Long fingers

“There are no more mountains from here. Free ride to Ulan Bator,” says the porter at our hotel as we say goodbye. “Fantastic, then we’ll be at the border in three days at the latest,” I reply with satisfaction. We leave Ulan-Ude with a light wind at our backs. Then the route is actually relatively flat along the main road in pleasant sunshine. We reach the small town of Ivolginsk around midday. As it’s not far from here to the largest Buddhist monastery in the Russian Federation, we look for somewhere to stay right here in the village. We actually find a promising-looking wooden house right on the main road. While Tanja looks after the bikes, I enter the large dining room of the street café. “Jeßt Komnatu?” (“Do you have a room?”), I ask a young Buryat woman who has just come out of the kitchen. “Yes,” she replies kindly. After I ask to be allowed to look at it, I am told to be patient for a moment. The floor above me is now full of people running back and forth. She probably only starts cleaning the room at this moment. Ten minutes later I am allowed to look at the simple room. In addition to four beds, a rickety old bedside cabinet and four dirty walls, for 800 roubles (18 euros) you also get a smelly toilet and shower on the same floor. “Does the hot water work?” I ask from experience. “But yes,” I hear. When I want to know where I can park our bikes overnight, the woman points to the courtyard. “No, that’s not possible. Far too dangerous. The bikes have to go in the house,” I reply. “It’s safe in the courtyard. We have a fence, a dog and someone is there all night,” the Asian woman tries to convince me. “What about the cellar? Can you get in there?” I want to know and point to a completely filthy staircase that leads down to an open door. “They can also put their bikes in there,” she says. When I ask if the door is locked at night, I don’t get a clear answer. A cab driver, who belongs to the family of the house and, like many Russians, is dressed in a military camouflage suit, wonders why I am making such a fuss about security. “My cab is also parked in the yard at night. So they won’t want to steal your wheels,” he explains, pointing to his rusty Lada, which costs just 5,000 euros brand new. I’ll refrain from mentioning that in Germany he would have to pay extra to have this broken-down car scrapped. When we want to roll the bikes into the yard, the landlady demands the exorbitant price of 100 roubles (2.27 euros) extra per bike. “That can’t be right? All over Russia, they don’t ask for anything to accommodate bicycles. They’re not motorcycles, they’re bicycles,” I argue. “Leave him alone,” the cab driver waves him off, which finally clarifies that we are staying here for one night.

With a sore knee, I drag the bikes into the cellar while Tanja carries bags into the room. I am greeted by yawning darkness and a musty stench. In the beam of my headlamp, I see garbage, old tools, indefinable scrap and a broken sink lying around. The floor is littered with small, pointed pieces of metal. “Is it a good idea to spend the night here?” I wonder. I put our powerful sumo bikes in the back of the cellar and lock them with our steel lock to a broken window frame leaning against the filthy wall. Then I lock our trailers to the bikes with another lock and cover everything under the green tarpaulin. Leaving the dungeon, I hope to find everything like this tomorrow.

We lock our room and ask the landlady how to get to the monastery. “By cab,” she suggests, so that she can make another deal. “We’d like to take the minibus,” I explain, whereupon she explains something incomprehensible. A completely drunk couple is sitting in the pub and overhears our conversation. “I can tell you how to get to the monastery,” the man slurs, while his companion giggles loudly. “No thanks. We’ll find our way,” we reply, leaving the quirky street café. As soon as we are on the street, the drunk staggers after us and calls us back. We raise our hands in thanks and simply march on. Plumes of dust, whirled up by the strong afternoon wind, literally swallow us up as we walk through the miserable Siberian village to find the bus station. “To the monastery? Always straight ahead. At the end of the road,” we are told. As it is only nine kilometers from here to the monastery, we start to get annoyed that we didn’t take our bikes there straight away. A few minibuses are parked in a dingy square. “No, you have to go to the monastery on the other side of the road. The minibus only runs if there are enough passengers,” we hear and wait patiently by a rusty sign.

They hit him on the head with the bag

A drunk staggers across the road. Children follow him, bawling loudly. They insult the man and repeatedly hit him on the head with a bag. Tanja and I watch in amazement at what is happening on the street. The man turns on his own axis, swaying, to defend himself. “Hi! Hi! Hi! Old drunk!” they shout. The obviously defenceless man staggers on, always protecting his plastic bag in which he keeps a few belongings and half a loaf of bread. Suddenly one of the kids jumps on him and snatches the bag. “You!” he shouts desperately, spinning around again, causing the mob to retreat a few meters. Then one of the boys hits him over the head with the plastic bag. The plastic tears and a few indefinable things and half the bread fall into the dirt. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Old madman!” the children shriek with delight and try out the karate tricks they’ve seen on TV on their victim. While the torn, pathetic figure tries to keep the ugly, cackling and loudly screaming crowd of children at bay, stumbling and almost falling several times in the process, passers-by keep walking past, not taking the slightest notice of the drama. Everyone, whether women or men, simply looks away. As if nothing was happening here. As if the tragedy right next to them was just a fiction from another world. “Are the people in this village so hardened? Is it the alcohol that degrades us humans to unfeeling beings? Where are the lovable Siberians we meet all the time? Or are they there and just showing their other face? How am I supposed to understand this? How can I understand it at all? What kind of strange creatures are we humans?” I think and remember one or two situations in Germany where people are beaten up on the street without anyone intervening. I look at Tanja, who is standing there speechless. “I’d love to help the man,” I say, feeling the great urge to get involved again. “Not a good idea. What do you want to do? This is a gang of children. Any interference can lead to further escalation. We don’t know why the adults on the outside don’t intervene. We’re in a country that’s foreign to us, with a completely different culture,” she stops me. As in Ulan-Ude, I stand there and ask myself what has to happen in order to selflessly help a stranger. I realize at that moment that I will save him if he falls and the children step on him. Thankfully, the rascals lose interest in their defenceless victim only moments later and storm off.

Half an hour later and just a few kilometers further on, we find ourselves in another world on the same planet. In a wide valley of the Chamar Daban Mountains, several Buddhist temples stretch their colorful roofs into the blue autumn sky. Stalls are lined up along the path offering every imaginable Buddhist souvenir. We stroll through the complex, which for a long time was the only functioning Buddhist monastery in the entire Soviet Union. In 1945, after the Second World War, a few lamas released from camps and prisons were given permission to open a monastery here. Despite complete control by the state at the time, the monastery developed quickly. Today it is a center for Buddhist philosophy and Tibetan medicine. Recognized as an official university, teachers from India, Tibet and Mongolia teach philosophy, astrology, medicine and also subjects such as computer science and foreign languages.

“Where can we see the body of the famous saint?” I ask one of the monks. You’ll have to come back in November. Only then is the body of the lama Daschi-Dorscho Etigelow accessible to the public,” he replies with a laugh. We are disappointed, as we were already told in Krasnoyarsk that since the death of the famous scholar, who died in 1927, there are hardly any traces of decay to be seen and that we should definitely visit this place. On the way to the exit, I think I saw a real wolf fleeing behind one of the bushes. We hurry to the group of bushes and can hardly believe our eyes at first. “That’s definitely a wolf,” I say carefully, pulling out my camera. As soon as I lift the Leica to my eye, the emaciated animal runs to the monastery fence and disappears through a hole into the steppe.

Back at our accommodation, Tanja realizes that someone has stolen various creams from her wash bag. “That can’t be true? Are you really sure about that?” I ask, startled. “But of course I’m sure. I know what I have with me. The person only stole the best tubes and jars that were still full,” she replies. Tanja immediately goes downstairs to the pub and talks to the women. At first they don’t want to understand, but then they know what Tanja is talking about and look quite shocked. None of them want it to have been them. Because we are the only guests and only family members have access here, we are sure that it was one of them. At that time I didn’t know that the person had also rummaged through my things and taken our complete nail set. As we really need everything we take with us on a bike trip like this, we quickly miss the small items of equipment and have no opportunity to buy them in the Mongolian villages we pass through.

After almost 14,000 kilometers of cycling and many overnight stays in simple accommodation, we were robbed shortly before leaving Siberia. We are happy to have only lost small items and no cameras, laptops, satellite phones or other expensive electronics that we often have to leave in the room. Nevertheless, it is a small bitter taste and loss of trust that we experience here in this unpleasant house. Of course, it makes no sense to go to the police for the little things. They might laugh at us. But who knows? Maybe they would help us too. It’s about the next travelers who stay there, believing they are renting a piece of security for the night, only to find themselves in the lion’s den. Perhaps I should have listened to my initial feeling? It gave me a very clear warning. But it’s not always easy to listen to feelings. Especially when you are tired. Sometimes I ask myself whether my feelings are sometimes wrong? However, it is now clear that we will have to listen even more carefully in future. Evidence like this then becomes superfluous.

At 10 p.m. it starts to get loud in the pub below us. Music booms from the loudspeakers and guests bawl. In the room next to us, where some of the thieves’ family live, the TV is blaring. We don’t sleep a wink until one o’clock in the morning. Then everyone goes to bed. The doors rattle and the old wooden beams creak. At 3:30 in the early morning, someone bangs on the wooden door next door. “Andrei Bstavat! Bstavat! Bstavat!” (“Andrej Get up! Get up! Get up!”) roars through the hut, almost lifting us out of our beds. Two and a half hours later, we crawl out of the uncomfortable sleeping area, groggy, to leave the inhospitable place of the thieves as quickly as possible.

“One of your relatives stole my Krems,” Tanja tells the cab driver as he watches us pack our bikes. He shrugs his shoulders and simply leaves her standing there. Then two of the graces open the wooden gate and we roll our road trains over the dusty track to the road.

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