KIMCHI KIWIS
There is the sound of something heavy moving outside the tent, followed by a pause and what might be a snuffling noise. Gareth's skin feels as though it's suddenly a couple of sizes too small. He dares not move, hardly dares to breathe. There is a brief silence, and then a rending, tearing noise and the starlight gleams in the eyes and on the flashing teeth of a bear.
He wakes with a shout. Bathed in sweat and panting, he looks about himself wildly. The dream has been so vivid that it takes several minutes before he can convince himself that he is in a hotel room with a noisily buzzing air-conditioner rather than in a shredded tent, wreathed in the carnivorous stink of the breath of a bear. He sinks back and lies there, eyes wide, heart pounding.
It's strange the way things seem in the night. Gareth isn't generally prone to anxiety dreams, and while he prides himself on his cold?blooded rationalism, he can't help but wonder as he lies there in the deep of the night: was this a premonition?
Ever since we began studying our route in detail and it became plain that we would, sooner or later, have to camp out under the stars at some point - perhaps at more than one point - bears have stalked Gareth's subconscious. He has nothing in particular against the beasts and would, if pressed, say that he actually likes them. He's admired them from relatively close range in the wilds of Alaska, but in each of those encounters he enjoyed a natural competitive advantage, being astride a motorcycle with the engine running at the time. Only once has he had what he felt was a close shave: when we camped in Yosemite National Park in 2006, we awoke to find that a bear had deftly broken and entered a Mustang convertible, in search of the burger that its unwary driver had left on the back seat. It was a cool operator, as we noted queasily at the time: this happened less than 100 metres from where we were snoring peacefully in our sleeping bags. For Gareth, camping has never quite been the same again.
In the planning stages for the Russian leg of this trip, it was clear that the distances between substantial settlements were too great for us to expect to stop each night in well-appointed hotels, or even shabby back-of-beyond B&Bs. Our options appeared to be sheltering in abandoned buildings (this part of Siberia has plenty of these), or camping. Neither, our research indicated, was without risk. The abandoned towns were haunted by gun-toting, vodka-addled misfits and outcasts, who had been known to accost and harass travellers. The badlands in between were crawling with bears.
For Gareth, the choice was simple. He had been rehearsing the Russian for 'Don't shoot. We come in peace, with vodka,' for days.
This is just one of the things weighing on him as he lies awake.
His health is an area of uncertainty: besides niggling neck and back complaints, acquired through a lifetime of peering at computer screens in ergonomically deplorable conditions, he has just, seven days ago, had a hernia operation. The trip has come around long before the doctors considered it advisable for him to do anything other than rest up.
Then there are the usual questions that arise at the outset of a motorcycle expedition. Where will we find petrol, and what will the quality be like? Will the bikes hold up? What do we do if we break a bike, or - god forbid - a rider out there in the wastes of Siberia? Will conditions allow us to get through, and through in time?
For more than on most trips, time is the enemy on this one. We have a date with the Government of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in Vladivostok on Tuesday 13 August 2013, and the North Koreans have assured us that we are not permitted to be late if we want our visas to be granted. After all they had many people involved making this ride happen from their side, and if we couldn't even keep our date with them that would be seen as pretty unreasonable on our part. Fair enough.
The precise arrangements around our getting from Russia into North Korea have yet to be finalised. Getting people across the border is relatively straightforward, as there is a passenger train. But our bikes remained the sticking point. Eventually the best offer we got from the Russians is that it will cost us US$40,000 to hire a boxcar to take the bikes into North Korea. Gareth is an economist by training and by instinct, and this seems exorbitant in the extreme. Every time he thinks about that figure, he grinds his teeth involuntarily. The fact that the money had to be sent to Russia before we flew out of New Zealand but after our motorcycles had departed by ship to Magadan, meant our ability to call the whole thing off was limited. To do so would have meant writing off the bikes or at least sending someone up to Magadan to get them back. So we had coughed up the funds - which our contacts in Vladivostok confirmed were of an extortionary amount - and boarded the plane for Russia. And now worse still, up here in Magadan with our bikes in hand and with all this uncertainty over key points in the journey still swirling around, we're about to lose contact with the outside world, as tomorrow the road north of Magadan beckons. Without email or cellphone coverage or comms of any other description, Gareth now has no way of keeping abreast of developments, let alone influencing them.
Carl Jung would have had a field day with the symbolism of Gareth's dream. The bear is Russia's national animal.
We had arrived in Magadan that morning, flying into Sokol Airport from Hong Kong via Khabarovsk. We emerged from the plane slightly dazed, and faintly amused to find that had we wanted to shop for fresh fish, there was a fishmonger's stall in the terminal. Once we had collected our bags, Gareth phoned our contact, Pavel, to let him know we had made it and to find out what arrangements had been made to reunite us with our bikes.
'Welcome to Russia,' Pavel said gloomily. 'Please to go now to hotel. I phone by five in the afternoon.'
We caught a cab to the hotel and were cooling our heels there when Pavel phoned at 3.00 p.m.
'Good news,' he said glumly. 'Bikes have customs clearance. I send driver to bring you to port. Brown Honda Accord at four in the afternoon. The driver's name is Yuri.'
Sure enough, at 4.00 p.m. a brown Honda Accord pulled up. The unsmiling Yuri drove us to the port, an unsightly assortment of rusting cranes and apparently derelict buildings, where we found our bikes sitting on their kickstands in a muddy, fenced yard, guarded by a big dude in fatigues.
He jerked his thumb at Jo's bike as we approached.
'Is not going,' he said.
Jo turned the ignition key and the lamps lit up weakly. The battery was near dead, and too near death to turn the engine over. We prepared to push start it.
Thumping his chest and miming pushing, the guard told us he had already tried this, but as he stood there watching expressionlessly, we had a go anyway. Jo and Gareth pushed and when we had a bit of momentum up, Dave let the clutch out. The engine fluttered but refused to fire.
Jo had, with the level of foresight that only she seems to possess, packed a little lithium emergency battery in her hand luggage, which she now produced in triumph. A few minutes' quick work with a spanner, and the bike was running. All three bikes needed fuel, and we needed to charge the flat battery.
Fortunately, we had been preceded on the ground in Magadan three weeks earlier by Brendan, Tony and Chris. As fate would have it, they too found that one of their three bikes had suffered battery corrosion on the sea voyage up from New Zealand. They had scouted the town and found a battery shop, and helpfully logged the GPS coordinates for us. We found our way to the point indicated by the boys' intelligence, but there was little or nothing to suggest this was a commercial premises at all. It more closely resembled a junkyard, and nothing about this changed as we made our way through the yard between rusting sheds towards the blank, closed iron door in the bunker-like building at the end. Dave tentatively pushed on the door and it opened to reveal a counter and a few shelves loaded with batteries.
'Well, how about that?' Dave said. 'It's a battery shop.'
Lucky, he thought, we had the tip-off from the boys. With no spoken language and as little hope of reading such signage as there was, Dave was in full-blown culture shock.
For the twenty minutes before they closed, Jo's battery sat on the charger, and when she produced her wallet to pay, the woman running the shop shook her head dismissively.
Jo installed the battery, still warm from the charger, back in the bike, and with the engine also still warm, it fired up no problem at all. Whether it would keep working remained to be seen, but for now, we were all in running order.
Suddenly Gareth was tired and grumpy and over it all, so we returned to the hotel. After a meal, he took himself off to bed, there to dream of being savaged by a bear. Jo and Dave, meanwhile, emptied the panniers from the three bikes onto the floor of the room and deployed all of their not inconsiderable skill and experience in trying to stuff everything back in. Too much weight - too many heavy inner tubes, Jo reckoned. But any kind of rationalisation would have to wait. After checking and adjusting tyre pressures, they judged us to be gassed up and ready to go. Then they too hit the hay.
'Nah,'...
