Tomcat is off again

[Cousin Jack]

For those of you who remember TC (aka Motosunburn on Facebook) he is off again. Not sure where his final destination is, but he has done Italy and Greece so far.

[Zimbo]

Following him on FB, love a good travel write up!

[Scootabout]

Used to like his posts. Is he not on here any more?

[Skub]

Used to like his posts. Is he not on here any more?

He makes the odd appearance.

Always a good read for those of you on Bakebook.

[Skub]

TC met a chap with experience of Turkish roads in the wet.

[Cousin Jack]

And again! Des (aka Tomcat) just doesn't give up!

Back to Plan A, ride from Almatty back to the UK.

Facebook blog as Motosunburn.

[Cousin Jack]

And he has done it! Good write up over on Facebook, 14000 kms, umpteen borders, no support and lots of unmade roads. Makes my recent trip around Europe look puny.

Respect !

[Tomcat]

Week 1 26/5-1/6
Almaty, Charyn Canyon
500 kms

We built this city on rock n roll

The days passed, flights came and went, and Katie KTM and I were re-united in Almaty. Customs clearance for the bike was positively Byzantine but happily the smiley fixer lady from Avialogistics knew what to do, and in a mere 4 hours we had the box out in the car park with a couple of willing helpers taking the covers off.

But there's a fly in the ointment. A couple of big ones, actually. For reasons best known to themselves, Almaty customs won't allow a bike to continue into another country of the Eurasian Customs Union, as they apparently then lose sight of the TIP closure. This means instead of nipping over the border to Kyrgyzstan and driving along the shores of Issyk-Kul, the amazing alpine lake of Kyrgyzstan, towards the perfectly preserved 14th century caravanserai of Tash Rabat, I need to enter Kyrgyzstan from Uzbekistan, which would mean an extra 1,700 kms of riding to visit these two places. Regrettably, I am going to bail.

The other big buzzy thing is closure of the Tejen border on the west side of Uzbekistan, leading into Kazakhstan and a loop over the north side of the Caspian Sea. Construction works at the border aren't forecast to end until September. This again would mean a massive detour if I wanted to see the Silk Road cities of Bukhara and Khiva and the famous ship graveyard at Moynaq. So the road home will have to change as well, taking me north on the vast Kazakh steppe to Baikonur and Aktobe before I can head back down to Atyrau and the road home. I'll see how I feel when I get to Samarkand but I'm not sure I'll be motivated enough for another 1,000-plus kms double-back. There are still plenty of places to explore along the way.

But in the meantime, Almaty. Father of Apples! Legend has it that apples first originated in this region, reflected in the city's old name, Alma-Ata. For some time it was the capital of Kazakhstan but in 1997 that status was moved north to the lonely city of Akmola, renamed Astana (which means "capital" in Kazakh). But Almaty remains the country's financial and cultural centre, a buzzing city of almost 2m inhabitants where the well-connected and professional classes are doing very well thank you, in contrast with the more humble who look after the manual work, car washes and service jobs, living not in the plush city centre flats but the 20 km sprawl of tin shacks with massive daily traffic queues.

I used to work here, a fortunate foreigner with paid flat and good salary, and life was sweet. So it was nice to spend a week back here, exploring the old haunts, remembering some of the cool Soviet and post-Soviet architecture and culture. The imposing Panfilov Park with its monumental war memorial and the exquisite Zenkov's cathedral (completed in 1907, the world's second tallest wooden cathedral and built entirely without nails), the panoramic Kok Tobe, the Tien Shan mountains always in the background, snow-tipped even in summer. Markets abound, including the famous Green Bazaar where you can buy a complete horse's head should the fancy take you. Wide open spaces, green parks and banging nightlife. Take a day trip ride out to visit the spectacular Charyn Canyon (which sadly you can no longer drive down). But after a week I'm sated and I want to move on. Katie is not a shopping bike and I haven't come all this way to sit around in a hotel in one town. There's a lot out there to see and explore. We're off. Taraz, then Tashkent, Osh and along the Pamir Highway, some of the world's highest navigable roads.

[Tomcat]

Week 2 2/6-8/6
Taraz, Tashkent, Andijan, Sary-Tash. Jalal-Abad, Naryn
2,200 kms

Games without Frontiers

With my pleading for a Temporary Import Permit that would allow me to go to another country in the Eurasian Customs Union falling on deaf ears, I had no choice but to strike west for the Uzbekistan border as my first crossing, and as it proved, one of the worst experiences of the trip. The first crossing, Kaplanbek. refused to close the TIP, directing me to Konysbayeva, another 100 kms west. By now the temperature was rising above the 40 degree mark, and despite finally getting the TIP signed off the process was tortuous, pushing and shoving at customs windows with dozens of Tajik truck drivers who were probably even more fed up then me, judging by the length of the lorry queue. By the time I finally cleared into Uzbekistan it was rush hour in Tashkent and I was struggling to maintain consciousness in the heat, let alone concentration navigating through crazy traffic to the hotel.

The next morning dawned hot, but leaving a city is always easier than entering it and I resumed my plan to head down through Kyrgyzstan to Tajikistan and the legendary Pamir Highway – a high altitude unpaved mountain road that winds for more than 1,000 kms along remote passes and the Afghanistan border to the capital, Dushanbe. Clearing the border into Kyrgyzstan was pretty easy, using their self declaration customs app, and I duly arrived at Sary-Tash, the last remote village befoe the Tajik border.

It was here, once again, that borders reared their ugly heads to throw a spanner in the works. I thought I’d been smart and organised getting the evisa and GBAO permit well in advance to ride the Pamir region but at the hostel in Sary-Tash I was informed there is a further barrier, a “Border Permit” that is required to use the specific crossing point I needed to go through. It was Friday, and with a 4 working weekday lead time to get the permit electronically, I was facing almost a week’s delay. I could have lived with that, until I checked the weather forecast. Storms coming in, for at least the next week. The combination of the border issues and the likely state of the high altitude dirt road passes after a week of storms caused me a sleepless night, and in the morning I wasn’t much clearer. In the end I flipped a coin, and the coin said: move on. Knowing that whatever I did would be both right and wrong, that’s what I did.

Should I head back to Uzbekistan, Samarkand and the Silk Road cities to start heading back westwards towards home, per my original plan? Guess what, borders fouled it all up again. The Uzbekistan-Kazakhstan border at Tejen was closed until winter for renovations. I could have done the Silk Road cities but would then have to retrace the road for more than 1,000 kms back to Tashkent, and the heat was growing on the desert plains. I really wasn’t coping with the heat though. I’ve ridden in hot conditions before but this was something else, and at 69 years old I have more care for my health than I did as a younger man. So, I reluctantly abandoned that plan too.

Heading north in Kyrgyzstan on roads I never planned to take, I routed through Osh and Jalal-Abad towards Naryn which would be on the way to Bishkek and the unavoidable long drag through western Kazakhstan. On the plus side this took me past Tash Rabat, an ancient and very well preserved caravanserai, which I wanted to visit but thought the Uzbek routing would make non-viable. On the other hand of course, Central Asia being what it is, it threw me another curve ball.

The road to Naryn, which looks pretty straight on the map, is not. It climbs steeply to take you 80 kms over the Kaldama Pass, one of “the World’s Most Dangerous Roads.” This road, unpaved and surfaced with loose stones and sand, pushed me to the limit and reaching the 3,000m highest point brought a sense of relief I can’t describe, knowing I’d be heading back down. But even on the flat plain below I faced a 200 kms stretch of unpaved gravel road that several times nearly washed my front wheel away. Kyrgyzstan is an incredibly beautiful country but its roads are the worst I’ve ever seen, and finally checking into the hotel – a rather grotty old Intourist place – at 7 pm, after a dozen smoking Chinese guys, I slept without being bothered that they didn’t do food in the evenings.

[Tomcat]

Week 3 9/6-15/6
Tash Rabat, Bishkek, Taraz, Turkistan, Kyzylorda, Aralsk, Aktobe
2,400 kms

When the going gets tough

Tash Rabat isn’t one of the best known tourist destinations but on the list of “remarkable remote places to visit” so it’s no longer completely unknown. As such the government has taken a bit of care with the approaches, smooth tarmac out of Naryn and even the unpaved road up to the place is relatively good condition rolled clay. There is a school of thought that Tash Rabat used to be a monastery, but I rather like the caravanserai explanation. Set in the remote mountains you can easily imagine how this would have provided a welcome break to the old Silk Road traders with their camel trains, and standing in the central atrium the silence of centuries falls away, imagining intricate mouldings on the stone walls, the smell of smoke and cooking food, and laughter among travellers.

The road that lay ahead was long, definitely not winding, and it was going to be a challenging run. And as much as this adventure was always a “road trip” rather than a historical voyage of discovery, I wasn’t looking forward to the long trek across western Kazakhstan, the only viable route back home given the Uzbek border closure. Re-entering Kazakhstan (remarkably easy with the common TIP in the Customs Union) the next leg presented a series of 600-km stretches across the hot featureless steppe between towns.

Unexpectedly Kyzylorda presented the opportunity to meet with a fellow traveller – the first such meet-up of my trip. The remarkable Nate Allen AKA Natethenomad has been riding round Asia since before Covid and is still finding new places in Uzbekistan to marvel at and making new biking buddies among the locals, all the while coaxing an old BMW single along with black tape and baling wire. We shared a couple of cold non-alcoholic bottles and swapped some tales, which raised my spirits. Look him up on Instagram, you’ll be glad you did.

Among a series of nondescript provincial Kazah towns miles from anywhere, one sticks in mind, and not for the best reasons. The story of Aralsk (Aral) is well known these days, an example of extreme man-made climate change. It used to be a prosperous fishing town, hauling in the catch from the shallow but expansive Aral Sea – actually one of the world’s largest endorheic lakes – and sending produce across the whole USSR. But during the 1960s the Soviets decided to divert the rivers that fed it to irrigate the thirsty but profitable cotton fields of Uzbekistan. Gradually the Aral Sea dried up and receded, leaving the town of Aral literally high and dry. I don’t know why people stay, because there is nothing. The feeling of hopelessness is palpable. The old rusting stranded ships are long since gone, cut up for scrap, even the old dockyard is walled off, as if to stop it reminding the public of its past purpose, only a couple of dockyard cranes can still be seen above the high walls, skeletons of times past.

[Tomcat]

Week 4 16/6-22/6
Aytrau, Astrakhan, Vladikavkaz, Tblisi, Gori
1,900 kms

Strange world

I never wanted to do this road. It’s a thousand-plus kilometers of nothing. Petrol stations every 200 kms so don’t miss one. Bus stops in the middle of nowhere, bit of shade for a water break but no real respite from the dusty heat of the steppes. The best thing you can do is grit your teeth and Just Do It. Or maybe JFDI.

Aytrau was my last Kazakh town before the Russian border and I decided to take a day off riding to chill. For an oil town, illuminated by its refineries at night and surrounded by nodding donkeys in place of camels, I found it surprisingly pleasant, with a nice chilled vibe. As if to add to the good vibes I bumped into veteran bike traveller and writer Graham Field who introduced me to a nice restaurant where they do great Lagman. We’d briefly met almost twenty years ago at a Herts TRF event where I’d bought his first travel book, In Search Of Greener Grass. Look it up, it’s a good read. Meeting on the road was surreal but that’s the road for you.

Heading into Russia I wasn’t particularly worried. Plenty of travellers had been through in the past few years and all reported that the authorities were polite, efficient and happy to show the best side of their country to visitors. And so it proved. The crossing itself is in an area of swampland teeming with incessant buzzing black flies and nasty bitey things but we got in pretty OK, with none of the rumoured FSB interviews or people looking through my phone. I’d booked a hotel in Astrakhan on the Ostrovok app and everything looked like it was finally going to plan. But borders. As a response to drone threats targeting Russian cities the GPS signal is jammed in certain areas, as my Garmin told me in no uncertain terms. Oddly my phone, as a backup nav system running Yandex maps, seemed OK and got me to the hotel without problems. Having arrived a little early I took the time to have a little walk round the city on the Volga. It had quite a European feel to it… as did the restaurant I found that inadvertently put a bit of a hole in my budget.

Next day we set out to head down south to Makhachkala and Derbent, Black Sea resort towns, where I was hoping to see the “Caspian Sea Monster” – the legendary Soviet ekranoplan, now permanently beached. All went pretty well, most of the way. Russia is a federation of republics, and names like Chechnya, Ingushetia and Dagestan may sound familiar, mainly from the Foreign Office’s “don’t go there” advice. I managed to avoid being pulled over for police checks but the military posts on the border of each of the republics found the Brit on the bike very interesting. With my limited Russian I was able to chat a bit with the soldiers, all amiable young lads presumably doing their military service, and even the one invitation to the police office for a document check didn’t cause any concern.

Right up until we hit the border with Dagestan, anyway. A major military presence gave off rather a twitchy feeling and the soldier who stopped me made it pretty clear that no forriners were going into Dagestan today. I managed to pick out the words “Angliski cigaretti” but not having any to offer as a bribe, my enthusiasm for negotiations was fading. The guy had a big gun and a big dog and the dog was giving me the hairy eyeball, which clinched the deal, so down the road we headed towards Vladikavkaz, the city at the gates of exit from Russia. You’d think this would be a major smooth road given the highly visible route, but yet more gravel tracks were there to delight.

Having entered the city, predictably, this did not go smoothly either. First the Garmin threw a wobbly, soon followed by the phone as well. Finding a hotel in a city you’ve never been to before, in a language you barely speak, is not high on my list of favourite things to do. By a combination of (very bad) dead reckoning, asking for directions from pedestrians and finally following a kindly Russian biker I got to the hotel about 7, ready for a shower and a beer, only to find I’d made a reservation for July, not June. After much rapid-fire Russian between the ladies on reception they found me a room – at the rack rate, which stung, but after my day I’d had, I’d have taken a broom closet if it had running water. The meal and the beer barely touched the sides.

After much studying offline Google Maps I worked out that with a minimum of turns I could get onto the main route out of the city, and in a very unaccustomed turn of events the plan worked perfectly. Transit through the border was smooth and in a couple of hours I was plunged from surgical Russian efficiency into Georgian chaos. The road down from the border towards Stepantsminda is a beautiful twisty mountain road, that has been lovingly lined for miles with wrecked cars and abandoned lorry trailers. I have no idea why, but FFS Georgia get your act together.

By now Katie the KTM was deserving of a bit of TLC and although I’d been doing running maintenance along the way, she was overdue for an oil change and filters. So I contacted Husky Park, the KTM and Husqvarna agents in Tbilisi, who run a service workshop as well as owning a bit of waste land people ride on – sorry, I mean a motocross circuit. They duly did the business (it was only later I found the hadn’t bothered to check the brake fluid and I had to source some on the road as it had gotten critically low). You get what you pay for I guess, and with the cost of the service being less than an hour’s labour at home I can’t complain too much. Tbilisi is a charming little city, with a historic centre and a jumble of old town buildings that mirror their flair for chaos. I liked it.

Onwards to Gori, a short run but I was curious to see the Stalin museum in Uncle Joe’s birthplace. His reputation is mixed, to say the least, but it’s undeniable that he took a peasant economy and turned it into a nuclear superpower, along the way basically winning WW2. The museum exudes an air of reverence, with little mention of the millions who died or were imprisoned or deported. “Local boy made good” mindset I suppose. Most of the content was old photos but it was interesting to look through the armoured railway carriage that took Stalin to pivotal wartime meetings like Yalta and Potsdam. The accommodation in the carriage is modest, but I can now say I have seen the place where Stalin took a sh!t.

[Tomcat]

Week 5 23/6-29/6
Batumi, Rize, Bayburt, Samsun, Safranbolu, Bursa, Alexandroupoli
2,300 kms

The Final Countdown

Turkey is a big country and it felt odd to have a song by Europe as my earworm for much of the week – though perhaps fitting as it marked the time when I was to exit from Asia and re-enter Europe. Last year I had done a tour of southern Turkey and marvelled at some of the many historical sites and natural wonders there.

After a nice night in the Georgian resort town of Batumi it was yet another border crossing – thankfully without dramas – and a short run to Rize, a bustling, sweltering city by the Black Sea. It wasn’t a city I wanted to visit, but it was a convenient stop-off point for a road I very much wanted to ride. The D915 road from Of to Bayburt – reputedly THE world’s most dangerous road.

It started quite easily, as such things do, but as it wound up into the hills the surfaces deteriorated, the road got smaller, and by the time we reached the village of Karacam the road wasn’t signposted anywhere. Stopping to ask a group of old guys at a local cafe the right turning to take, one lifted a finger to point at a mountain peak nearby, “Derebosh…” The others nodded in agreement and murmured among themselves. Obviously this stupid lost Englishman was going to take on a road he knew nothing about. One Turkish coffee later I was ready to fly with or without the bike and more by luck than judgement found the right turning, bringing me into a world of sweat and vertigo. If the Kaldama pass challenged me this “road” threatened to kill me. With a track half the width of the Kaldama I’m astonished 4x4 cars can even get along it. Hairpin after hairpin on loose surfaces followed, breathtaking views and even more breathtaking sheer drops by the side of the road. Meltwater steams flowed across the track and I thanked the gods of Brembo and Mitas for brakes that worked and tyres that gripped the loose surface as I crawled very un-ambitiously over the 30 mile Mount Soğanlı section and the infamous Derebaşı Bends. Built by local people under Russian rule in 1918, it had previously been considered an impossible road to build, and today it remains a route only taken by those with the skill and bravery to ride it. And dumb English tourists, of course.

I wasn’t looking to explore more of the cultural highlights of Turkey on this occasion, and I raced along the north coast, deciding against the traffic madness and heat of Istanbul, instead routing along the beautiful Gallipoli peninsula to cross the Bosphorus bridge to bring me back into geographical Europe. Crossing out of Turkey I was relieved to find I had no traffic fines to pay, as I’d been a bit liberal with my interpretation of speed limits, and a flash of the Irish passport got me into Greece in a matter of seconds.

And there I was in Europe once more, a night in the seaside town of Alexandroupoli and the final countdown to my trip had begun.

[Tomcat]

Week 6 30/6-6/7
Veliko Tarnovo. Sibiu, Szeged, Szombathely, Mattighofen, Zweibrucken, Bailleul
3,000 kms

The Impossible Dream

Another change of plan. Originally I had looked at a route across Greece then up through Albania and Croatia to central Europe and homewards. But the heat dome that was bringing sweltering conditions to Europe was concentrated on the Dalmatian coast and I needed to avoid that if I could. So upwards and northwards it was, in the hope of encountering cooler weather – if not immediately then at least sooner.

On my tour last year I’d ridden up through Veliko Tarnovo and Sibiu, two lovely towns that it was nice to stroll through again, with a difference this year. Last year I was too early to ride the Transfagarasan Pass, which is generally only clear of snow from mid June. This year I was later and the Pass was open. Opened in 1974, the Pass is 90 kms long and connects the regions of Transylvania and Wallachia. Winding past impossibly blue Balea Lake and towering Poenari Castle (the ancestral seat of Vlad the Impaler) the road reaches over 2,000 metres elevation and consists of a dizzying series of hairpins and sweeping turns on perfect tarmac with extraordinary panoramic views that draw tourists from all over the world. As a road to ride on a warm summer day it’s a motorcyclist’s heaven (even with lots of traffic...)

But it has a dark side. The woods surrounding the road are home to a large colony of Romanian Brown Bears, wild animals that can grow up to 500 kgs in weight and stand 2.5m tall. Over the years, tourists have fed the bears, some losing hands in the process, and today it is illegal to feed them. Unfortunately nobody told the bears and they continue to be unfazed by tourists and on the lookout for food – more so as the unaccustomed food source has led to their population quadrupling from what would be the natural number. You see them by the roadside and people congregate to get photos, but hungry bears and mothers with cubs don’t mix well with humans. The day I was there an Italian motorcyclist who had stopped with a group of friends to take photos was dragged off by a bear and killed. I saw plenty of bears as I rode through, more by luck than judgement I didn’t stop.

The road across Hungary and Austria continued uneventfully, but hot, broken by a visit to the KTM museum in Mattighofen, the birthplace and still home of the brand. The museum is pretty good, as museums go, and I’d probably say better than the Ducati museum, which I visited a few years ago. There is the customary static parade of KTM bikes from the earliest to the newest, a truly impressive display of all the winning trophies they have gained over the years, and a diorama of past champions on KTM machines. I’d have liked to have seen more on their MotoGP effort, which has been a big part of the company in recent years, but all in all a good visit.

There is always a sense of anticlimax at the end of a big ride but I tried not to dwell on it for my final two nights, in Germany and France. I decided to get decent hotels and decent food as a little celebration and basically sprint for the port. Two days of 500 kms per day is easy enough in Europe with plenty of petrol stations and good, fast roads. And it was going so well until we left Germany and ran into 500 kms solid heavy rain. A word of advice, avoid driving through Belgium in the rain. They don’t slow down, they tailgate like it’s dry and they don’t switch their lights on. Horrible, and not what you want for your last full day’s riding… especially when it’s France and Sunday and the 3* hotel doesn’t unlock until 6 pm. Fortunately they had a number to call and my schoolboy French plus a little Anglo-Saxon got me in to the room where I could start to dry my gear.

And then, it was all over. A short ride to the boat, a greasy fry, the white cliffs of Dover, the M25, a pint by the river and home. Like it never happened, only a filthy bike and a credit card bill to say otherwise. And the memories.

[Count Steer]

Fab - u - lous!

What a cracking read. Thanks TC.

[crust]

Thanks for posting. Cracking good read.

Nice to see a dream finally realised.

[asmethurst99]

Thank you !

[Sunny]

Excellent stuff!

Got a map of the route that you can share?

[Tomcat]

The Asian bit anyway... the plan and the reality