For thousands of years, nomadic communities across northern Asia have lived in yurts. A yurt is a tent, tall enough to stand up in, and big enough for a whole family to live in. They are quite similar to the traditional North American teepee.
Kyrgyzstan’s flag is red with a yellow sun and in the centre of the sun is a red tunduk. A tunduk is the top of a yurt, the place where sunlight can enter.
Tom saw yurts dotted across the lush green pastures of Kyrgyzstan, looking like little white mushrooms in the empty expanses. One evening he was cooking his tea outside his own little tent when he spotted two horsemen galloping over the grasslands in his direction. The horses kicked up dust as they galloped.
Arriving at Tom’s tent at an incredible speed, the horsemen heaved on the reins and skidded to a halt. The horses’ nostrils flared as they panted for breath. The two men on the horses looked down at Tom. They smiled big smiles, filled with gold teeth, beaming out from beneath their brilliant big hats.
Tom smiled back and stirred his noodles. “Hi!” he said.
The horsemen were a father and son, called Taalay and Zhyrgal. They were expert horsemen and had looked tough and a bit frightening until they smiled. Indeed, they were tough men, for they both enjoyed playing buzkashi. In the olden days these games could go on for several days at a time and sometimes turn very violent!
But there was no violence now. Taalay and Zhyrgal had spotted Tom’s tiny tent and ridden over in the last of the evening’s sunlight just to say hello. Tom often felt like a nomad on his journey. He had no fixed home, and every day he packed up his life and moved on to somewhere different, to a new place to sleep, a new view to wake up to, and new horizons beckoning him onwards. So these three nomads had much in common. With smiles and sign language, Taalay and Zhyrgal invited Tom to come and spend an evening in their yurt.
Tom was happy to accept. It was nice to have company and he was curious to visit a yurt.
Taalay reached down, took hold of Tom’s hand and helped him climb onto the back of his horse. And they were off. The race was on! Galloping into the sunset, hooves drumming the hard ground, dust flying, Zhyrgal shouting and whooping to make his horse go faster, Tom holding tight round Taalay’s waist, Taalay urging more speed from his horse, the wind blowing back Tom’s hair … and all of them grinning at the fast-rushing, crazy speed. Too soon they arrived at the yurt and the race between father and son was over.
They climbed down from the horses and went inside to introduce Tom to all the family. Three generations lived inside the yurt. There was an old grandmother with a big smile and no teeth. She sat in the corner with a warm blanket over her legs. There was Taalay’s wife, Anara – who was embarrassed for a visitor to arrive before she had finished cooking – and there were Zhyrgal’s six brothers and sisters. It was a crowded but happy yurt!
Tom sat cross-legged on the floor beside the small, central cooking fire. The fire was fuelled by flat cakes of dried cow dung, and smelled exactly the same as so many campfires in Africa had smelled. Tom did his best to explain his adventures to this family who had travelled for their whole lives but had never been to school or left Kyrgyzstan.
Anara made Tom very welcome. To celebrate the boy’s surprise appearance – which had caused a lot of amusement in the family – Anara cooked her favourite food just for Tom. He was treated to a meal of barbecued sheep’s head, washed down with a drink of kumis, the horse milk in a goatskin. It certainly was different to a banana sandwich!
There are places in the world that people who love travel and adventure dream of visiting. That special place will be different for each person, but the dreaming and the excitement is the same. For some people the place might be Timbuktu. For others it might be New York, Nepal or New Zealand. Where do you dream of visiting?
For Tom, that place was Samarkand. Ever since he began his ride he had been excited about reaching Samarkand, which is located on the hot dusty plains of Uzbekistan. As he approached the legendary city, the sun was low in the sky, reflecting and glowing off the road. Tom kept pedalling, always a little further, along the golden road to Samarkand.
Samarkand is one of the greatest of the ancient Silk Road cities. Silk from China was first traded with Europe thousands of years ago. Travellers, explorers and merchants moved back and forth, carrying precious goods and making lots of money. Samarkand is famous for the beautiful blue domes of its spectacular mosques and its many great buildings. These days taxis buzz speedily round the incredible ancient monuments, but much of the city remains unchanged.
The markets are still busy and noisy, as they have been for centuries. As Tom squeezed through the crowds, past pyramids of apricots and pistachio nuts, around hat sellers and silk shawls and gigantic carpets, he liked imagining the famous explorer Marco Polo seeing many of the same sights that he was enjoying now.
Much of Samarkand today looks modern but if you get off the beaten track, you’ll find ancient alleyways with walls made of mud and straw, and enormous old wooden doors that open into courtyards and vine-shaded gardens – exactly as Marco Polo described them 700 years ago.
Some things in the world change a lot. Other things stay the same forever. Both are good reasons to go out and discover the world for yourself.
Endless miles of sand and gravel stretched away to the horizon, shimmering with mirages in the furnace heat. Roadsigns warned drivers that camels might run across the road in front of them. Turkmenistan was the hottest place Tom had been since Sudan in Africa, even hotter than the Taklamakan Desert. Riding a bike when it is 45ºC is hard work. (It’s not as hard as -40ºC though!) He was pouring with sweat all day long. Tom drank many litres of water and still hardly ever needed to pee.
Sometimes Tom passed ditches of water that farmers used to water their crops of melons. He jumped into each ditch in all his clothes, whooping with joy as he hit the refreshing water. He even left his shoes on. Soaked to the skin, he would then continue riding. The breeze felt deliciously fresh on his wet skin. But within minutes all his clothes would be completely dry again. The heat was cruel. It was hard to imagine that back in Siberia Tom had been desperately dreaming of hot days like this one.
It was a relief when the sun set and the world cooled down. Tom didn’t sleep in his tent here. Even at night, the weather was warm and dry. He just unrolled his sleeping mat and lay down under the stars. When you sleep outdoors, even in your garden at home, your eyes become more sensitive and you see more and more stars until the sky seems to be bursting with them. Sleeping outside always feels like an adventure.
The Milky Way marched across the heavens and Tom noticed the moon sliding slowly across the sky towards the west each time he woke up and rolled over. Sleeping on a camping mat is not as comfy as a real bed so you wake up a few times every night. About an hour before dawn the sky in the east slowly began to lighten. It was time to get up – to make the most of the cool hours of the day.
Tom made a quick banana sandwich, glugged some water, and got riding. He didn’t waste time brushing his teeth. By now Tom had learned the trick of brushing whilst pedalling, doing two jobs at once. If you brush your teeth for 4 minutes a day, that adds up over a year to 24 hours of tooth brushing. That meant that Tom could cycle about an extra 250 miles a year just while he was brushing his teeth!
On one of his best night’s camping in Turkmenistan, Tom couldn’t see any stars at all. He was camping on the edge of a crater. The desert was ablaze with bright light blotting out the stars. Turkmenistan has giant reserves of natural underground gas. The crater is filled with natural gas that is on fire so it looks like a huge cauldron of flames. The fire is about as big as a football pitch, and the blaze lights up the desert night. There is so much gas billowing up through the earth that this fire has been burning non-stop for 40 years. The fire is too huge to put out and so will keep burning until all the gas beneath the crater has burned off some time in the future. Local people call i
t the Door to Hell.
Tom was too excited to sleep that night. Not only was he camping next to a blazing crater, but ahead of him lay the Caspian Sea. Tom needed to cross the sea to get to Azerbaijan and Georgia. And beyond those countries lay Europe and home. With every turn of the pedals Tom was creeping a little closer to becoming the boy who really did bike all the way round the world.
Goodbye Asia, Hello Europe
Travelling on an overnight ferry was a treat! Tom covered easy miles whilst he slept, and he got to spend the night in a soft bed instead of on the hard ground. When he woke in the morning the ferry was just pulling into the harbour in Baku. Tom climbed out of bed and looked out of the porthole with excitement. He cycled off the ferry and rode swiftly through the country of Azerbaijan, heading towards Georgia. He had a plan: he had been told about a food in Georgia called khachapuri, and he wanted to track it down.
Khachapuri is a cheese bread that is something between cheese on toast and a pizza. It is hot, soft and oozes cheese. Even better, people eat them for breakfast (and at most other times of the day). Every morning in Georgia Tom bought a khachapuri from a stall on the street. He ate it straight away and then bought another to eat later. It might sound greedy, but they were so delicious that Tom could not resist. He’d wait until he had left Georgia before returning to banana sandwiches.
Tom had to rely on his nose to hunt down his morning khachapuri because, once again, he was back in a country where he could not read a word of the local writing. Georgia has its own alphabet with 33 letters:
Tom, or enjoyed trying to spell different words he knew in the Georgian alphabet: it was like writing a secret code.
Most Georgians live in rural villages. Their homes are large cube shapes with steep roofs that extend out to make balconies and verandas on all four sides of the house. The gardens are filled with fruit and vegetables.
Georgia is a very green and fertile country. Cows amble slowly down quiet lanes. In each village are a couple of water pumps for those who do not have taps in their houses, and a small church. This is because Georgia is one of the very oldest Christian countries in the world.
Georgia is said to have been named for St George, the patron saint of many countries, including England, Portugal, Germany and Greece. There is a fable attached to St George, which goes like this:
Once upon a time there was a village called Silene. The village had only one well, but the well was guarded by a dragon. And whenever the village needed water they had to sacrifice somebody for the dragon to eat before it would let them have any water.
One day a princess was about to be sacrificed. Everyone was very sad. But a brave knight called George arrived on his horse in the nick of time. He galloped into battle and slayed the dragon with his sword. His heroism saved the princess and rescued the village. Despite all his courage, things ended quite badly though for poor George – later on in life, he had his head chopped off.
Tom cycled steadily through Georgia, winding up into the foothills of the Caucasus mountains. Off in the distance he spotted the sea. With a cheer he turned away from the mountains and began swooping down towards the shimmering water. The sun shone and the water looked lovely and blue, even though it was called the Black Sea. The road curved down through lush green tea plantations.
As Tom swooshed through the curves he thought of his Mum and Dad. They absolutely loved tea and got very excited whenever someone offered them “a nice cuppa”. This whole mountainside planted with tea bushes was probably only enough to keep his parents going for a couple of weeks.
Tom squeezed hard on his brakes and slowed to a stop beside the Black Sea. After a quick swim he turned left and followed the coast back into Turkey. Tom rode along the seashore all the way to Istanbul. On his right was the sea, on his left side were rolling green hills covered with hazelnut trees. In the villages, all the flat space outside the homes were covered with hazelnuts spread out to dry in the sunshine. Tom camped on the beach at night and swam in the sea every day, often more than once. He hadn’t smelled this clean in a long time!
Turkish bread, ekmek, is really good. It’s a bit like a French baguette. As he cycled through Turkey, between handfuls of fresh hazelnuts, Tom invented a totally different food to eat: banana hotdogs. Here is the recipe:
Slice open the ekmek lengthways
Put one or two bananas lengthways down the bread (depending on how long the bread is)
Do not squash it flat
Eat
When Tom began his ride round the world so many thousands of miles ago, the first stage of his journey was to ride across Europe to Istanbul. To an inexperienced boy fresh from England, Istanbul had seemed to be the busiest, smelliest, most chaotic, exciting city ever. He was about to return to Istanbul.
Tom cycled to the shore of the Bosphorus. The Bosphorus is a narrow strait of water that separates Asia from Europe. This was the first place in the whole world – in his entire journey – that Tom had been to before. Imagine not ever seeing the same place twice for year after year, not knowing which way it is to the shops or what direction to take to leave town. Think about never knowing what is round the next corner or over the next hill. Do you think you would enjoy that? Tom loved it – all adventurers do. But he was also looking forward to being in more familiar places again.
Arriving at the Bosphorus was an important moment. He paused to take it all in. Old men sat peacefully on little stools holding fishing rods, just as Tom remembered. They still didn’t seem to catch many fish, but they didn’t seem to mind, either. They were happy chatting to their friends and feeling the warm sunshine on their faces.
Looking at the big ships sailing along the Bosphorus, Tom was delighted to have made it right across Asia. Asia was behind him. On the other side of the water lay Europe. Europe was the smallest and the easiest continent Tom was going to cross. He had already cycled it once so he knew he could do it again.
Tom wheeled his bike onto the little ferry for the short ride across the Bosphorus. Over the water was Istanbul’s famous skyline of the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia, two buildings that he had visited last time.
“Goodbye Asia! I’m going to Europe. I’m on my way home now!” Tom shouted on the deck of the ferry into the breeze. A seagull whirled away in surprise at his loud voice. Having now cycled nearly the whole way round the planet, Istanbul felt much less chaotic, Tom found, than it had been the first time he visited. He knew that the city had not changed, but that he had changed during the course of his long adventure.
Pedal Power and the Final Push
This was it! The final stretch! Like in a running race when you see the finish line and suddenly find a new burst of energy, so too Tom rode faster and faster as he left the Bosphorus behind and rode into Europe. He was excited about getting home now – he only had about 3,000 miles left to ride. When you’ve ridden as far as Tom had, 3,000 miles doesn’t seem very far any more.
Tom smiled to himself: he was actually going to make it round the world. When he began this trip he’d never thought he could do it; he just wanted to try his best and do more than he had ever done before. But now he knew that he really could make it to the end.
Tom pedalled through Greece, camping under orange trees on high cliffs above the blue Mediterranean sea. Glow-worms flashed in the trees above Tom’s tent as he sucked an orange he’d picked from a tree. Cycling up through the limestone mountains of Macedonia, he was chased by some of the fiercest dogs he had yet encountered.
Tom loved dogs, but they did not always love him. All around the world, dogs enjoy chasing cyclists. Once, he had even been chased by a very fast dog who had only three legs but was desperate to try to bite Tom.
Sometimes when Tom shouted “go away!” at dogs, they stopped and gave up the chase. But he did not know how to shout “go away” in Macedonian. And it seemed that the dogs did not understand English. Certainly the louder he shout
ed the faster they chased and the more they snarled. They continued their hunt, barking loudly with savage teeth and drooling in a disgusting, frightening way. Tom was tiring fast. He was riding uphill, and even though he was pedalling furiously, the dogs were gaining on him, fast.
It was time for Tom’s secret dog weapon. He grabbed his water bottle and squirted the dogs smack in their faces. The sudden burst of water shocked them into stopping. Tom seized the moment. He put on a final burst of speed and escaped from the pack! Heart beating and sweat pouring, Tom zoomed down out of the mountains, past Lake Ohrid and up the beautiful rocky coastline of Montenegro and Croatia.
By the time Tom arrived in Bosnia, the warm summer weather had gone. He hid from a heavy rainstorm underneath a tree. Sharing his tree was a very grumpy old lady with no teeth and one cow. Her face, wrinkled like a walnut, scowled with suspicion at the young cyclist. Perhaps she thought Tom was going to steal her cow.
Tom’s hair was wild and long. His clothes were dirty and torn. The bags on his bike were battered and patched. His bike was almost worn out. Tom was almost worn out! So he did perhaps look like the sort of person who might steal a cow. But even though he had often daydreamed of having a pet for company, he had never thought a cow would make a good adventure partner.
As the young cyclist continued northwards, the leaves on the trees turned golden brown. The nights grew colder and the tent was crusted with frost when he packed it away in the morning. With his wheels spinning steadily through the miles, Tom passed the time by daydreaming about all the different things he had seen on his journey.
His teacher at school, Mr Field, used to get cross with Tom for being a daydreamer. Now that he had seen the whole world, his head was filled with a million new ideas for daydreams. When Tom returned to school, Mr Field was going to be furious!
Riding Home through Asia Page 5
