A Siberian Adventure

Western Siberia is not a name or a place that conjures up visions of a great vacation spot. It may invoke instead words like "gulag" and "Stalin." So when my friend Werner Wachter of Edelweiss Tours invited me to join him on a motorcycle trip in Siberia, I was unsure of exactly what I was getting myself into.

            Siberia is a huge area, and we traveled to the Altay Mountains nestled among Mongolia, China and Kazakhstan, four time zones east of Moscow. Werner and I have ridden bikes together in faraway places like western China, Israel and Oman, so I knew it would be challenging and an opportunity to learn about a distant part of the world. Werner, who owns Edelweiss Bike Tours, had invited his friends, Bernd May, George and Gerhardt Offer, Uli Bree, Brett Taylor and me to join him and his son Toby to try out a new tour being offered by a Russian tour group called Moto Typc. This risk-tolerant group of American, Austrian and German men became know as the Siberian Heroes. Together we became the first group officially to tour off-road The Golden Altay Mountain route.

            We met at the airport in Moscow and flew four and half hours east to the city of Barnual, resplendent with Soviet-style architecture. Barnaul would be our jumping-off point and where we would pick up our bikes, eight BMW F650GS models. After a two-day ride, mostly on pavement, we arrived at Lake Teletskoye, a smaller replica of Lake Baikal, the world's largest freshwater lake. It reminded me of Flathead Lake. It looks very pristine, but during the Soviet years rockets launched from Baikonour in Kazakhstan fell around the area. Some of these rocket parts were contaminated with poisonous rocket fuel, and there were a few cases of a local person finding a nice piece of metal, installing it on his outhouse and dying a few years later from the contamination. Rumors or truth, this was a great story that added a little spice to our adventure.

            Teletskoye Lake is a nature preserve and part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site called Golden Mountains of Altai. The road ends at the village Artybash, and there are no roads around the lake. We stayed at the famous Eden resort and were well entertained by a corporate retreat for women working at a Russian perfume company. The next morning we loaded our bikes on a tour boat for a seven-hour trip across the lake to the Chulymshan valley, where our off-road adventure would begin. The trip across the lake was a prelude to what we would encounter on the road; we had sunshine, hail storms, intense rain and wind in the time it took to reach the other side some 80 kilometers away.

            The landing and off-loading of the bikes on a makeshift dock of large rocks was difficult enough but was followed by a deep water crossing in mud 100 meters down the road. We had arrived in the wilds of western Siberia. The Chuymshan valley is deep and narrow the entire length, and it is crisscrossed with streams and rivers. The dirt path we traveled was filled with pot holes that were sometimes water-filled from the recent rains and quite rocky at other times. We needed to make 100 kilometers that evening to reach the camp site. At one particular river crossing that was deep and swift, one of the bikes stalled out and we ended up towing it until we could restart it. Passing through small villages also had offered a couple of unique experiences like riding through standing water and sewage.

            As riders, we were all pretty good, and our guide Victor Pantykin was a three-time Mototourismo world champion. However, we still had a couple of bikes go down that first day, including Werner, who made a guest appearance in one villager's back yard after crashing through his fence. Victor had scouted this route for us, and it was a beautiful valley with steep mountains on both sides and the spring wildflowers in full bloom. We passed through a couple of small Mongolian villages and horsemen herding flocks of goats and sheep. It looked a lot like Montana to me.

            That night we stayed at the foot of Katu Yaryk pass in a round shelter with a fireplace in the middle. Each one slept eight men and we needed to keep the fire going all night for warmth. After dinner, we had a traditional Russian banya in a wood-fired sauna, then a swim in the river. The Russians use bundles of eucalyptus soaked in hot water to beat each to help exfoliate the skin while they are in the sauna. There's nothing like a bunch of dirty naked men sweating out the day's effort to end the day.

            Katu Yaryk Pass is 3.5 kilometers long, gravel and a 20 percent grade the whole way. At the bottom of the pass by the sign warning of how dangerous the pass is, there is a pile of empty vodka bottles drunk by travelers either preparing themselves for the ascent or in relief after their descent. Cars could hire an eight-wheeled flatbed to take them over the pass. Reaching the top turned out to be the easy part. The snow was melting off the high area, and the road was quite muddy.

            Our BMWs were equipped with Metzeler Tourance tires which are an on-road/off-road tire. The mud would stick on the tires if we went too slowly, and if we managed to get into second gear, we couldn't touch our breaks without falling down; the mud was like gumbo, and everybody fell on this road. We really needed knobby tires. I fell at a little higher rate of speed and dislocated my collar bone. Gerhardt Offer and his son George are both doctors and told me I couldn't do any more damage to my shoulder, so if I could handle the pain it would be OK. It did slow me down for the rest of the day, but I really didn't have much of a choice. Heck; I was in Siberia.

            The ride now was rough track, trail and large gravel or mud, and there were times my skills were severely tested, whiles other yearned for more, but the ride was unmatched for beauty and remoteness. On the trail to Lake Kara some of the riders had to get off and push each other up the track or get off and let one of the more experience riders get up a stretch. Where there were bridges, they would be swinging bridges of suspect condition, and we would ride one or two at time across them. Every corner and bend was a new treat or challenge, but when the rain came (which was like Montana in that if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes) nothing was a treat. It took all of my concentration not to fall, so I did not have time to look around. There was one spot on the last day of the trip where the bikes stood up in the mud without kickstands.

            We stayed a couple of days in Mongolian yurts and bought a sheep, which was delivered in the trunk of a car. Our host butchered the sheep and reached in and grabbed the heart to put it out of its misery. It was the oldest sheep in the Altai region and really gave something to chew on for days. I tried my hand at fly fishing the river Chou. I met a couple of Russian fisherman and got a couple of nymphs that they were using and set about catching what I would guess were whitefish. Unfortunately, it was not enough to replace mutton for dinner.

            Log homes with brightly painted shutters typified the few Mongolian villages we passed through. We were told not to stop in the villages due to drunkenness among the locals and our lack of language skills. This is one of my regrets. I wanted to stop and look around the villages, but we kept moving at a brisk pace through them, dodging pigs and dogs and followed by very curious stares from the inhabitants. I really can't comment on the culture; we camped out or stayed away from the cities and had little contact with the locals. Our cultural experience was the nightly banha and a dip in an ice cold river, then socializing with our Russian tour guides. On a few days we visited a local museum or had lunch in a small village. The locals were friendly, but there was always some sign of the vodka problem with the drunks that wanted to visit with us.

            This trip, unlike most that I've been on, was about the riding and the terrain, the search for a challenge and the thrill of pushing ourselves. It was also about friends getting together to share some time, laughs and a good ride. Western Siberia and the Altai Republic is a remote and basically unspoiled region of the world. I hadn't heard of it nor put it on my list of places to go, but it was wonderful place to get away from it all and enjoy spectacular scenery and a challenging motorcycle ride.