Steve's Cycling Blog

Check out the weather forecast at the bottom of the rider notes for today’s ride:

Stage 38 rider notes with the scary head wind prediction

When we went to bed last night we were expecting 20 – 30 km/h head winds which even for ‘only’ 97km was going to make for another really long day. I’m pleased to report that aside from a few gusts over the last hour (once I was already at camp) it wasn’t anything like that bad, and in fact at times we even had a tail wind…!

Up at what is the new ‘normal’ of 0415, though I’d been awake since well before 0400 when others started shuffling round in their tents nearby – lord only knows why they need to be up so early.

I left camp in my customary position, but only very shortly after Paul and Erwin and caught them in the town some 5km away from which point we rode together back in our 2km lead routine of yesterday. We stopped briefly at 35km but otherwise road straight through to lunch at 65km anticipating stronger winds at any point so not wanting to lose any time.

From lunch we had just over 30km to go and it became clear that we were going to get in pretty early since the wind wasn’t arriving so Erwin decided to stop and practice his custom of photographing flowers and butterflies (although his blog’s in German, the pictures are well worth looking at for non-German readers).

Paul and I carried on to camp which we discovered was a field behind a line of trees so went back up the road to the service station at the junction we’d just passed for some soft drink and crisps where we met Erwin heading toward camp having found a source of beer at one of the restaurants (I’m going back up there later to get a dinner-time beer or two).

The wide open spaces of the Kazakhstan steppe

There are two schools of thought on where to camp today. There are those who have voted for ‘the plain’ on the grounds that the trees are too close to the road:

Camping on the plain in the sun

While others (myself included) are of the view that bugger-all goes up and down the road and so we’d rather be in the shade under the trees:

Camping under the trees in the shade!

This afternoon my butt is a bit sore after the last three days – today not so much, but the really long day, followed by the really rough day, and things are definitely tender. Tomorrow we’ve 135km to a rest day, so that will hopefully give things time to sort themselves out.

We’ve had visitors in camp, as is often the way, though today they are three young Dutch guys on motorbikes who are basically doing the same trip as we are in reverse from Istanbul to Beijing.

Motorcycle visitors leaving camp

They saw the lunch van with it’s English sign-writing so stopped to say hello, and when they heard Andreas was a motorcyclist, and a mechanic, they came back to camp as one of them has been having trouble with his bike. It seems Andreas was able to sort things for them, so after some soup they were back on the road and headed for Semey.

And in other good news I’ve just learnt that we’re having BBQ chicken for dinner – this day just keeps getting better 🙂

It’s now 1415 and I’m glad that we’re already in camp – the wind’s picked up and is blowing pretty consistently in what would have been a head wind were we still riding – let’s hope it does the same thing for tomorrow so we can get in to rest day at a reasonable hour.

Now I believe it’s time for me to practice napping!

Riding data

View from my tent

Looking out through the sunroof (fly half open for ventilation)