Road of Bones, End of the Road

AUGUST 20, 2011

From Susuman, we could conceivably make it to Magadan in one day, although it would be a long day.  We decided play it by ear, but decided that we would probably stop somewhere along the way.  Before leaving, Igor, the guy with the garage, asked for a couple of group photos; Igor is on the right, a really nice guy:

The first city past Susuman is Yagodnoye, a couple of hours away; Doug and Max wanted to stop for lunch there so we pulled into town and spent some time looking for a cafe.  We found one in the center of town, and found out it was some kind of holiday.  Maybe it was just the holiday, but Yagodnoye seemed much more lively and clean that Susuman, although even Yagodnoye probably be confused with the deserted and derelict Kadykchan without too much imagination:

We kept going after lunch, saw a lot of the same scenery.  We crossed the Kolyma river, and bit later decided to decorate a road sign with one of my stickers:

By 15:00 or 16:00, Doug wanted to stop, so we pulled into a town called Orotukan.  Orotukan lies on the left side of the road, on the far side of a small river.  At the entrance to the bridge, there was a sign that said "ABSOLUTELY NO OUTSIDE VEHICLES ALLOWED."  Friendly place!   We ignored the sign, rode into town, and pulled into the main square, which was completely deserted.  We went into what looked like the city hall; the doors were all unlocked, but the place seemed completely empty.  We came back outside, and pretty soon someone drove up in a Russian jeep, and we asked them whether there were any hotels in town.  It turns out there Orotukan does not have any hotels, but by then the mayor had wandered up, and promised to find us a place to stay.  While were were waiting, a few other people came up, including a family with a couple of kids, who started playing like they were vampires.  How cute!

Soon enough an army guy came back, and led us to a room that they had found for us; it looked like a guest house for visiting officials or something; not a hotel but someplace made up for visitors.  It was nice enough, but the apartment was number 13, and someone had painted crossbones on the door.  How odd!  After showing us the room, he led us back to the bank's garage, where they told us we could lock the bikes for the night for security.  Finally, the army guy drove us to a little store, where we bought the usual Ramen noodles, but I was also shocked to see freshly-popped cheese popcorn and lo and behold, Budweiser (US Budweiser) in bottles.  I bought some noodles, some popcorn, and some Budweiser and as we were getting back into the jeep, the army guy told us "Whatever you do, don't leave the apartment at night."  Between the sign at the bridge, the vampire kids, the crossbones, and this comment, I concluded that we'd escaped the zombies in Kadykchan only to end up in a vampire town…luckily it was pretty obvious that there was nothing to do or see in the town at night, and I was tired, so after finishing the popcorn and beer I went to bed, hoping that we'd see the sunrise….  Here I am, toasting the wonderful town:

Sure enough we survived the night and headed over to the bank garage to get our bikes.  We had to wait awhile for them to show up and open the garage, but once they showed up things went smoothly enough.  We rode the bikes back to the room, packed up our bags, and hit the road for Magadan.  This part of the road was the most unpleasant of the whole trip; the scenery was a bit more boring, but more important, there were suddenly a lot more trucks on the road, with the resulting dust.  As before, the dust made it very difficult and dangerous to pass, and because there was a fair amount of on-coming traffic as well, it was a real nightmare.  I think at one point I was trying to pass a particular truck for about fifty kilometers, riding right on its tail and losing sight of it in the dust until it braked right in front of me, or trying to pass but being able to because of the dust and on-coming traffice.  Finally we came to a construction site and I was able to pass the truck while riding through the construction.  As a result of all the dust, I got really really dirty.  When I stopped for gas about halfway to Magadan, one of the people there asked me "Don't you have cars where you come from?"  haha.

I had gotten kind of tired of riding in a group, so told Doug and Max that I was going to ride ahead today, and that I'd see them in Magadan.  I reached Magadan about two thirty or three, and waited for Doug and Max for maybe forty five minutes before deciding that I'd just see them at the hotel, and check out some of the sights in the meantime.  Here I am at Magadan city limits:

And here are some pictures from Magadan's memorial to the victims of the Gulag:

From up by the monument, I could see the fog rolling in over the city:

Finally I went to find a hotel; Doug had mentioned he wanted to stay in the BM Hotel, so when I saw it I pulled in and asked for a room.  I was pretty happy to find out that they had a room, and the girl behind the desk told me that another biker was staying there as well, so that we cool.  He was not in at the moment, but I figured I'd see him soon.  Here I am in front of the hotel, I guess I'm lucky they even let me in:

A bit later Doug and Max showed up, as well as Luiz, the other biker.  He had arranged with Hans-Joerg (the Austrian guy that we didn't see after Yakustk) to ride Hans-Joerg's bike back from Magadan to Vienna, so he was getting ready to leave in the morning and was excited about the trip.  He had planned to do the BAM, like Hans-Joerg, but we kind of discouraged him since it was getting late in the season, and he as by himself.  After everyone had showered, etc., we decided to go out for a celebratory dinner at the Green Krokodil, which was pretty good!  Here are Doug and Luiz, and then Max, and finally Doug with friend:

I took this shot of the bikes with my iPhone when we got back to the hotel:

The next morning we had to figure out how to get the bikes from Magadan to Vladivostok.  I was flying back to Moscow from Magadan, but Doug was going to take both of our bikes to Vladi, and then his girlfriend would ride mine back, so we had to find a ship to take the bikes.  We when to the TransFes shipping agent, and they said that they had a boat leaving in the morning, but that the bikes would have to be crated first.  We didn't have crates and didn't want to deal with it, so the woman at TransFes told us to go down to the port and speak with another shipper.  We did so, and they had a boat leaving in the afternoon, with no crate necessary, although the bikes would simply be strapped on deck, rather than in the hold.  Doug was in a hurry to get to Vladi, so we decided that that would work and brought the bikes down to the port for loading.  I got back to the hotel just in time to get my bags and catch my taxi to the airport.

We hadn't heard from the Moscow guys in several days and were wondering how they had fared on the Old Summer Road.  We found out later that they had made it, but it had take then six or seven days, so I was glad that we had chosen the new road.

Road of Bones, City of Ghosts

AUGUST 19, 2011

After our relatively restful night in Ust Nera, we packed up our bikes and went to fill up.  Here is our hotel, and the gas station there:

We didn't have much of a plan today, and didn't really know where we would spend the night.  We did figure that we would spend some out Kadykchan, which was along our route and which is described in full below.  But first we had some riding to do, including a couple of water-crossings.  Here is the first one, really the only significant water-crossing of the whole trip, as it turned out:

Here is the second one.  As you can see from the water level on the truck in the river, this one was kinda deep, probably a bit too deep for the bikes.

While Doug and I were futzing around looking for a shallower part of the stream, Max took the initiative, found an old bridge nearby, and got some pix from the other side:

Finally Doug and I got our acts together and also crossed the old bridge, which was actually in pretty good shape, here is a pic from the bridge, and then me crossing, then Doug:

A little later we came across another old bridge; I guess the winters, ice, flooding, etc. out here are pretty damn tough on bridges!

So we kept going a bit and came across another old town, of which there were quite a few out here.  We rode right by many of them, but this was bigger than most, and we decided to check it out.  The view from the road is shown below.  Doug memorably describes this look as "Post-Soviet Apocalypse," which really nails it.  There were actually a few people which seemed to be living in this place, but overall the place was derelict:

The only entry to the town was over these bowed concrete slabs, beneath which was a narrow, deep gash and then a stream. In general, seems like it would have been easier just to put the stream through a pipe and then cover the gash with dirt, but I guess they had their reasons:

Here is a view of one of the buildings in the town:

Doug and Max went rummaging around in some of the buildings, but I got a bit bored and rode ahead to the turn off for Kadykchan.  On the way, I stopped at this memorial to three Soviet pilots that died during WWII while they were ferrying a plane from the Far East to the front.  The text on the front reads "No one will be forgotten.  Nothing will be forgotten":

Finally I saw Kadykchan, a couple of kilometers off to the left of the road.  Kadykchan is a "ghost city", a city of some 20,000 abandoned after an explosion in the coal mine which was the sole reason for the town's existence.  Apparently after the explosion, people were given little warning to abandon the town and little ability to take stuff with them, so the place is full of junk.  I waited for Doug and Max on the road, and they showed up in twenty minutes or so.  We had briefly discussed spending the night in Kadychan, but decided we would check it out first.

I won't bore you all with more info about Kadykchan, if you are interested, here are a few links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadykchan

http://englishrussia.com/2007/10/04/kadykchan-the-city-of-broken-dreams/

If you don't want to read anything about it, by all means proceed to the pictures:

I guess you get the idea…  Actually it was a very creepy place, very post-apocalyptic.  I you know your Soviet-style cities, you can pick out the various municipal buildings in the pictures above:  apartments, power station, theater, city hall (complete with crumbling Lenin bust, etc.).  All the buildings had been reduced to a derelict state by the elements and by looters, and there is all kinds of debris scattered all over the city.  Doug picked up an old hammer and some kind of fur thing to use as a seat cushion. 

While I didn't exactly expect to see any zombies per se, I would not have been surprised at all to see some kind of cannibalistic mutant/freaks, and in fact Max and I encountered a zombies/cannibal/mutant shortly after we arrived:  I had lost Doug and Max and was waiting at a crossroads looking for Max and Doug.  After a few minutes Max saw me and rode up.  While were were waiting there, off in the distance we saw a figure dressed in black walking toward us along the main drag, a couple hundred meters away.  Since Doug was also dressed in black, I thought it was him, so we waited.  As the figure approached, we realized it was not Doug, but figured we wait to see who the hell other than us was wondering around this God-forsaken place.  The figure in black finally got within a couple of dozen paces when Max and I realized that there was something wrong—the person was kind of stumbling and had some kind of open sores all of his face—yikes, a ZOMBIE.  Max immediately got the hell out of there, but I had to do something with my helmet and gloves, which I'd removed, so by the time I'd started my bike the zombie had approached with a couple of paces and said something to me, although I couldn't understand what he said, and couldn't even tell if he was speaking Russian.  Whatever, I zoomed off. 

After losing the zombie, we found Doug again and explored the town for awhile.  It was kinda spooky poking around the buildings by myself (Doug and Max disappeared into some buildings, and I didn't see them for a while), and mosquitoes here were just brutal. Between the zombies and the mosquitoes, we decided it wouldn't be a great idea to spend the night in Kadykchan, so we left for Susuman, maybe 80 km up ahead, here is what the road looked like: 

Along the way we passed through Artyk, where there is a gas station that works sometimes, and sometimes does not.  When we came through, it was defiintely not working, and looked completely derelict, but it is hard to tell sometimes out here:

Just past the non-gas-station, there was a police checkpoint where there was a gate-thingy blocking the road, and a policeman checked everyone's documents.  Well, everyone but ours, anyway; invited us in for tea and cookies and a chat, all the while ignoring any vehicles that pulled up, forcing them to wait.  Nice guy, he said that there had been a heavy snow two days before, and showed us his collection of skins from duckheads he'd tacked to the back of the door to his living quarters.  We later wondered what on earth had done to be banished to this place…

We set off again for Susuman.  Here is Max's bike parked somewhere along the road, and then Doug and I taking a little pitstop:

Finally we pulled into Susuman.  There were spraying some kind of crap on the roads in town that made them really slick.  The first hotel we went to was full, with construction workers.  The second hotel had space, but no secure parking, so they called some guy with a garage who came by and led us to his place. Here is my bike parked in the garage:

After dropping off the bikes, we asked Igor (the garage owner's name) if he could take us to a cafe where we could have dinner, because we hadn't had a hot meal since Cafe Kuba in Kyubeme.  Susuman apparently has three cafes, and Igor took us to all of them, but all of them were booked for weddings.  Susuman looked like the kind of place suffering from a mass population exodus, so I was surprised by the number of weddings on the same night, and not very happy, because it meant Ramen noodles again for us…

Road of Bones, Old Road or New, that is the Question?

AUGUST 18, 2011

The next morning dawned kind of sunny.  Here are a couple of views from our campsite, one early, one a bit later:

Today we would reach Kyubeme, where we would have to decide between taking the new "federal" road to Magadan, or the "Old Summer Road".  The federal road was completed only a few years ago, and sounded rather easy—well-graded gravel, bridges, etc.  No real problems, and apparently even normal cars (ie, without four-wheel drive) could do it.  The so-called "Old Summer Road" is the classic, old-school Road of Bones.  The bridge at the Kyubeme end of the OSR had washed away some years ago, so now the only access to the OSR was through the river at Kyubeme, or from the eastern end, near Kadykchan.  There are still a couple of small towns along this road, but since the construction of the new road, it is no longer maintained, and has already been reduced to a rather poor state indeed, with something like 150 kilometers of bog separating the eastern end of the road from the part of the road with the villages. Obviously, there is very little traffic along this road, and basically NO traffic on the eastern end, once you pass a village called Tomtor.

The chief question about doing the OSR was the water level, both at Kyubeme and further along, in the bogs and the remaining rivers.  Sometimes the river at Kyubeme is too high to cross on bikes, and the only way across is to hire a huge six-wheel drive truck to ferry the bikes across the river.  Further east, at least past Tomtor, hiring such a truck would not really be an option, because there would not be any.  So if you got stuck there, you'd better be able to get yourself out, especially since we were kind of late in the season, and there would probably not be anyone coming up behind us to help out. 

So you can see that this is in some ways a momentous decision, not the mere "pick a fork in the road":  take the easy new road, and forever have your ride to Magadan marked with an asterisk, or take the OSR and be prepared for some serious challenges, and perhaps find out once you were in pretty deep that the route was simply impassable due to high water levels.  Doug, Max, and I had already decided that there was no way we would tackle the OSR on our own, since none of us has any serious off-road riding experience, and Doug's Harley in particular was a heavy bike, rather ill-suited to the road.  Moreover, in Yakutsk we had mounted dual-purpose tires that were fine for the gravel/dirt roads but which would be very poor for the deep mud to be expected on the OSR.  

However, the Moscow guys planned to do the OSR, and had invited us along.  If we were with them, all very experienced off-roaders, we would probably be able to do the OSR (if it were possible at all), although it wasn't certain, and moreover, it was not clear how long it would take. We had been trading stories about some female Russian rider who had been riding in the middle of nowhere when she was caught in some rain and the rivers rose in front of, and behind, her, forcing her to wait a week (according to the story) before the water levels fell enough to make the rivers passable. I didn't know about anybody else, but I could not afford to get stuck for a week…

Anyway, the final decision lay a few hours ahead of us.  In the meantime, in the morning Big Andrei discovered that his rear sprocket had been worn to nubs, and the Russians were busy figuring out how to fix it.  I gave them the old sprocket from my bike (I had changed mine in Yakutsk), and once again Doug, Max and I set off ahead of the Moscow guys, figuring they would catch up with us along the way. 

So off we went.  The hundred or so kilometers after Razvilka is probably the most beautiful part of the Road of Bones, so it was quite nice, although often there was no where to stop, so I didn't get as many pictures as I would have liked.  Here are a bunch of shots of this stretch of road:

I didn't take any pictures of it, but there was lots of construction along this stretch road, some of the places were a bit hard to ride because of the deep churned mud, although overall this stretch was pretty slow, but not very hard.

Finally we reached Kyubeme.  Kyubeme is not a town, just a "fueling point" or gas station, and it is also, or was before the bridge collapsed, the western end of the OSR.  The turn-off for the old bridge is a little bit before the actual fuel station, and we wanted to check that out, as it is kind of a famous RoB photo-opp.  We took one wrong turn down a little path to the river, but then turned around and found the right road to the bridge.  As I parked my bike in the sand by the river, something happened with my kickstand, and the bike toppled over on top of me, pinning my leg against a big rock.  It hurt like hell, and I started screaming like a little girl.  Luckily Doug was nearby and came over to help lift the bike up.  I thought I'd broken my leg, it really hurt at first.  But after limping around for a few minutes, it hurt quite  a bit less, and by the next morning, there was no trace, no swelling, no bruise, no nothing.  I guess I was lucky I was wearing some decent boots at the time.  Anyway, here is a picture of the guilty rock (just left of my bike, in the shadow) and of the bridge itself:

So then we went to the fuel station, filled up, and asked about the water level in the river, and if we'd be able to cross on our bikes.  The guys there said that the water was high, and that we'd never be able to get across on bikes.  They also said that the day before, a couple of UAZ jeeps had been flooded when they tried to cross the river, so the only thing that could make it across was the gigantic 6x6 truck at the fuel station. 

After two nights of camping, all of us were also pleased to discover that there was also a cafe next door, so we could order a hot lunch and discuss next steps.  The Cafe "Kuba" needs to work on its menu (Coca-Cola and nachos, please?), its decor, and its location, but I sure was happy to see it:

By the time we finished lunch, the Moscow guys still had not caught up with us (we didn't know if they'd been able to fix the sprocket at the campsite so weren't sure that we'd see them), and we'd decided to definitely take the new road.  Just as we were about to pull out, however, the Moscow guys roared into view and pulled into the fuel station.  They also asked about the river level and decided that they would pay the truck to ferry them across the river; they also invited, or rather strongly encouraged, us to come along.  So now we really had to decide…

For me, it was a pretty easy decision; my main goal was to get to Magadan, doing the OSR would be nice but really wasn't critical to me. Moreover, because of work, I had to get back to Moscow in a few days, I couldn't really afford to get stuck in the swamps for a week.  And finally, if for some reason I later decided that I really really wanted to do the OSR, I could come back some other time and do it.  So I voted for the new road.  I'm not really sure what Max wanted to do, and Doug seemed to kind of want to do the OSR, but said that he would accompany Max and I on the new road.  So that was that.

From Kyubeme it was a couple of hundred kilometers to Ust Nera, the next town up the road, where we would spend the night. Here are a few shots of the scenery along the road:

Ust Nera is not quite as beautiful and the wilderness around it; in fact it is pretty damn ugly.  Here is the town:

It had been a long day, I was tired and dirty and very glad to get off the bike:

While we were making enquiries at the local hotel, a local came up and offered to let us stay in one of his apartments for a lower price.  We checked it out, and it was OK—three bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, etc., definitely better than a crappy Sov hotel.  Doug and Max went to the store and bought some food (ramen noodles, sausage), then we had dinner and went to bed.