We’ve almost finished our preparations for the next part of our Expedition, as we will soon be back on the road and leaving the beautiful country of Georgia.
Firstly heading to Baku in Azerbaijan, from there we will sail across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, I hear you can wait many days before leaving the port as they only leave once the cargo ship is full, which can take 3-4 days if not a week or even longer to load..so we’ll be camping at the port as you don’t get much notice before it leaves, it takes about 30 hours to make the crossing, unless the weather gets bad, and then they can drop anchor and sit in the middle of the Caspian for days!
Once on the other side we will cycle through the extremely hot deserts of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan following the Silk Road, temperatures will be in excess of 48 degrees with strong headwinds, that should make camping fun!
From there we enter Tajikistan and head to the mountains to the famous Pamir Highway, its the second highest road in the world, the summit being at almost 16,000ft with snow all year round, so thats when we will be back in the freezing cold, with temperatures plummeting to anything as low as -40 below freezing, if we manage to survive that, its on to Kyrgyzstan, then finally into China hopefully by mid November, which will be our 23rd country!
Once we have crossed the Caspian Sea and arrive in Kazakhstan, we will be off grid for several months, theres not going to be much over our next 4000km journey, apart from Camels, Wolves and Snow Leopards!
So this is where our World Cycling Tour gets real, we will soon be on a timescale as will be on short visas with many, many kilometres to cycle and mountains to climb, through extreme heat to extreme cold through some of the worlds toughest terrain and climates, this is going to be the toughest leg of our journey to date.
Chris and Gabs World Cycling Tour 