A pleasant day!

Because of yesterday’s exertion, we are slow to get going today. We don’t leave the camp until 9:20 am and push the bikes back onto the road. Then I raise my saddle by just three millimetres in the hope of counteracting my knee pain. “Look how beautiful the day starts. And what’s more, we can let our bikes roll down the mountain from the very first meter,” I say happily. Light cloud cover promises pleasant temperatures and a positive change in wind direction for us. In fantastic temperatures of 21 degrees, we glide almost effortlessly through an impressive steppe landscape. As we crest a hill, the first steppe rider comes galloping towards us. We stop to answer the man’s questions. He invites us to his place, but we decline again. Then we continue and after just 15 kilometers we reach, as always unexpectedly, a truck stop. Although we haven’t gotten very far today, we ask if there is food for our insatiable bodies. “Yes, we have Bortsch,” says the friendly cook. We sit down in front of the hut and enjoy a very tasty soup with beef and fresh white bread. Afterwards, we treat our stomachs to milk tea and cookies. When I’m full, I wash my itchy head under a Kazakh washbasin, a tin pot hanging from a wire belt with a metal plunger in the middle of the bottom. If you push it upwards, the water inside flows out. One of the truck drivers sees me struggling with the water rinse, stands up, takes the hose from a rusty water tank and lets a powerful jet of water splash over my head. “Ahhh! Suuuper!” I cheer as the itching stops immediately and the cool water refreshes me. “You absolutely have to try it,” I recommend to Tanja, who follows my advice to cool her head under the water jet.

After a relaxing break, we leave the friendly people behind us and pedal up a mountain to an altitude of 260 meters. Threatening-looking storm clouds darken the sky. “It’s raining there!” I shout, pointing to the cloud plumes that reach into the steppe like arms. There is thunder and lightning all around us. A cool breeze pushes us forward unexpectedly and then the gates of heaven open up and drench us again with cool moisture. We enjoy the wet and rainy ride through the countryside. We laugh and joke. Imagine having an invisible solar motor built into the bike that drives us forward. “The engine is working really well today.” “Yes, mine too,” Tanja confirms. “Fantastic technology, such a solar motor. The way it gets you up the hills. Can you imagine that people still had to pedal their bikes with their own muscle power in the last century?” I say. “Must have been a tough time,” Tanja replies. “Very hard! Ha! Ha! Ha!” “Yeah, glad to be on the bike now and not back then! Ha! Ha! Ha!”, laughs Tanja, careful not to fall off her bike from the hilarity.

Then one of the roadblocks sobers us up again. “We’ll just ignore them and stay on the tarmac,” I decide. One kilometer further on we reach the construction machinery. Young, strong men shovel hot tar into the machine without any respiratory protection. “Look at that. They’ll probably get lung cancer by the time they’re 30,” I think. “It’s terrible that people have to work under such conditions and ruin their health early on,” Tanja confirms. We push our muscle-powered machines past the big, smelly tin monsters and lo and behold the road continues. The trucks rumbling along a dirt road next door whirl up huge fountains of dust that even block out the sun.

At 16:00, after 53 kilometers, we already find a camp today. The clouds have disappeared. The thermometer is 34 degrees in the shade. Unfortunately, we can’t find a bush or tree under which we can shelter and sweat. I study the map. “It can’t be long now before we’re in the foothills of the southern Urals,” I say. “Are there high mountains we have to climb?” asks Tanja. “I don’t think so. But my guess is that we’ll be accompanying them for the next 800 kilometers.” “Eight hundred kilometers?” “Yes.” “We’ll manage that too.” “Definitely.”

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