Day 42 - Mission Civilisation
We got going quickly, knowing we'd need all the daylight we could get to do the 50km offroad, and then 100km road to the next town with accommodation where we could have a much needed shower and wash our clothes.
The off-road passed quickly despite the terrain being the same as yesterday. It was stressful though as our food dwindled and the hunger didn't! There was of course also no guarantee that we'd get food just for arriving at the main road either.
We ate the very last of our food!
It was blissful to be back on tarmac! Quite soon there was an option for a 10km detour to a town which may or may not have shops. We decided to take it. Initially it looked bad, but then the cluster of excited school children, after trying to lead us to their houses, took us to a very closed and very padlocked shed and told us to wait. Just as we were calculating the odds of how many children it would take to steal our bikes, they came back with the owner and we had a market! Full of beautiful, calorie-filled food!
While they were excitedly swarming Emma outside, I bought a modest lunch of half the shop. The shop keeper shooed away the children with one sentence, but we decided to retreat out of town for some peace and quiet to devour our hoard.
Suitably fuelled it was child's play on tarmac with no wind to blast out the 100km remaining to the town lying on our aero bars. Just before we got into town I did a double take when I saw Swiss plates drive past! It was Christian and Nadine on a 1 year tour around in their 4x4.
After we'd each done our reset phaff, we had a really nice meal swapping stories from our travels on very similar routes while comparing 4x4 versus bike travel: 120 litres of water versus 5, 800 max km per day versus 220, vast quantities of diesel versus vast quantities of food. They were keen to split the bill equally at dinner for which I felt a bit bad given I had three plates to their one and shared salad...
Locals kept coming over, sometimes with no explanation, to get pictures with us! Christian's few words of Russian really helped with one particularly enthusiastic group of guys, who after talking about Kazakhstan for a while, establishing that they were firmly behind Ukraine (nice to hear!) and insisting on getting Christian's number returned with some Kazakhstan chocolate and dried milk curds (a very salty delicacy) as a gift!
Then MORE reset phaff (by which I mean getting dust off of absolutely everything and sleep. They do have a washing machine here though thank goodness and it's good drying weather in this desert 😉.
Food spend today: 45.15 euros