KTM 1190
Minehead to Magadan, on Russia’s Pacific coast, is an almost 16,000-mile ride of a lifetime. Ian Chappel points his KTM 1190 east ,but discovers that such a mammoth undertaking doesn’t come without a unique set of distractions…
You would think riding from Minehead to Magadan would be reasonably straightforward, in so much as it is a journey from one town to another. Albeit from the UK all the way to Russia’s Pacific coast. However, when it comes to riding big distances, in remote places, life is not straightforward. And so, having started this trip solo, I find myself sitting in a cafe beside a fuel stop, two-hundred-and-fifty miles short of Magadan with Christian (more of whom later) trying to get some heat back into our systems. It is dark, cold, there are no hotels for hundreds of miles, there is talk of bears on the edge of town and snow is falling and rapidly turning the Road of Bones (ROB) to mush. The small truck-stop cafe is a 24-hour affair, so we consider ordering coffee and soup… and staying through the night. The ROB, currently outside the café door, is a wide, maintained gravel road used by all sorts of vehicles to get to Magadan. But mainly these vehicles are lorries and 4x4s which soon have an impact on an unsealed surface when the weather turns. And the weather has turned early this year causing our current predicament.
It’s funny the way things turn out: I’ve done two solo trips before but planned to do this one with a mate, however, he sadly has to pull out at the last minute for family reasons. So I set off on my own from Minehead, first stop a late arrival in Calais. I continue alone into Germany where I odometerwatch on the autobahns while wondering ‘WTF am I doing here?’. It crosses my mind to turn back. But, sure enough the more I hit unfamiliar territory the more my excitement builds. I know I’m really somewhere when I take the short ferry ride across the Dardanelles into Asia.
Deliveringcoke
My first deviation from the Magadan plan happens in the city of Almaty, south-east Kazakhstan – halfway between Minehead and Magadan. The terrain here isn’t the most exciting yet it is huge—kazakhstan is about two-thirds the width of Australia. I find little of interest in the west of the country, apart from the dried up Aral Sea followed by a very interesting day when an irreparable puncture in the middle of nowhere sees me delivering a van-load of Coca-cola and refilling it with fresh melons, before returning to my bike
with a repaired tyre. So by the time I reach Almaty, where I’ve arranged for fresh rubber and a service at Kazakhstan’s KTM dealer, Agent Orange, I’m up for something hillier.
‘I’m done for’
As it happens just south lies Kyrgyzstan. So off I set for a week-long loop. There’s a saying – be careful what you wish for – well I wanted hills and I got mountains. Plenty of mountains. There’s something nice about Kyrgyzstan, it’s how I imagine Nepal to be; not sure if it’s the mountains, the people, or maybe it’s the mountains that make the people who they are.
I’d seen something online about some guys, riding lighter bikes than my 1190 KTM, attempting a pass south of the capital Bishkek. And struggling with snow and the Kegety Pass. And here, in late July, there are remnants of snow, but no show-stoppers. Climbing higher, in what by now is heavy rain, it looks more and more likely that the size of the loose rocks will be my downfall. But they remain manageable and all of a sudden there I am at 3780m above sea level, wondering which is my best way down. I hate back-tracking and don’t like seeing the same thing twice, even from another perspective. But the south side doesn’t look so easy.
I try to work out where the guys on the lighter bikes had hit problems, but their main difficulty was snow.
Tricky ascents are good in that if you fail your only real problem is turning the bike round. Tricky descents are different because you can pass a point where you think, ‘I couldn’t get back up there’. You’re committed and there’s only one way out, especially solo.
No points for style up here, that’s for sure. So first-gear and dabbing is the way down what by now is a narrow goattrack of loose stone zig-zagging a hundred metres one way, then a hundred metres back. At some points there is a more discernible path while in others the scree has overwhelmed it. Becoming more loose and narrow a shut engine and combo of first gear and using the clutch as a handbrake prove safest. A bit like the big water crossings later in this trip, where I’m determined not to drop and drown the bike, all I can think of here is that if I drop the bike it’s got to be uphill, or I’m done for.
Thefullenglish
My patience pays off and I only lose it off the edge once, which is really more a gentle slip of the wheels than a high-side tumble. And after fifteen minutes of gentle clutch
‘It crosses my mind to turn back. But, sure enough the more I hit unfamiliar territory the more my excitement builds’
control and tacking at the optimum angle I ease her back on track. It’s been a long day and I’ve got pretty wet, so I keep riding in the hope of a roof over my head. As darkness descends I come across a basic ski chalet, with some heat but no food. Time to break open the first of my emergency food pouches and the Coleman stove.
I’m too cold and tired to work out why my panniers smell of Full English, but in daylight the following day all becomes clear: I’ve only brought along a handful of food pouches one of which has blown up like a balloon due to the altitude while the Full English has gone a stage further, presumably many miles back, judging by its even distribution through the contents of my pannier.
But all this messing about on mountains is nothing compared with my second deviation: the Baikal-amur Mainline or BAM. I’m talked into this one at the
Oasis Guesthouse – a well-known overlanders’ stop in Ulaanbaatar. Here I run into Stuart and Oli (they live in the same street in Brighton) who I’ve ridden bits of Kazakhstan, mid-russia and Mongolia with before and in between eating tins of horse-meat we get talking to Christian (KTM 690) who’s looking for a partner to ride the Western BAM. The BAM road is an abandoned service/construction track that runs alongside the railway through Russia’s remote Far East, built by Brezhnev as a northerly back-up for the TransSiberian railway in case of Chinese invasion. The Western
section runs for 830 miles from Severobaikalsk at the northern end of Lake Baikal, the largest body of fresh, liquid, water on the planet, east to Tynda. Due to the remoteness and the wide river crossings it’s not something to attempt solo. Which is why my friends from Brighton suggest Christian and I join up.
There’satraincoming
The BAM turns out to be nothing too technical regards riding, more a mental and endurance challenge. Probably the trickiest challenge on an 1190 is riding long sections of railway ballast. Four or five small towns exist along its length (served only by the railway), and we decide to try and make it from one town to the next each day, which means setting our alarm for 4:30am. Not my usual time! Rivers are the main issue and their size can be considerable. For each one, there are options. If the water’s shallow enough, ride through. If the old ‘road’ bridge hasn’t totally collapsed, that’s a good choice. And then there’s the third option – ride the railway bridge. These are only train-width, so the procedure is to wait until a train passes, then quickly hop on the railway behind it, and hope that our info about there being a minimum separation of six minutes is good. The biggest of these bridges stretches 600m and there is an elderly chap who ‘guards’ it, the sort of elderly chap who might be starting to have hearing difficulties. As you would expect they’re not keen on motorcycles riding on railways, but after a chat with the ‘guard’ we are good to go. I feel relieved, not just because he has agreed to let us pass, but also that he’ll make sure we don’t suffer any train entanglements. I am, however, a bit surprised when he doesn’t pull out a timetable, and surprised again when he doesn’t pick up a phone or radio. And then he turns his head and cups a hand to his ear. A few seconds later he declares there are no trains and that we should get on with it.
Thebike
At this point many of you might be wondering why I’m tackling all of this on a big 1190 KTM, after all lots of people consider a litre-plus bike way too big for a round the worldtype off-road trip. The current fashion seems to be for ever-smaller bikes. But after doing both Alaska to Ushuaia, and the UK to Cape Town (via the Algerian Sahara) on a 1200 GSA, an 1190 actually seems small! Certainly more dirt-oriented, with 21/18in wheels and proper forks. The big V-twin never misses a beat – in fact the only problem I have is the constantly breaking pannier racks. Do I regret going for that size bike? Honestly not once.
My final deviation sees me on the infamous Old Summer Road (OSR). The OSR is, or was, part of the ROB before it was abandoned years ago. And the section east from Tomtor (outdone only by its neighbour Oymyakon for the honour of coldest permanently inhabited place on the planet) to the ghost city of Kadykchan is a proper challenge. Only one-hundred-and-sixty miles but relentless bogs, standing water of unknown depth and river crossings mean it takes me, Christian and Mike (a young Swiss policeman on a KTM 640 who has joined our merry band for the OSR) two solid days. It’s probably do-able in one, but it’s not the best idea to go ploughing a fully loaded KTM 1190 (even an ‘R’) into the unknown. So we develop a routine of walking each challenge first; for anyone who knows the peaty bogs on the more remote parts of Exmoor you’ll get the idea. The reason the bogs here don’t dry up is the permafrost, which lurks a few feet below the surface, prevents surface water draining away. And so with the OSR done here we are back on the ROB proper, in the cafe, 250 miles short of Magadan and settling in for a night watching snow fall and eating soup; we really don’t need to ride through that mush in the dark and risk bears. But on the road fortune often favours the pragmatic and we manage to contact a local official who lets us stay in a vacant flat and store our bikes in the highways depot. Magadan will still be there tomorrow…
‘He turns his head and cups a hand to his ear. A few seconds later he declares there are no trains and that we should get on with it’