Riding Home through Asia Read online

  Published in 2015 by Eye Books

  29 Barrow Street

  Much Wenlock

  Shropshire

  TF13 6EN

  www.eye-books.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78563-008-8

  Copyright © Alastair Humphreys, 2015

  Illustrations copyright © Tom Morgan-Jones, 2015

  Typeset in Walsh and Optima. Journal typeface based on Grace McCarthy-Steed’s handwriting.

  Counting in Chinese on One Hand image sourced from Wikipedia.

  Georgian Alaphabet sourced from UCLU Georgian Society.

  Flags sourced from activityvillage.co.uk; colouringbook.org; coloringkids.org; flags-to-print.com

  The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  For George and Sophie

  Contents

  Tom’s Route Round the World

  Battling Snow in Siberia

  Half a World Away

  Pancakes and Reindeer

  Riding the Wild Winter Road

  Steaming through Japan

  Tokyo Tower Blocks, Temples and Mount Fuji

  Chaos and Chopsticks in China

  Beijing to the Great Wall

  The Taklamakan Desert

  Cycling the Stans

  Nomads along the Silk Road

  Goodbye Asia, Hello Europe

  Pedal Power and the Final Push

  Round the World and Home Again

  Find Out and Colour In – Flags

  Your Adventure Journal

  Acknowledgements

  About Eye Books

  About the Author

  Tom’s Route Round the World

  Battling Snow in Siberia

  Tom was cold. He was shivering. And he was frightened. He was going faster and faster. Trees passed in a blur. He couldn’t stop. This was going to end badly. But it was supposed to have been fun! Riding your bike downhill is fun. In fact, it was one of Tom’s favourite things to do. But this was not fun. This was no fun at all.

  Tom was about to crash. He was flying down a big hill at top speed – in deep snow. His brakes could not stop him. Tom loved sledging, but this was ridiculous. All he could do was hang on tight! Waiting for the crash was almost worse than the crash itself was going to feel.

  It was time for Tom’s last option. To scream.

  “Aaaaagggghhhhhhhh! Help!”

  But nobody could help. Nobody even heard him scream. Tom was alone. He was hundreds of miles from the nearest human. Siberia is one of the emptiest places in the world. And, in winter, it is one of the coldest, too. Nobody was bonkers enough to be outside in this weather. Nobody except Tom.

  Siberia is a huge region of Russia famous for its ferocious winters. Tom was trying to cycle across Siberia in the middle of winter. Everyone had told him it was a crazy idea. Maybe they were right after all …

  CRASH!

  SPLAT!

  Tom landed face down in a snowdrift. For a minute or two, he did not move. He was not sure if he was broken or not. Then, ever so slowly, Tom wiggled his toes. Then his fingers. Then his nose. Everything seemed to be in place. The snow had cushioned his fall. Tom was OK. But lying face down in freezing snow is not a nice feeling, so Tom slowly pulled himself upright.

  Falling off your bike is horrible. Getting a load of snow down the back of your neck isn’t nice either. But Tom was lucky this time and was not injured. As he stood up he left behind in the snowdrift a splatted-Tom-shaped hole that made him chuckle.

  “Maybe I really am crazy,” Tom said to himself. “Everyone says I am. I’m out here, in the middle of nowhere, on my own, on a bike, in the middle of winter. I’ve crashed on every hill I’ve ridden down today. This is stupid. It’s stupid, but it’s brilliant!”

  Tom smiled as he hauled his crashed bike from the snowdrift, struggling as it was really heavy. Tom was carrying all the equipment he needed to cycle round the world. And in winter, in Siberia, that meant a lot of gear.

  The young cyclist stamped his feet and whirled his arms like a windmill. It’s the best way to warm your hands when they are freezing cold. Then he climbed back onto his bike. This was tricky too, as the multiple layers of clothes – now soggy and damp – weighed a ton.

  Here is what Tom was wearing:

  2 pairs of long thermal underwear, like pyjamas

  Trousers

  2 fleeces

  Windproof jacket and trousers to keep off the wind. Wind chill is what makes you the coldest

  A big puffy duvet jacket for when not pedalling

  A thin balaclava

  A woolly hat

  Thin gloves for fiddly jobs to stop fingers sticking to frozen metal

  Thicker gloves

  Huge mittens

  A big Russian fur hat

  Thin socks

  Two pairs of thick socks

  Warm Russian felt boots called valenki

  Tom had also covered the saddle of his bike with a layer of reindeer fur to keep his bottom warm! One advantage of wearing so many clothes was that they cushioned him each time he skidded and crashed on the snow and ice.

  But nobody said that cycling round the world was going to be easy. In fact, most people said it would be impossible. Tom knew that if he was going to become the boy who biked the world then he’d have to make it through a lot of hard times like this.

  And as he pedalled away down that long, silent, empty road through the snowy forest, Tom began to whistle a cheerful tune.

  Half a World Away

  Tom had been riding round the world for a long, long time now. Sometimes he thought back to the very beginning, back to his school classroom on a hot, sleepy afternoon. Back to the moment when he’d blurted out to everyone that he was going to cycle all the way round the planet. Even today, Tom was surprised he had actually said that out loud. He usually kept his daydreams to himself. Everyone had laughed, circling around him in the playground and telling him that he had no chance of succeeding.

  Tom had blushed and felt a bit of a fool – he was just a boy daydreaming in a boring lesson at school. Cycling round the world was the sort of adventure people liked dreaming about, but not the sort of thing they would actually go on to do. It was too hard for a normal boy like Tom.

  But once he’d spoken his dream out loud and the other boys and girls laughed at him, something inside Tom made him determined to give the trip a try. He didn’t know if he could do it, but he would never find out if he didn’t begin. It’s exciting to try things when you don’t know how they will turn out.

  So Tom began.

  He packed his camping kit, waved goodbye to his Mum, Dad and sister Lucy, and pedalled away down his street.

  Step outside your house. Or look out of the window where you are reading this book right now. And just imagine for a minute … If you cycled down that road you can see, turned left at the end, then turned right past the shops, up the hill, left at the traffic lights and just kept riding, you could get to anywhere on Earth. Anywhere at all! The s
treet that you live on is the road to Siberia, or to Africa or to anywhere that you dream of.

  Where do you dream of going when you are older? All of us dream of adventure, but not many act on those dreams. Tom was brave enough to get on his bike and go. And he just kept on going!

  Tom rode across England. He cycled across Europe. Along the way he learned how to put up a tent, to fix a puncture, to read a map and to ask for directions in different languages. He didn’t know much before he began, but he learned a lot along the way. Tom pedalled into Africa, marvelling at elephants and deserts and Maasai tribesmen.

  Africa had been exciting, but it was just the beginning. Tom hitched a lift on a boat and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. When he landed in South America a signpost showed it was 12,000 miles to Alaska. Tom climbed on his bike and started riding again. He rode over the colossal Andes mountains, sleeping in a tent and living off the cheapest food he could find. This was usually banana sandwiches (Tom’s favourite food), though he did once eat a guinea pig, much to the annoyance of his sister Lucy who had a pet guinea pig!

  Tom kept going – up through Mexico and into America, passing Hollywood with its movie stars and famous sign to arrive at a redwood tree so enormous that a car or a bike could pass through a hole in its trunk. Which he did immediately, of course. Can you imagine how big a tree needs to be for a car to be able to drive through it?

  In Canada, forest fires blocked Tom’s route and he was forced to build a raft and paddle for hundreds of miles down the Yukon River, through thick forests and past big, scary bears.

  Reaching Alaska at last, Tom crossed the Pacific Ocean to Asia on a boat. Before he returned home again, back to his family and his comfy bed, he was going to ride thousands of miles through Russia, Japan, China and right the way across Asia and Europe.

  Home was still half a world away.

  Tom began this third and final leg of his journey in Magadan, on the shore of the Sea of Okhotsk, a tucked-away, little-visited corner of Russia. Magadan is the sort of town that Tom really loved; towns in the middle of nowhere, without tourists, towns he had never heard of and would probably never visit again.

  He enjoyed seeing how normal people lived in normal little towns all over the world. In some ways their lives were just the same as his had been: going to school, helping with chores, playing with friends. But the details were different, and this was what made travel so interesting.

  Tom met children in Africa who had to walk miles to collect water and carry it in buckets balanced on their heads. He met a boy in Peru who looked after his family’s llamas. He met girls in California who went surfing before school. And now in Siberia, Tom met children whose school wouldn’t give them a day off from lessons until the temperature dropped below -50ºC!

  Magadan looked like every other Russian town Tom would ride through. Old cars rattled down bumpy roads, crashing through potholes as their engines spluttered. Clouds of exhaust fumes billowed into the air. People lived in small flats above shops. The shops sold everything you could imagine – bread, sausages, balls of string. But they never had very much of any item so everything was spread out carefully on the shelves to make the shops look fuller.

  Some Russians are very rich, but many are poor. Old ladies – known as babushka or “grandma” – sat on pavements trying to sell small piles of vegetables from their gardens, or jars of homemade jam, or a few eggs laid by their chickens.

  “Zdrastvoojte!” they said to Tom.

  “Zdrastvoojte!” smiled Tom. “Hello!”

  Tom bought bread, jam, noodles and fat salami sausages. He was preparing for the wilderness ahead. To his disappointment, there were no bananas in any of the shops.

  In Siberia, the land is frozen solid. Even in summertime the earth does not completely thaw. This is called permafrost. You cannot dig deep into permafrost to lay foundations, so buildings are built a little way off the ground on stilts. Water pipes and sewage pipes cannot be buried underground either, so they run overground, zig-zagging round street corners and crossing pavements. Sometimes on the pavement there is a stile to cross over the pipes, like when you climb into a field on a footpath.

  The town of Magadan was built in 1930 by prisoners. They arrived in this empty area by ship, then were put to work chopping down trees and building a town. They built the only road that leads away from Magadan to reach the wealthy gold mines that are dotted across Siberia. This was the road that Tom was going to ride.

  It was a cruel and harsh life back then, and Tom thought sadly of the prisoners as he cycled out of town and into the wild. A cold wind blew. Winter was on its way. Tom shivered and pedalled a little faster.

  Pancakes and Reindeer

  After Magadan, there were no roadsigns. At times the road was only a dirt track. Often there was not any road at all. Sometimes the rivers were bridged, but often the bridges were uncared for and had collapsed.

  On occasion, Tom could carefully tiptoe across a broken bridge and look down through big holes at the scary drop into the current below. But usually the only option was to take off his shoes and socks, roll up his trousers, and wade through the icy water, gasping at the cold and making a noise that sounded quite a lot like a monkey!

  When this happened, his feet turned blue with cold. It was like an ice-cream brain freeze for his feet, but without the good bit of first enjoying the ice cream.

  The temperature was low, but it was not yet viciously cold. Soon though, the temperature was going to plummet and even the rivers would freeze solid.

  Winter arrived silently in the night. Big flakes of snow, millions of them, covered Tom’s little tent and all of Siberia in a thick white blanket. Trees sagged under the weight. Animals shivered and settled down to hibernate through the long cold months; most of them would sleep until summer returned. Tom shook the snow from his tent, clambered out into the freezing morning air, and looked around. Amongst the vast white emptiness, he was the only moving thing.

  Tom grinned. He loved snow! It was fun to play in. Back home snow might mean that school was cancelled, and those rare days were the best days ever. Now, here in Siberia, the snowflakes were still falling and would not stop falling for many days to come. Tom had never seen so much snow.

  “Woohoo!” he shouted into the white, flakey sky.

  But his voice sounded thin and small. There was nobody around to reply. No-one to throw a snowball at. And a nervous feeling started to grow inside Tom’s tummy. Snow might look pretty. It might be fun back home. But cycling through Siberia in the middle of winter was going to be very hard indeed …

  As soon as he began riding, Tom skidded and crashed. Cycling in snow is difficult! Tom gradually got the hang of it, but he still had to stop and push his bike whenever the snow was too deep to pedal through.

  In a funny way it actually reminded him of crossing the boiling hot desert in Sudan, when he had to drag his bike through drifts of sand. Sand and snow aren’t that different to a world cyclist like Tom.

  Luckily, about once a day, a skidoo or a jeep passed Tom on the road. The jeeps’ wheels packed the snow down, making a track that he could cycle along.

  One day a growling, roaring noise made Tom turn around. A tank was driving towards him, its caterpillar tracks easily gripping the snow. The roads in Siberia were so rubbish that these road workers had bought an old Army tank to drive instead of their work van! Tom laughed and waved as it passed.

  The track was meandering backwards and forwards through the forest. The tank driver, though, decided to take a more direct route. He turned off the road and drove into the forest. The tank smashed the trees out of its way as it battered a new, straighter route. Tom was fed up with dragging his bike through the rutted, frozen marshland, so he was happy to follow the tank’s shortcut through the destroyed section of forest. Anything that made the day less difficult was good. And following a tank through a Siberian forest was fun!
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br />   For miles, Tom cycled through the dark forest. There was no-one to talk to and he had only the trees for company. Finally, after several days he saw another vehicle. This one swooshed quietly across the frozen ground. Tom heard the hiss of metal runners, the panting of running animals. And then he heard the jingle of bells. It was a reindeer sleigh!

  A tall man stood on the sleigh, holding the reins in thick gloves. He was wrapped from head to foot in fur. The reindeer steamed as they ran, their broad feet acting like snowshoes and gripping the snow. When the driver saw Tom he hauled on the reins and brought the sleigh slithering to a halt. In all his furs he looked more like a yeti than a man. But his big smile made Tom feel welcome.

  The man had two gold teeth, and his narrow, dark eyes creased with laughter as he took in the sight of the boy on his bike. He had never seen a cyclist before. He was from the Yakut people who have lived in Siberia for a long, long time, hunting, fishing and herding reindeer. He spoke the Yakut language, so he and Tom had no way to speak to each other. But you can exchange lots of information without using words.

  The man pointed to himself and said “Kaskil”. That was his name. Tom pointed to himself and said “Tom”.

  Kaskil rubbed his tummy, showing that he was hungry.

  Tom was always hungry so he did the same.

  “Let’s go and eat!” grinned Kaskil.

  Kaskil picked up Tom’s bike and placed it carefully onto the sleigh. Tom climbed up and stood beside the man, who shouted and cracked his whip. The reindeer galloped off at speed. Tom was so excited about riding on a reindeer sleigh that he didn’t mind that they were zooming off in the direction that he had just ridden, nor that it was absolutely freezing.

  After a short journey they arrived at a cluster of small homes deep in the forest. The houses were bungalows, built from long logs. In front of each home was a neatly chopped stack of firewood and an even bigger pile of ice blocks, about the size of pavement slabs. The ice had been cut from a river with long saws to provide water for the families.