Steve's Cycling Blog

So I managed to get a decent night’s sleep without needing to climb the stairway to heaven (well the toilet actually) which made this morning considerably better than yesterday morning.

While and I was feeling somewhat better I wasn’t really interested in breakfast but needed to eat as we had 120km to ride and yesterdays total input was only two chocolate biscuits and a litre of sprite so nothing like enough to get me through the ride!

Stage 64 route notes

It turns out that the hotel breakfast, which I’d missed yesterday, was pretty good – shame I didn’t feel more like eating it.

Since Friday afternoon the wind had been blowing fairly strongly down the valley from the south which would have made for a good tail wind. Of course within 20km of starting to ride it had turned and was now blowing up the valley straight at us!

It was fortunate that I had my passport with me, as though there were no checkpoints mentioned for the day there was one just before the bridge and though I was told to stop by the man with the machine gun, in the end all he did was look at my visa and GBAO permit rather than recording details in his exercise book.

As I came into Rushan I noticed Ivan sitting outside a small store with a bottle of cold coke and decided that was probably a good idea. The woman in the store had to rummage around a bit in the freezer to find me a bottle but it was well worth it – cold (like ice-cream headache cold) and tasty and actually made me feel somewhat better.

Lunch was a few km down the road where I discovered I’d forgotten to restart my Garmin after stopping in Rushan so my distances were somewhat screwed up. I still wasn’t feeling particularly like eating but having burnt over 2000 calories in getting there it was once again necessary.

The morning ride was really enjoyable with lots of smaller villages to pass by and people out and about – in the UK people take their dogs for a walk in the morning, in Tajikistan it seems to be their cow!

From lunch the valley we’re riding in closed in to be more of a canyon – at times Afghanistan was less than 100m away the river was so narrow. And while the Tajikistan road’s pretty rough in places at least there is one – it looks like they’re currently trying to build the Afghan one!

Now what are they going to do…?

There’s also a significant amount of water in the river at present

The afternoon got quite a bit tougher – the road was in much worse condition, there was more climbing, and the wind became more consistent which made actually getting the last 15km done a bit of a challenge.

Into camp and it’s a rather nice spot. The kitchen etc is under some mulberry trees, while we’re camped in the school yard which also has lots of fruit trees in it. There are some workmen adding a couple of extra classrooms to the end of the building so I snuck in and took a look around.

I’ve also been for a wander round the village we’re in. The school seems somewhat larger than I would expect for the size of the village, so presumably kids come here for school from further away.

It’s nearly dinner time now, and I’m actually feeling like eating for the first time in 48 hours so I’m numbering that amongst the successes of the day!

Riding data

View from my tent

Sunset on the ridgeline above camp