Beyond the Horizon by Colin Angus

Author:Colin Angus [Angus, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37485-1
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2007-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I loaded my extra gear into my panniers. My rickety racks jiggled precariously as I continued along the flat roads. The heat of late spring brought out the bugs, and enormous horseflies easily kept pace with me. These irritating creatures, the size of large wasps, numbered in the hundreds, and their drone was like a disturbed beehive.

From now on, I would make sure all my camping spots were out of view from the road. I had been getting slack in my vigilance. Tim’s visit was a reminder that the success of the expedition relied on more than just doing miles on the road.

Four days after leaving Novosibirsk, I skirted the large city of Omsk via a southern route that bypassed the industrial megalopolis. Beyond Omsk, the road enters the southern end of the world’s largest wetlands. The Western Siberian Lowlands—between the Yenisey River and the Ural Mountains, bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean and stretching as far south as Kazakhstan—comprise a total area of almost 2 million square kilometres—larger than France, Spain, and Germany combined. It is a birdwatcher’s paradise and a bug hater’s nightmare. My time spent in the Amazon basin, in northern Canada, and in Alaska did nothing to prepare me for the bugs in the world’s biggest swamp.

The 700-kilometre stretch of road within the swamp was a nightmare to build. Fill for the roadbed often had to be trucked in hundreds of kilometres. For large sections, a type of red clay, not an ideal substance, was used as the base. Such an unstable foundation results in ruts in the asphalt, sometimes 30 centimetres deep, as it sags under the weight of countless transport trucks.

The positive side of such a landscape for a bicyclist is a flatness so complete it almost feels like you’re riding down a slight but perpetual slope.

In their attempts to colonize Siberia, the Soviets deemed even this endless swamp habitable. I passed small settlements that seemed to be sinking into the mud. Brief stops in these Mudvilles were visits to the world’s most depressing communities. Muck was everywhere. Babushkas waged a never-ending battle to mop muddy footprints off the floors and keep the swamps at bay. Even the roads and sidewalks, a relative sanctuary from the mud they passed over, were painted brown with a thick layer of grime.

Another element at war with the people was the bugs. Fly screens, fly paper, bug sprays, mosquito coils, and fly swatters were everywhere. Still, the insects remained, buzzing unperturbed over the corpses of their fallen comrades.

A man smoking a cigarette on the muddy steps of a store proclaimed he couldn’t wait for winter. During this season, the bugs disappear and a clean coat of snow smothers the filth of the land. I chuckled. This truly was a living hell. Where else in the world are minus-40 temperatures and short days considered a period of bliss?

I would camp in the occasional forests where the land was better drained, a prisoner in my tent, as the insects waited outside.

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