Day 13 – 12th August – Kazarman to Osh (268km)

The sun and the heat woke me up before the alarm clock rang – the sun here is already up before 6am – and the first thing I noticed was that I had slept soundly all night desite my back. I turned tentatively in bed, expecting the pain to be much worse now that the painkillers and adrenaline would have worn off and my body had had time to cool dow but, surprinsingly, the pain was about the same as the night before. I found out that, while I could not lift my arm any more than about 10 degrees from its resting postion while standing, if I grabbed it with my hand and moved with my other arm I could do a full rotation without pain, which gave me some hope that it might not be a fracture, otherwise I would be in a lot more pain.

I manage to strap my bag on the bike and put on all the gear without having to ask Katja for help, even though I had a serious distraction making things difficult for me.

We left and headed for what we expected to be a hard second half of the journey to Osh. Well, at least this time we were leaving early. We knew we had about another 160 kilometres of dirt road and a mountain pass before finding tarmac on the main road from Bishkek to Osh.

I was quite comfortable riding on the bike, and most of the time my back did not hurt. The climb up the mountain pass had a few tight turns with sand that I had to take with caution, and from time to time there would be huge trucks coming down the road and kicking so much dust in the narrow road that we just stopped near the edge and let them through, but in general I was able to enjoy the views.

About 40 kilometres before the main road we got to yet another small town and found tarmac. I was not getting my hopes up, as I had learned the hard way that the main stret is tarmac in every village, but it disappears the moment the village ends. However, this time we got lucky, and after ‘only’ 120 kilometres of dirt tracks we were finally on tarmac all the way to Osh.

We got there in good time, at about 4 in the afternoon, with almost 40 degrees of heat and the mad anarchic traffic of any big city in this part of the world. You’d think that I would have gone straight for the hospital, but that was not what I did. Insted, I went to Muztoo, a workshop that caters for the needs of all the adventure riders that pass through Osh on their way to Tajikistan, China, Mongolia, India, far East Asia or travelling around the world.

The workshop was bustling with activity, lots of people toiling on their bikes to do maintenance or repairs, but soon as I explained what I needed to do with Marc’s wheel, the mechanic found me a new Mitas E-07 tire and fitted it. With that first challenge completed, I said goodbye to Katja, who was just reunited with her boyfriend, and rode off to the CBT office in Osh to see if there was any tourist transport leaving for Naryn that could take the wheel to Marc. My original intention had been to go back with the wheel myself, but after seeing the state of the road and then having the crash, there was no way I could do that.

The girl in the CBT office really went out of her way to help me, and even though there was no tourist transport doing that route in the next three days, he put me in touch with a taxi driver who said he’d give the wheel to another driver who would leave the following morning, drive all day to Bishkek and then the following day drive south to Naryn and deliver the wheel, all for 2000 som (about 26 euros). I gave him the money and the wheel, hoping that he would make good on his promise, and finally headed for my hostel.

I rode across the city centre following the directions on my GPS, but when I got to where the hostel was supposed to be, there was only a derelict factory. No worries, these usually happens in soviet countries, there are several levels of buildings off the street, so I probably just had to drive around the block and would find the hostel behind. Only there was no block to drive around, the street was neverending. I made a U-turn and tried in the other direction, but it was the same story. I went back to the factory and realised that in the gates that led into it there was a tiny sign that read ‘hostel’ with a painted arrow pointing through the gates. I rode in and indeed there was the hostel, at the end of a creepy alley at the back of the factory, past a construction site.

Exhausted again, I checked in and crashed in the bed of a tiny single room in the third floor, right under a roof that had been baking under the sun all day.