that we were all falling down repeatedly, while walking our bikes. Two miles in 6 hours; 9 miles in 11 hours. Thunder, lightning, rain, hail. Mud and blood. We climb 4,600 feet in one big push.
And what about the 4 million stream crossings ankle to waist deep, the 4 trillion mud puddles -some with tadpoles and some without, vicious flesh-tearing flies, and the set of brake pads that we wore down to the metal in four days --- are they the agony or the ecstasy, or just mountain bike riding in Kazakhstan?

OK,... so we were shaken down by petty railroad officials and a Kazak horde of ragtag bandito baggage handlers on the train to Novosibirsk. But considering the past raping and pillaging of Kazak hordes and the Gulag history of trains to Novosibirsk, we didn't come out too bad at all.

We rode 1000 kilometers across the vast and very empty steppe of central Asia and arrived twenty hours later at the platform in Zhanghyztobe. There we met our 40 year old guide, Stas, who is actually 14, with a minor translation error.

We drove to the office of the "Empire of Tourism" and the woman asked if we'd ever been camping before. Then she suggested a low-key introductry ride with jeep support. Noey tells me that I just about lost it. After I calmed down, and they got the idea of what we were intending to do, Stas's father got worried and arranged to have Guide/Interpreter II, Pavil, join us. Pavil speaks no English and announced that he will ride with us for five days and then wants nothing more to do with us.

Stas gets the idea and silently is determined to go on a big adventure with these Americans.

We could get grumpy and put our bicycles and bobs back on the train and fly home in a huff, but clearly we aren't going to do that.

Actually, Noey and I are thinking that this is all pretty funny and we are giggling a lot. Tomorrow we head into the mountains.

We won't be at a computer until we are in Xingjiang Province in China over a month away. So we'll call in our stories by satellite phone to Nina Maclean and she'll do the postings from Darby, Montana.

When I inserted my Fidelity Visa debit card into an ATM machine on Sunday, the machine alerted some Dickens-like clerk in a dark cobwebbed room. The clerk quickly leafed through his big ledger book and snorted, "Huh, this is funny. Last time Jon Turk used his credit card, he was in Danbury, CT." Then he turned to another musty book and said, "Huh, this is even stranger. Jon Turk didn't book any international flights with his credit card. (Noey paid for the airline tickets with her credit card.) But now someonw is demanding cash in Almaty, Kazakhstan. And then he pulled the big red lever on the wall and the machine did not give me any money.
Two days later I tried the card again in another ATM machine. The clerk, now tired, grumpy, and overworked, alerted a horde of gnome soldiers and they raced to the second ATM machine, grabbed my card, and sequestered it in dark tunnels of the corporate/facist netherworld, guarded by fierce trolls with gleaming battle-axes.
Seventy dollars in phone calls later, an ultra-polite receptionist in a mud hut with geaming electronics in the slums of Bombay pulled the green lever on the wall to dispense some money for us.
Expeditions are a compression and amplification of "real" life because you are more vulnerable, more alone, and with less stuff. But the goal -- both in expeditions and in real life -- is not so much to avert disaster, because that is impossible, but to have enough redundancy, back-up, and maybe luck to absorb the glitches and move on.
We have a guide, a map, and money. Today we board the train to the north to start riding.

Noey and I are in an Internet cafe in Almaty, Kazakhstan. There are paintings on the wall of nomadic horde warriors in battle against evil. Speakers are playing smalchy American music from somewhere.

When I write a story after the trip is over, I tend to omit the glitches along the way, especially if they turn out to be trivial in the end. But in a blog, you get to hear the disaster of the moment....

Which is.....

Our guide/interpreter is a nice guy, but doesn't speak a word of English.

And, the travel agent responsible for taking care of us is 800 km away, in another city.

I've been through this before, so while it seems devastating at the moment, we'll figure things out.

We're here and our bikes are here.

It's fun to be half a world away with my daughter.

Today is Sunday ... tomorrow a regular work day......

Shashlick in the park in a fully modern city....

Of course, we're going to ride our bikes whether we have a guide or not.

We now have three sets of maps .... all have different roads, different cities, and different names for the same cities.

Still waiting for our trip to begin, I went googling for information on where we are going in China.
I learned that Xinjiang is one sixth of China’s landmass. It is the hottest and coldest place in China, has China’s largest desert and longest inland river. It has the second lowest and second highest points on earth - the Turpan basin and K2 (Qogir)respectively. There are 20 million people of which one fourth are Uygur, a distinct ethnic minority. There is no Uygur- English dictionary. The region shares borders with Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgystan, Tajikistan, Afganistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, (pretty much all the ‘stans) India, Tibet,and the Quinghai and Gansu districts of China. It is a farming region, known for melons and fruits. Jon knows that there are melons here because when he and Chris were adjacent to this region on the Mongolian side of the border, they found a melon transfer station at a lonely crossroads in the desert where melons from China were taken to parts unknown. He reports that it was a memorable experience, arriving hot, thirsty, and strung-out, to find a mud hut, housing 20 tons of watermelons. According to the Chinese government website, Xinjiang has “enchanting spectacles of nature.” We look forward to being lost in this unique place.

We're in Connecticut at my Dad's house and just had a big family reunion. We've been going through our gear. Each person will be carrying 13 pounds of tools and bike parts, 7 pounds of camping gear, about five pounds of clothes, and a few pounds of maps, navigation devices, and electronics. That's not a lot of stuff. No stove or other frills. In the mountains we'll cook on wood fires. Down in the desert we'll look for camel dung. We'll see.
We're looking at maps, but we're still blissfully vague about where we'll find roads or trails, and therefore we don't actually know where we're going.
We do know that we get on the airplane in a few days to fly half-way around the world.

In my world atlas, Kazakhstan is included in a map of Asia and has about as much detail as the one that Jon drew. I can identify the region where the four countries – Mongolia, China, Russia, and Kazakhstan – meet, and know that there are some smallish mountains there called the Altai. Small in this part of the world is relative. The highest peak in the Altai is Belukha Mountain in Siberia. At 4500 meters it is just a bit higher than Mt. Whitney in the Sierra Nevada of California. So I pulled up the trusty search engine and discovered…. very little actually. “Eastern Kazakhstan uniqueness level very high.” And “rare and endemic animals can be met here.” The World Wildlife Federation declared the Altai-Sayan one of 200 global eco-regions that merit preservation. It is a good place for tourism, but the roads are bad and there is no infrastructure (read: If you had a really good four-wheel drive jeep you could travel about as fast as you can on a bicycle and there would be nothing to eat when you get there). So off we go to get lost smack dab in the middle of the Eurasian continent, half way between the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans where “objects of global uniqueness are available.”

Last day on the computer before I take off. I'll take this time to thank my sponsors:
Patagonia and I have been working together for several years now. That organic cotton is going to feel good when we hit the Takla Makan desert in August;
I'm building what I hope is a strong and long-lasting relationship with Montrail shoes
Bob helped out with Pro-deal on bike trailers;
Zeal Optics gave us sunglasses.

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