Beyond the Horizon: Part 3 pp126-169from outside Ust Nera to Irkutsk, alone

(the cyclist below is actually Tim Harvey)

Colin bicycled 750km along the “Road of Bones” to get from Ust Nera to Yakutsk

[The Road of Bones] was constructed in the Stalin era of the USSR by Dalstroy construction directorate. The first stretch was built by the inmates of the Sevvostlag labor camp in 1932. The construction continued (by inmates of gulag camps) until 1953.The road is treated as a memorial, because the bones of the people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road.[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M56_Kolyma_highway_(Russia)

Yakutsk, Yakutian Province, Russia

• Colin has been in SiIberia for 6 months

• The first major city since Fairbanks, Alaska

• Pop. 200,000• A chance to send

mail and repair his bicycle

• Along the Lena River, the 10th longest River in the world

More images from Yakutsk:

Leaving Yakutsk:Bicycling 1150km on the M56 “highway,” south to the Trans-Siberian

Highway

Two stops between Yakutsk and Tynda (the end of the M56): Aldan(left – the town and the river) and

Neryungri(right)

Tynda: the end of the M56 and a major hub on the BAM rail line

More images from Tynda:

Outside of Tynda, Colin met another world-traveller: Rosie Swale-Pope who was on her journey to be the first person

to jog around the world unassisted

Chita, Russia: 1100km from Irkutsk

More images from Chita

Crossing the Yenisey River

• Familiar ground for Colin: in a previous adventure he rowed the Yenisey from its headwaters to its delta in the Arctic Ocean

• The photo is of Colin• The Yenisey is the 5th

longest river in the world

The “road” between Chita and Ulan-Ude:

Siberia: the land of rivers and bad roads?Crossing the Selenga River, the primary tributary of the

Yenisey River

Ulan-Ude, Buryatia Province, Russialate April

More images from Ulan-Ude:note the Selenga River again, as well as the world’s largest bust of

Lenin, one the USSR’s founding heroes

Vladimir Lenin• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January

1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years (1917–1924), as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a socialist economic system.

• As a politician, Vladimir Lenin was a persuasive orator, as a political scientist his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Leninism, the pragmatic Russian application of Marxism.[1] He was also named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.[2]

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

Marxism is philosophy a political, as well as an economic and sociological worldview, which is based upon a materialist interpretation of history, a Marxist analysis and critique of capitalism, a theory of social change, and a view of human liberation derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxist

Rounding Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world

Lake Baikal (bottom right is a satellite image)

And finally…Irkutsk, where Colin planned to wait for Tim and Yulya

As with all Russian cities, Irkutsk has Orthodox churches and a statue of Lenin

Irkutsk to Moscow:Colin formally breaks with Tim, but will meet Julie in

Moscow