kins, honey, badges, mugs and all
sorts of other things – oh and plen-
ty of vodka. We stayed with a host
almost every night, it was an amazing
but very intense experience. There
was no respite, gruesome cold in the
day and gruesome amounts of vodka
by night.
After Claus left us in the café that
day, we pressed on for another 100
kilometres to a town called Ugle-
gorsk.
After Claus left us in the café that
day, we pressed on for another 100
kilometres to a town called Ugle-
gorsk. We’d seen on the map that
there were a couple of hotels there.
Knowing that we could safely get
our heads down for the night, we
pulled in about 10 kilometres short
to do some shots in the sunset. It
turned out to be a big mistake. We
arrived to Uglegorsk and found a fif-
ty-foot concrete wall surrounding it.
It was a closed city.
It turned out we had scooted to
some kind of secure Russian rock-
et ship, military base. You couldn’t
write it. It was now pretty much
dark and the only two hotels in town
were the other side of a massive wall.
The security guys were telling us we
couldn’t go in and there was nowhere
around to stay. We were flummoxed.
I mean what are the chances of
accidently planning to stay at Putin’s
secret space base?
We were looking at cracking the
tent out in the car park, when a guard
told us there was a trucker motel in
10 kilometres that wasn’t on Google
maps.
We rode off in to the dark and sure
enough 15 minutes later, stumbled
across a truck stop. It was a huge
relief!
Over the following days, we made
it around the top of China and down
to Chita. There were trucker stops
the whole way and although it was
the hardest thing either of us had
ever done, there was always some-
TRAVERSE 26
where warm at night.
We arrived in Chita feeling en-
thused. It had been horrible, but we
had done it. We had been through
the coldest and most exposed part
and come out unharmed – it would be
plain sailing from here.
We couldn’t have been more
wrong.
Over the next few weeks, tempera-
tures dropped to lower than -40°C at
night and we rode in -37°C during the
day.
When you get to those temper-
atures, nothing works, everything
hurts. The batteries in your phone/
GPS die so there’s no directions.
When you walk outside the cold feels
like it creeps down inside you and
squeezes your lungs, making you
cough and splutter for the first two
minutes until you adjust. Your nostril
hairs freeze together within 5 seconds
and there’s still no option to ride with
your visor down, you just have to take
it in the face. You sit there while your