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Home->Journeys->Altai Bike Expedition, 2006

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We are still in Alai city, this is the last day before we go back into the mountains.
Here people have the gardening concept down. There are big community garden spaces on the edge of town where each person has a hoop house and little squares
of onions, cabbage, corn, and then trellises with cucumbers and beans. It smells like manure, and the soil looks rich.

The kazakhs are highly carnivorous - the basic meal is mutton and noodles with raw onions scattered over the top served onto a big plate in the middle of the table and everyone eats with their fingers and chews on the bones. The main farming acivity of the Kazakhs is to come out of the mountains in August and cut hay for the animals for the winter so it is kind of a relief to come into towns with chinese people where we can have a plate of vegetables and a bowl of rice.

You would have to be reincarnated as a goat tied to the back of a motorcycle many times to repay your karmic debt for being a Kazakh carnivore.

We are ready to get out of the city though, and have passed up the offer to stay for the winter.

Of course our guide only knows about a dozen English words, and we are still working on some of the more difficult phrases like - how many K M to Fuyun? and - Fuyun, buy food? and technical terms like: camping; water; firewood. But we all need to eat and sleep, so at the end of the day we manage to figure all these things out.

He is 52, very strong and has carried many watermelons up absurdly steep roads. He shaves his legs and wears a colorful bicycle jersy. He wears his helmet religiously, sometimes even during lunch, but never to bed. He has faithfully followed us off into the unknown, possibly terrorist camps of Islam Kazakh hordes, down unreasonably bad roads, flash floods and other sorts of hardships, but thank god there are NO MOSQUITOES or other evil biting flies in the Chinese Altai because I think that would be too much for him.




Dated: 08/12/2006