Steve's Cycling Blog

Ah sleep…! What it is to be able to sleep without needing to run to the loo all the time. As unpleasant as yesterday was it would have been a whole lot worse if it had been last night that I was needing to get out of my tent at short notice to attend to business!

So after a good night’s sleep I was feeling more-or-less back to normal this morning – just as well because we’ve got a challenging day ahead of us with a 3,615m pass to get over before the day is done.

Stage 56 route notes

Although the distance for the day looks pretty short it’s going to take a while as a 2% gradient is the new flat – at least through till lunch after-which it really starts going up!

Packed and breakfasted and it was time to get on the road which was the first challenge for the day – getting back out of the river valley and onto the road was definitely a walk!

Since the bottom of the descent yesterday, and through to lunch today we’re following the Gulcha river through a valley which has been carved out by centuries of erosion and recently someone (presumably the Chinese, bless them) has built a beautiful road up the valley.

I set out at a moderate pace keeping the pedals and wheels turning and the distance ticking away steadily as we climbed further and further up the valley.

Heading up the valley to the pass

Shortly before the lunch stop I crossed the Gulcha river for the last time and it looked like this

The dry Gulcha river head

The Gulcha river downstream

A significant change from the torrent we were crossing yesterday afternoon only 45km and 600 vertical metres downstream

We had a number of visitors at lunch today who were keen to have a ride on our bikes, and who Jackie convinced to let her climb onto their donkey
[get a photo of Jackie on the donkey]

From lunch the real climbing began and I set out shortly after Grant and Jackie, catching them a few km later and continuing on to the top of the Taldyk pass at 3,615m – our highest pass to date.

Not the best photo of me, but I made it 🙂

One of the downsides of modern roads is that they’re actually getting steeper – the previous passes which we’ve been over are all older Soviet-built roads from times when cars and trucks were much less sophisticated and so required less steep roads with more switchbacks. Modern roads are the opposite, steeper and fewer switchbacks.

We didn’t drop so far from the top today as yesterday and it was a pretty chilly ride since we were still rather high and the wind was blowing at us off those snowcapped mountains in the distance.

Snow-covered mountains in the distance for added cooling

Tonights camp is the ‘backyard’ of a guest house in the town of Sary-Tash and it’s a pretty good spot complete with a yurt for us to relax in.

I’ve put my tent up close to a building on the western side of the compound so that I get shade sooner rather than later though it’s quite a bit cooler here than recent camps so it may not be so important.

Across the fence a yurt’s been being set up over the course of the afternoon – when the crew arrived they were weed-eating the section, but by the time I got here the frame was up.

I wandered back toward town to find a shop to spend most of the last of my Kyrgyz Som as though we don’t cross into Tajikistan until the day after tomorrow there’s nowhere between here and the border to spend them.

I’m now sitting in the yurt writing up today’s news and waiting for dinner. Tomorrow we get a very short ride, only 23km which will put us just this side of the Krygyzstan border exit. The day’s so short to allow time to acclimatise – tonight we’re camped at 3150m, tomorrow night 3500m before continuing up to higher passes and camps later in this (riding) week.

Riding data

View from my tent (yurt)

Distant snowy mountains which we pass through the day after tomorrow