The third day was a flat nothingness punctuated by bicycle mishaps – not as bad as the day of disaster in Azerbaijan – but still pretty frustrating. I had multiple flats in the morning – the first a thorn puncture, the second a pressure puncture, and the third a repeat of the second due to a poor job that I did on patching puncture number two. Later in the afternoon I lost my second spoke to the deteriorating Kazakh roads, and it took me an hour to extract the remaining piece so that it would not get caught in the cassette. During that hour, something kind of strange happened. The pipeline that was about 500 meters away, without any warning, started making a noise similar to a jet engine, only louder, and was expelling something dark (but not oil) – this roaring and release went on all during my spokework, and at the time I started to get a little bothered that I might be shortening my life a bit by exposure to whatever it was that was roaring into the atmosphere.
In the evening of the third day, my state of showerlessness was becoming problematic. I could feel resistance when I tried to pull my helmet off. An adhesive bond had formed between my head and protective gear by a vile concrete of three day’s worth of sunblock, sweat, sebum and road dust. I began to feel that the continued exposure to the sheer monotony of a barren and unbroken landscape was beginning to become psychologically oppressive. There was literally over one-hundred kilometers this day that was completely uninhabited, with the only signs of life being occasional road traffic and pipelines.
In the evening, I counted 11 of these tarantula-type spiders, which I will call the Yellow-Haired Ustyurt Plateau Tarantula. I heard this might be a camel eating spider. They are supposed to jump up on camels, inject them with some sort of anesthetic, and then begin eating away at the camel, which cannot feel the feeding frenzy. (6-05-05)
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Kazakh Tarantula |
