Chapters 6-10: Back in the Saddle
Chapters 6-10: Back in the Saddle
Week 3 of the Silk Road Expedition - Kazakhstan
My jewelry burns hot against my skin. Sweat pours from my brow. I’m doubled over at the waist, barely holding together as the temperature climbs ever higher. How long before I pass out? How long until I’m roasted alive? I squeeze my eyes shut and run my hand up the slick surface of my neck, muscles tense in the oppressive heat. Each ragged breath is scalding against my soft palate. I can feel my mind unraveling. Above me, the thermometer reads 200 degrees.
Slinging an 8-foot wooden ladle, the warden sends more water into the gaping maw of the inferno. Thick tendrils of steam writhe out from the abyss, lashing violently until the door is heaved closed, the beast trapped inside. The furnace takes up an entire wall of the stone dungeon, and even closed, its scorching presence makes every inhalation feel like a breath of boiling water.
Old Russians line the benches around me, their fat, naked bodies reflected in the pools at our feet. They’re beating themselves with branches of birch and eucalyptus, and the rhythmic self-flagellation casts a dark, god-fearing gloom across their already shadowy faces. I watch, transfixed, as a rail-thin old Kazakh approaches the biggest guy in the room. Sitting three times as wide and half again as tall as anyone else, the giant has a bashful smile, but his visage turns sinister as he takes a branch in each meaty fist. Dual-wielding the veniks1 like a sadistic metronome, he slams them down against the smaller man’s back with punishing force. Again. Again. Again. The wet crack of leaves on skin sounds like tearing paper. Arching his back, the frail old man wails in ecstasy, screaming for the colossus to hit him harder.
Feeling faint, I stumble towards the door.
Hello hello!
Welcome to the long-awaited fifth issue of the Silk Road expedition newsletter.
When we last left our heroes, their adventure stood on the brink of disaster. With Carter confined to a hospital room and Phil unable to reach them, there seemed little hope of continuing west… but all is not lost! They say the can-do American spirit is strongest in times of crisis, even halfway around the world.
In case you’re new kids on the block: our names are Carter and Phil, and we spent this past year cycling the Silk Road.
Sauna Days
My release from the hospital came with a phone call and a warning.
“Carter, the doctor says you’re doing better, but I don’t think you should keep biking. Get some rest, and then go home.”
Without NurSultan’s help, I might not be here. His friendly henchmen drove me from the airport to the hospital, and when the doctor refused to take me in, a handful of words from the young oligarch was all it took to get me rolled through the double doors in a rickety wheelchair, front wheels sliding against the floor where they’d been smoothed flat.
“I’ll be sure to take some time off. I really can’t thank you enough, man. You saved my ass.”
With a melange of dirt cheap soviet pills in my pack, doctors in the States had cleared me to continue. My mind was already made up, but I wasn’t about to argue with the guy who saved my life with a snap of his fingers. NurSultan was right about the road ahead: pushing forward would be tough… but I didn’t care. God, it felt good to be outside.
To celebrate my newfound freedom (and fulfill my mother’s compulsory recovery period), we set about exploring the historic city of Almaty, a hallmark trading destination on the Silk Road. Of course, Phil had a bit of a head start. While I was confined to my tiny hospital room, Phil was galavanting around the city, making friends and getting into trouble. So he took me on a tour of his Almaty highlights, beginning with the Arasan sauna.
For those yet uninitiated, the wet hot sweat box is a tradition of great importance to the Slavic peoples of Eastern Europe, Turkic peoples of West Asia, Nordic peoples of Northern Europe, and - perhaps most impassioned of all - Phil. If sauna patronage was a religion, Phil would be the first disciple, and if they had a Mecca, it might be Arasan. The multi-story complex houses countless steam rooms, wood-paneled saunas, bathhouses, an elegant pool, human-sized barrels for soaking between sessions, and self-filling overhead buckets to douse yourself with ice water… but the pièce de résistance is, as you might expect, the Russian Furnace room. I’m still not entirely sure what we witnessed in there, but I think about it often.
To round out our rest week, we visited the bazaar, took a gondola up the nearest snow-covered peak, and dined on mouth-watering horse steak (yum) at The Bottle, the best (perhaps only) French restaurant in the city and a favorite of our friends, William and Zhanar.
French and Kazakh, respectively, the Almaty-based couple were our guardian angels while I was in the hospital, regularly calling in to provide support and make themselves available for translation. By the time we left, they had become our second parents, and it feels like fate that they just happened to be in the same hotel - 1000 kilometers away - on the eve of our journey:
They were in Astana on business with their colleague, Zhanat. Phil and I were grabbing food to round out a day of extreme jet lag by the hotel pool. William, sporting a tailored suit, crossed the room to introduce himself. He glanced meaningfully at my feet, which were scandalously bare in the otherwise resplendent hotel lounge. I nearly dropped my borscht.
“Forgive me, I’m very curious… Um, what is your lifestyle?”
“We were business consultants.”
“I see.”
“But we quit our jobs.”
“Okay.”
“To bike across Kazakhstan.”
“No-”
“We start towards Almaty tomorrow morning.”
He gawked for a moment before wheeling back towards their table with a wicked grin.
“Ladies, you must come chat with us! These boys… They’re crazy!!”
Two weeks later, we found ourselves sitting at their kitchen table, debating the imminence of the apocalypse with their eccentric archeologist friends as James Brown played through the stereo. An incredible cook and brilliant story-teller, Zhanar recounted the time Renato put cannabis in their spaghetti without telling anyone, and the room filled with laughter. Wiping the tears from his eyes, William peered mischievously into his empty wine glass. “I think my glass has sprung a leak!”
Walking back to the hostel that night, I marveled at the whole experience. The satisfaction of a home-cooked meal. How humbling it was to be so well cared for by strangers. How we weren’t strangers anymore.
Who’d have thought we’d find family so far from home?
French Exit
The next morning was a bittersweet goodbye. The afternoon was a blur of cars and pavement. Heavily-trafficked highway took us beyond the city limits, its shoulder a mess of dust and sand. One of Phil’s bags was jarred loose in the first hour of biking. Thank the stars I was behind him, or we’d have been sharing a sleeping pad for months.
Stopping for lunch in the shade of an apple2 tree, we munched on meat-pies and gazed at the resplendent mountains that blocked our path south. The highway stretched east around the range, but Phil had heard the national park offered a beautiful route through the mountains via Turgen Gorge. I was giddy with excitement. Off-roading in the wilderness, that’s what I’d been craving! No more heinous, boring asphalt.
“We’ll definitely see more elevation than the highway, but hopefully nothing too crazy,” Phil mused.
That night, we asked a farmer if we could set up our tent on one of his empty fields, and he smiled wide.
“Откуда?3 You are California!”
“Uhhh sure! Yeah, actually.”
“Okay. Very good. Ah, good great night!”
As darkness set in, we washed our chamois in the stream and did our best to ignore the giant spiders that spun webs in the reeds around our tent. Dogs barked in the distance. Frogs croaked from the water. An old man sang hymns as he walked the empty road, his rich baritone rounding out the twilight chorus.
The next day was more of the first, gaining elevation little by little. We found a trout farm on the side of the road and baited hooks with bits of corn to catch our lunch. Families stood around taking turns dipping their lines in the water. Phil had one on his pole before I could finish reeling in my own. The experience was a bit cheapened by how easy it was, but the fish tasted unbelievably fresh.
Refueled, we hit the road again. Before long, the tarmac turned to gravel, and the gravel turned to mud. Staring up at the imposing peaks above us, one thing was certain: shit was about to get real.
StairMaster Ultra
The ATVs and motocross bikes should have been our first clue.
Kazakh daredevils leaned out the windows of their 4WD adventure jeep as they roared past.“Откуда?”
“America!”
“Wooouuuhhh,” they chorused, their trucks kicking up dust for emphasis.
Rounding another bend, we craned our necks to the top of a rocky hill that seemed impossibly steep. Gone were the luxuries of smooth, sticky pavement. Hills would be dirt and scree from here on out. Never one to back down from a challenge, I shifted to the lowest gear and stood, pressing my full weight into each pedal.
My tires were huge and knobby, designed for traction on loose surfaces like this, but as the angle grew steeper, my tires struggled find purchase. I skidded across the rocks, sliding backward with the weight of my gear. Each agonizing stroke gained less ground than the one before. To my left, Phil pushed past. He was fully off his bike, boots crunching up the gravel road as he heaved his steel steed forward by its handlebars. Defeated, I pitched sideways in a shaky dismount and turned to take in the gully behind us.
It was stunning. Barren steppe gave way to lush forests of pine. Is this really the same Kazakhstan we landed in just weeks ago? That endless flat expanse had been a different world. We were entering a new one.
Rule #1: Don’t Fall
“Fuck, that hurt.” I moaned, wriggling out from beneath my toppled bike.
“Carter, what’s Rule #1?"4
“I don’t think it counts if I was stationary,” I chuckled through the pain, hopping on one leg to a nearby boulder.
“It definitely d-”
“Shut up, Phil. I’m hurting here.”
“Better this than a real fall. Real falls end trips.”
I clutched my shin as little streams of blood slithered toward my socks, bloody holes mirroring the pattern of spikes on my pedals. We rested there in the shade for a while, listening to the nearby brooke as it burbled past. Behind the bushes, a smooth clearing offered a tempting spot to make camp.
“Got it in ya to push forward?”
“We’ve got another hour or two of sunlight. Let’s keep going.”
For our extra efforts, we were rewarded with a gorgeous mountainside stream already populated by military convoy. One of the double-wide trucks was outfitted with a mobile coal-fired sauna… heaven forbid any soldier go more than 24 hours without a good steam.
Making our way to the edge of the clearing, we were invited to dinner with three car-camping Kazakh civilians. We told them of our trip:
“I don’t believe. My mind can’t believe!!! Wow wow wow.”
And they told us of theirs:
“Every few month, we leave our wives and camp out here just guys. It’s nice, but, how I say… we not gay! Ha haha ha. Ahem.”
The most enthusiastic of the three offered us vodka every other sentence until he stumbled off to his tent in a stupor.
The next morning, we continued our hike-a-bike, and crushing the final-boss hill brought us to the Assy-Turgen observatory, which crowned the plateau with a 360° mountain view. The parking lot of 4WD trucks and adventure vehicles emphasized the impossibility of what we’d accomplished. Posing on the edge of the cliff, a kid proffered up his Kazakh flag, and we joined him for family photos. Snow-capped peaks crested the horizon in every direction. I felt on top of the world.
Finally, we had reached the fun part. Eager to enjoy some well-deserved downhill, we raced off the edge and sped into the valley. Prairie dogs cheered our arrival from the hillside, chirping wildly as we whipped through single-track. Muscle memory took over, and my bike carved with ease. The bags of gear, for so long a burden, now supplied invaluable momentum that carried us ever-faster forward.
“RIDE THE LIIIIINE” I shouted into the wind, exultant.
At the bottom of the valley, we found our first river crossing. I launched my boots as hard as I could to the other side and slipped into my sandals. Wading out into the middle with my bike, I wrestled with the handlebars to stay upright as wobbly rocks sloshed underfoot.
“This is the kind of shit you’d see on bikepacking.com!” Phil yelled from the riverbank.
This is exactly what I had signed up for: Off-road. Mountains. Rivers. Car-camping Kazakhs. All of it. Just months earlier, I had been sitting behind a laptop making powerpoint slides day and night. Now, we were subject to the elements, rapt by the rhythms of the landscape around us, free and near to the wild heart of life. The wind was in our faces, the sun on our shoulders. Every breath was intoxicating. The cold water felt euphoric.
Another long toss sent my sandals sailing back through the air to Phil (apparently, he had lost one of his own earlier that day - better to share than turn back for it), and I laced into my boots, grinning.
We had one more huge hill to crush before the real 1000 meter descent began, but the slog was worth it for the view alone. One of the most incredible places I’ve dug a hole to poop.
Riding the Dragon’s Back
Down the other side, I send the first run, less cruising so much as sliding. The shale shifts violently under my tires, and I white-knuckle the handlebars to stay upright in the chute. Fuck, I love this feeling. It takes all my focus to keep my bike underneath me, falling faster and faster, losing control but knowing I can’t slow down without wiping out. There’s only one option: keep moving. I release the brakes and rip around the curve in utter bliss.
From the next ridge over, I watch Phil drop in and smile. Wish I could do that again. He disappears behind the hill and - Pooffh! Dust cloud.
What a legend. He must have hit that turn really hard.
I turn back and appreciate the rolling hills before us. These lines are going to be gnarly. It’s nearly sunset, so we’ll need to be on look out for a flat spot to camp before-
“Carter!” I can barely hear it.
“Carter!” It comes again, pained and stinted and short.
The world bends around me, vision distorting. My mind goes blank. Instinct kicks in. My fingers close around the med kit.
I am sprinting back up the mountain.
___________________
To be continued…
As always, please reach out with questions and writing prompts of any kind. Want the list of gear we packed? Want to make tik toks with our unreleased video? Just inclined to say hello? We’d love to hear from you.
Shoot me a message at carterguensler@gmail.com, or hit me up on social media.
Onward,
Carter 🌸
Thanks for reading! Follow @carter.life.crisis on Instagram for pictures and videos from the trip.
Click here to read past posts, including my brush with death and the first week of our adventure in Kazakhstan.
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Venik [ˈvʲenʲɪk], (Russian: веник) - a bundle of small leafy branches harvested when the tree is in flower and tied together to form a crude broom. It is soaked until supple and used in the steam room to massage the body and to direct the steam from the stove.
Almaty’s name is derived from the Kazakh word for ‘apples,’ which grow in abundance in the nearby mountains and surrounding orchards.
Otkuda (Russian: веник) - whence, from where.
Rule #1 of the Expedition: Don’t Fall
Incredible. Cannot wait for the next one.
need me a almaty apple for real! loved this post and such cool photos!