AUSTRALIAN ROAD RIDER | 73SERIOUS ADVENTURE
as we turned south toward Uzbekistan.
Camping out on the immense steppe
was an incredible experience. We were
surrounded by a vastness and silence
that we’d long thought had disappeared
from this world.
We entered the storybook lands of
the fabled Silk Road in Uzbekistan,
skirting the Kyzyl Kum Desert as we rode
into Samarkand, home to some of the
fi nest antiquities in all of Central Asia.
The mighty Registan is its centrepiece.
Genghis Khan, Tamerlane and various
despot emirs all had a turn at ruling
these lands and all have le their marks.
Some of the fi nest riding of the entire
expedition was in Kyrgyzstan. We rode
the rarely visited and lo y Kazaman
Pass, three days of rough off -road riding
among towering snow-capped peaks and
lonely nomadic ger camps that do ed
the landscape. Many of us declared these
were the greatest riding days of our lives.
Once again we crossed the vast
empty Kazakh Steppe, camping besidedeep blue lakes and watching stunning
sunsets. Wild dust storms blew in from
the steppe at times, forcing the riders to
lean at an alarming angle into the wind
and stinging them with the sand that
blasted them.
The Russians seemed happier to see
us this time and the border crossing
only took fi ve hours! We were riding into
remote Russia now, among immense
wheat farms interspersed with huge
stands of fi r trees that served as farm
boundaries. A er 3500km since leaving
Almaty, Kazakhstan, riding virtually non-
stop each day, we reached the spectacular
Lake Baikal, referred to as the “jewel
in the Siberian crown”. This stunning
blue-water lake is a feast of superlatives.
Baikal is the world’s oldest lake and its
deepest lake. It holds 20 per cent of the
world’s unfrozen fresh water and 80 per
cent of the lake’s fl ora and fauna is found
nowhere else on Earth.
Continuing on the Trans Siberian
Highway we reached Mongolia, a country■ The incredible twisties
among the snow-capped peaks
of the Grossglockner, Austria■ Wild camping in the Tien
Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan►ARR112_068-078_Road of Bones.indd 73ARR112_068-078_Road of Bones.indd 73 2/3/2015 9:51:21 AM2/3/2015 9:51:21 AM