The Wild Path

‘Are you ok up there?’ shouted Ramsay
We could just see the top of his mushroom-style ponytail prodding out from the truck’s window.
‘All good! Go for it!’
Already, the truck was lurching forward, jolting over stones and into the potholes of the track as Marc and I held on for dear life to whatever we could find to steady ourselves against the wild rocking of the truck beneath us.
Riding on the roof of a truck on a mountain track is no mean feat, but a million times more fun than to sit inside the madly crashing cabin, especially now that we were no less than height people, plus a dog.
Marc and I looked at each other, wild with fear and boundless hilarity.
The truck moved in hic-ups in a storm of noise and dust, while we laughed so hard into the wind that our lips became glued to our teeth.
Behind us rose a cloud of dust, blurring the mountains in the distance.
Inside the truck were crammed Anna, the Russian girl who had joined us two days before, Maya, our Altai guide and her teenage son Agalash, as well as our usual crew: Inge, Isa and her freshly adopted dog Sasha, (who was definitely not used to travel in such conditions, hid his nose under his forepaws and vomited everywhere), plus off course Ramsay, our trusted driver, negotiating each bump and dip with a master’s touch.
After our near disaster in Omsk, when our back wheel had almost fallen off, we all felt each of the traumatic jerks with very much concern. Three of the bolts holding the wheel to its hub had completely cheered off. Some of them were altogether missing and others had been replaced with the only bolts we could find, which were of very poor quality steel and kept snapping every few kilometres. To make matters worse, the hub itself had suffered damaged, with some of the bolts mountings widened and misshaped after we hit a stone at high speed on the bumpy Siberian roads between Kurgan and Cel-Abinsk.
Riding on the roof of a truck climbing a pitted mountain pass is quite an exhilarating experience. The only thing I could hold onto with my only good hand, (the other one having been permanently shattered three months ago in a bench-saw accident), was the bicycle’s handle-bar, itself holding by one thin rope to the stub of an old antenna on the roof. As the truck lurched on across the deserted pass, bouncing me laughing from side to side on my precarious perch, I couldn’t help but struggle to maintain some kind of blind faith in the safety of my anchor. If the bicycle broke free, I would fall off almost four metres straight onto very uncongenial looking rocks.
If opting to travel on the roof of your vehicle as opposed to inside it may seem a bit reckless, in this situation it was categorically the less worst possible way, if not downright the best. Bumps were felt a million times worse inside the truck, where to borrow Ramsay’s expression, one felt like a sock in a tumble-drier. The only manageable place to sit without ending-up covered in welts and bruises was on the front seat, which was normally designed to accommodate three people, but which right then was crammed with no less than six unfortunate souls squashed like sardines in a can and near asphyxiated from the hot dust that poured in through the windows. Closing the windows was not an option either. Between the heat and the poor dog’s vomit vapours, the atmosphere inside the stifling cabin would have quickly degenerated into a complete pandemonium.
Meanwhile, between fits of laughter, coughing and disjointed bits of shouted conversation over the racket of our valiant engine and the million things that rattled and banged in the back of the truck, we progressed slowly towards Mount Talbooash, which other-worldly peacefulness contrasted so much with our crazy bunch that this alone was enough to send us into hysterics. What on earth would the Nomads think of us, or anyone else for that matter, if they saw us right now, a tiny but insanely noisy speck slowly inching forward in this empty, age-old valley in a delirious cacophony of voices from six different languages, while Maya looked on slightly alarmed and her son Agalash somehow managed to play his two-string Altai Sitar without missing a note in spite of the mayhem.
The vast plateau, surrounded on all sides by mountains, resembled a large volcanic crater. Its stony, seemingly barren looking ground was interrupted here and there by icy streams bordered by a narrow strip of lush green grass, the only vivid colour to be seen as far as the eye could see.
The Siberian Altai is immense and incredibly diverse in scenery from one valley, or one plateau to the next. If the mountains before Kosh-Agash were richly covered with Siberian Pine or Russian Birch, the plateau we were now travelling on could easily be used in a remake of Mad Max. Cows, horses or yak skulls, complete with horns and frontal tufts of hair were everywhere, bleached white by the sun. Every now and again a marmot poked her head out of a burrow and scurried madly before us before disappearing again.
A few kilometres later, a river suddenly interrupted the track. The stream, swollen by the previous weeks incessant storms, was waist-deep and the current strong enough to send large stones rolling down with it.
‘OK!’ shouted Mark over the gushing river. ‘I will climb on the back platform and film the wheels of the truck as you cross the river’.
Marc, in spite of his quiet looks had quickly revealed himself right from the start to be an amazingly audacious and enterprising cameraman.
He had an eye for exactly what exposures he needed to build up a film and would stop at nothing to get it, even if this meant that he had to hold on by one hand to the bucking aft-platform of a truck fording an icy torrent and film with the other.
Without Marc there would be no film, no documentary at the end of the trip, nothing to present to the sponsors. Without Marc there would be no studio and editing house on wheels. Marc somehow managed to build a short film every couple of weeks, which is quite a feast considering the circumstances. Watching him trying to edit a film on his laptop in the back of the ever-bouncing truck, struggle with the very little available power supply, or even try to concentrate in such a small and crowded place would make anyone cry with sympathy. Marc went on, somehow, uncomplaining, even when after seven hours of struggle with a homespun and temperamental Internet connection in an abandoned coop-farm in the middle of nowhere, staying up half the night while we are all sleeping peacefully, his downloading of the film to our web agent in London failed at seventy-five percent…!
‘You sure you want to do this?’ asked Ramsay incredulously. ‘There is nothing to hold onto on that platform! You’re crazy!’
‘I’ll be fine’ replied Marc earnestly, already finding a way to attach his tripod to the side of the truck and mounting the camera to it. ‘Let’s do it!’
Ramsay climbed in and on we went, down into the rocky river, water almost submerging our gigantic wheels. Our faithful truck slowly jerked itself forward over the boulders, wheel-turn after wheel-turn and we somehow made it, narrowly avoiding bogging ourselves down in the shallows on the other side.
In the rear vision mirror we could not see any signs of Marc.
‘Marc!’ we called, ‘Are you still alive?’
Marc hooted in reply. ‘Its in the can!’ he said. ‘Scary but great! Can’t wait to do it again on the way back!’
The way back… yes, somehow we would have to do all this all over again.
But for now the path lay winding its way higher into the Altai range, a path definitely more suited to horses than trucks. Marc joined us inside the truck and we all shared in the exhilaration with great reinforcements of hooting and slaps in the back.
One thought we all shared though, in spite of our boundless enthusiasm and thrill in each new day of the adventure was the question of whether our back wheel would hold on for long enough to see us back to at least Kosh-Agash or not, in which case we were stuck in the middle of nowhere, days walk from help if ever we could even hope to find some. One after one the bolts broke on the hub and we had run out of spares. Tightening the remaining nuts had to be done every ten kilometres and we were advancing at a snail pace.
In the eventuality that we made it back to Kosh-Agash and bought more bolts for the wheel the problem whoever remained the same. The hub was damaged and needed replacing, something we definitely out of the question. Not just this but our tires also were completely frayed and two of them had already been patched up twice. Our clutch grease-sleeve had also split and necessitated constant manual greasing of the arm or it would get stuck at the most inopportune moments. We were also steadily loosing oil.
After five weeks on the road and eight thousands kilometres our truck and only mean of getting back to Amsterdam was showing definite signs of fatigue.
Would our truck and home to the five of us last the distance all the way back across the Steppes, mountains, forests and deserts we still had to face to get back home?
Time only will tell.