Tomsk

Those wishing to escape Samara to the vast open spaces of Russia beyond the Volga region follow the busy, fuel-choked roads the city spits out to the east. On rainy days the dust along the roadside turns to mud and marshrutka buses screech unexpectedly to halts, spraying dirty water into the air as people pour out of them into the middle of the road. The city fades away undecidedly with seedy motels, stalls selling kvass and automobile part shops clinging for kilometers to the road, trying to scrape something from the passing traffic.

Over the past three weeks the daily entries into my journal have been often headed with the words "From nowhere to nowhere"! It is a strange feeling to follow the same road for hundreds of kilometers, broken only every now and then by the sight of a cafe or a village. Whilst the steppe in European Russia constantly changed, there have been times since Samara when the scenery hasn't altered for 150 miles.

Fields roll passed, dotted with clumps of silver birch trees - the horizon formed always by the dark green unbroken band of forest 3 or 4 miles away. Such a landscape gave the impression that I was stuck, endlessly, in an old Victorian toy. One of those wheels with cartoons drawn on the inside, which when spun round creates the ilusion of movement. The blue kilometer markers at first gave me the comfort that progress was being made, but after a 100 or so of these I began to expect that these were just a further part of the trickery. That everytime I looked away the giant, chubby arm of a Victorian child reached over the trees to replace the marker with the appropriate ascending number.

The Urals rise; a gentle green relief from the tedium that surrounds them. Their modest physical presence seems great after the flat miles that have gone before and the knowledge that they mark the transition from Europe into Asia lends excitement to the sight of them.

Considering the amount of time since my last entry, (because of to full hotels, expensive hotels and the now inevitable occurance of ladies sitting around in overstaffed, small-town, post-offices saying "Nyet - internet ne rabotayet")it has been quite an uneventful period. A lot of cycling, as the days have grown longer, and after I noticed the time left on my visa was constantly decreasing whilst Russia remained the same size.

For the first time last week I met another touring cyclist - Sierd from Holland - which was very exciting after seeing no-one on the roads since Austria. After starting from Mongolia in April he was able to warn me a little of what to expect - "There are no roads! You can only eat boiled goat!" His website www.6000km.nl has some amazing photos and is probably even more interesting if you can speak Dutch!

After 5678 miles I am now in Tomsk - a vibrant, old university town that has retained some of its old wooden architecture, by refusing to allow the original Trans-Siberian railway to run its way this far north. Its apparent decades of economic isolation, however, have made it the first large Russian town I have enjoyed staying in.