15.04.09 – Yalta

This was the second day of the trip with no miles to  cover.  The bike was with master off road mechanic Valeri, and I was going to help, film and generally get in the way.

First up was to remove the front forks, and service them.  While doing so he noted a lot of dirt had got under the dirt seals and was scratching the chrome on the forks.  I had planned to fit some socks / gaiters anyway, but this convinced me it had to be done now.  The only pair Valeri had around were KTM ones.  I had no choice it had to be done.  I now have KTM socks on my BMW.

Next job was to fit the Touratech handlebar risers.  Every other set of bar risers I had seen are neat little extenders that are a 2 minute job to fit, but the ones for the XC require fork removal.  Ever since laying eyes on them, I had shoved them away in the bottom of my bag (the “too hard” basket) for a time when the forks would be out.  That time had come.  It was also a chance to straighten my handlebars.  The only dropping of the bike so far was gooning around in Romania, crossing a bunch of railway tracks with Safran.  I fell at the final hurdle, and broke a pannier mount, a brake lever, dinged the front rim and ended up with non-straight bars.  Not really worth it for the few seconds of cheap thrills.  the brake lever was no drama – it broke after the useful bit anyway.  The pannier mount was fixed with a custom steel part in Odessa, and now in Yalta I could straighten the bars and sort the rim.

Front and rear tyres came off, and Valeri attacked the rim with a mallet and makeshift anvil.  He was stunned at how soft it was.  3 bashes and the rim was good.  He said if it was an Excel rim, he would have been bashing for 10 minutes.  And after schlepping (along with Jonathan and Marcin) my two Mefo tyres round Europe for over 2 weeks, I finally put them on the bike and ditched the original fitment Metzeler Saharas.  I have a new set of tyres waiting for me in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the Mefos will get me that far no problem, so no point carrying them as spares any more.

Next job was to shorten the sidestand.  Valeri welds steel, but the sidestand is alloy.  We cut a slice out of it and jumped in the van for a drive to the nearest argon welder.  10 minutes (and 3 EUR) later, and its job done. While out in the van we went down to the Livadia Palace, a former summer playground of the last Tsar, but more well known as the place where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt met in 1944.

The air filter came out.  I had  changed the standard paper one for an oiled sponge type filter before leaving England and it was getting pretty dirty.  Insects and dirt were all through it.  Out came the hot water and detergent and the filter was cleaned, dried and re-oiled.

Final job for the day was an oil and filter change.  Having not done one on the XC, I decided to sit back and watch and learn from Valeri, who also had never done one on an XC either, but totally knew what he was doing.  The first problem was oil.  Valeri recommended his favorite synthetic oil that he used in his KTMs, just a slightly different temperature grade for the BMW.  It was the most expensive oil I had ever bought.  We went down to the oil retailer, who had just about every high perfomance oil under the sun, for cars, trucks, bikes, whatever.  The stuff I needed was 19  EUR a litre.  And I needed almost 2.5 litres for the XC.  I would have to buy 3 containers and it would add up to 80 USD.  But at least the bike now has the very best Motul synthetic oil.

Draining the oil made me happy I watched Valeri do the first oil change.  Valeri removed the sump plug and wailed.  The oil was as black as the Ace of Spades.  After draining the oil from the sump he immediately looked puzzled.  “Its not 2 litres” he said as he looked for a second drain.  Finally he found it.  The XC is a dry sump bike meaning there are two oil drains.  The main one at the bottom of the engine, and the reservoir drain tucked away on the side of the bike in a hard to see and harder to get to place.  Glad I saw him figure that one out.  If it had been me I would have ended up changing only half the oil … basically wasting new oil and a new filter.

While I was ready to test ride the bike and fill it up with fuel, a guy rode in an a newish Yamaha R6.  He was from Feodosia, 150 km away, and had popped in for some mechanical advice from Valeri.  Seems Valeri is the top bike mechanic in the whole of Crimea.  I found the right guy.  The young guy on the R6 introduced himself as Yuri and invited me to stay with him tomorrow night.  As I am headed that way, I took him up on it.  After spending 80 bux on engine oil, I could use a little hospitality.

Finally with all that out of the way, I headed into town to find internet.  There was allegedly free wi-fi internet at McDonalds, but I couldnt get it to work yesterday, and I noted that the fancy hotel at the other end of the esplanade was sending my wi-fi phone into a frenzy, so I popped in for 2 EUR an hour high speed wi-fi.

Had a few requests for track data.  I have it all  (apart from the 75km leg from Balaclava to Odessa when the GPS mysteriously stopped working … maybe the soviets left some electro magnetic GPS disabling device at Balaclava.  Or maybe Garmin is just not what they are cracked up to be.)

I have sent the track data  to Jon “Baltic Extreme” Fox who is almost back in the UK … he will look at ways to get it up on the website.  – Probably in the data section (which is blank at the moment – while we work out how to populate it)

After grabbing a few gratuitous sunset pics just before the internet last night, I grabbed a quick dinner and had an early night.

I slept poorly in the Hotel Fantasia in the sleepy Crimean town of Krasnoperekopsk.  Typically I have been waking up about 6am, but not today.  I lay in bed drifting in an and out of sleep till well after 8.  There was no fantasy sleep that evening.  In fact the only thing with an air of fantasy to it was the decor the women who ran the cafe had taken the time to put together for their side of the business.

By the time I had had a long shower and a pancake and tea in the funky cafe, it was well after 9.  I stopped to chat with a old Hungarian guy who was driving a van back to Budapest to talk about I dont know what.  It was just that we were the first europeans either had seen in over 24 hours, so might as well see if we have anything interesting to say to each other.  We spoke in a mixture of German and Russian, but alas, there was not a lot of value there.

It was spot on 10am when I pulled out the the secure parking lot beside the hotel for a day on the back roads.  The first 100 km gave me plenty of opportunity for filming as the roads I had chosen were pretty deserted.  The country side over most of Crimea is very flat, contrasted with steep rocky mountains in the very south.  I dont think I had been more than 75 metres above sea level since entering Ukraine 4 days ago.

The first sign that I was entering the lands of the Crimean Tatars was the town of Saki, which I apprached from the North.  Mosques could be seen around the town and the people had different faces.  As I travelled further south, through villages on my way to the former Tatar capital at Bahchisaray, the culture changed from a predominantly Russian one to a Crimean Tatar one.

Historically speaking, the beginning of the Tatar history in the area goes back to Genghis Khan.  While Genghis never made it quite this far, the next generation did.  Most of the population of present day Russia and Ukraine lives in the lands taken by Genghis’s son Jochi and his offspring Batu and Berke Khan, and later Nogai and Chaka Khan.  This offshoot of the Mongol empire became known as the Golden Horde and ruled these lands for the nexxt 300 years.  As was always the problem for the mongols, internal squabbling  rather than external enemies was their undoing and the as the Russian princes began to claw back territory form the Golden Horde (known to the Russians as “Tatars”) the Horde split into 3 … the Kazan Khanate on the VOlga (Kazan is now the capital of present day Tatarstan), the Astrakhan Khanate down by the Caspian sea, and the Crimean Khanate in Crimea.

To this day, the Crimean Tatars are treated  as a separate ethnicity from the other Tatars in Russia and Ukraine.  All of the Mongol offshoots became increasingly Turkified with time, due to the large availability of Kipchak Turkic troops willing to follow them and the small number of Mongols to rule such a huge empire) but the Crimean Khanate became far more Turkic than the other two branches.  As the Ottoman empire grew, the increasingly Turkic Crimean Khanate became a key ally and vassal state ensuring Ottomn control of the Black Sea.  This ultimately led to tensions with Russia and then the Crimean War, charge of the light brigade, Balaclava, Sevastopol, etc etc.

Back to today then … I wanted to take in some authentic Tatar villages and photograph the locals, and that meant venturing off the main roads.  I took directions from 3 lads on a scooter, one Russian and two Tatar.  After some fun back roads, I headed to Bahchisaray to see the former Khan’s palace, now a museum complex, for some lunch.  A Tatar girl outside the complex recommended me a nearby restaurant and I had a couple of Tatar dishes that have become Russian staples – Shashlik (barbequed meat – usually lamb / mutton – on a skewer) and Chebureki (a semi-circular fried dough pattie filled with spiced meat).

Over the last few years I have taken a much bigger interest in ethnicity and I hope to visit many nationalities within the former Soviet Union.  Each group has their own language, history and culture, yet we in the west have a simplistic tendency to view Russia as a monolithic slavic bloc.  In fact, Russia is the most naturally ethnically diverse country in the world.  There are literally over 100 different indiginous nationalities in Russia.  One of the most densely packed regions in terms of nationalities, is the North Caucasus, where I will be heading after I leave Crimea and Ukraine.

Over the centuries, as the Russian empire expanded, scores of smaller states were pushed up against the Caucases mountains, to allow for the Russian farmers on the plains.  Now the Caucasus region is home to scores of nationalities, of which the Chechens have in recent years become the most well known.  While Chechnya is predominantly Chechen, neighbouring Dagestan is the ultimate melting ground.  There are 31 official nationalities in Dagestan alone, out of the total population of 2 million.  9 of those nationalities have their own daily newspapers in their respective languages.  Most people there are predominantly one nationality but with traces of many of the others.

Incredibly, these groups (which include Chechens and obscure Mountain Jews) have lived together in relative peace and harmony for centuries.  The North Caucasus is however a volatile region that can break out into conflict between powerful families within a nationality. More rare is conflict between nationalities, but as was the case with the Chechen conflict, there are tensions in some nationalities about remaining under the Russian umbrella.

I have digressed again.  Back to the motorcycling.  As I left Bahchisaray, the flat boring plains that had been my Crimea geography experience so far, changed to one of rocky jagged mountains.  The south of Crimea, on the Black Sea is very rugged.  The roads transformed from a boring strip of shoddy asphalt into motorcycling excitement.

There was one more stop before I headed to the summertime vacationing capital of Yalta, and that was the coastal village of Balaclava.  I had no interest in the Crimean war history of Balaclava, but something far more recent. Carved deep into the rock in Balaclava Harbour was a secret Soviet nuclear submarine base, just a few hundred kilometres from NATO Turkey.  The full details only came out after the cold war ended and the Ukranians closed the base.  A curved tunnel, partly above water level and partly below, goes right through a rocky outcrop, starting in Balaclava Harbour and ending in the Black Sea.  Th submarines entered underwater, surfaced inside the tunnel, were serviced and re-armed under hundreds of metres of solid rock, and could re-enter the world underwater, unseen.  Until the end of the cold war,, even the local villagers did not know what lay behind the soviet fences.  Now you can pay a guide to take you through the facility, but I had time only for a few snapshots before I had to get to Yalta, to meet a guy recommended to me by the Off Road Russians in Moscow.

I had only a phone number and GPS co-ordinates with which to locate Valeri, said to be a first class off road motorcycle mechanic and KTM afficianado in Yalta.  Not surprisingly, as i left Balaclava my GPS stopped working, for the first time in the trip!!!  I stripped the bike by the side of the road, checking fuses, wiring, everything, but the unit wouldnt turn on.  I gave up an just put it all back together figuring I could look at it tomorrow.  Valeri was expecting me this afternoon so I had to get on with it.  The windy mountain road from Sevastopol to Yalta was fantastic.  High speed curves as the road twists around the rocky Crimean coast would have been best on a sports bike, but I still had plenty of fun on my X-Challenge.  I pulled into Yalta, and passed a guy on a Chinese brand off-road bike.  I waved at him and asked if he knew of the KTM guy in Yalta.  Alas he didnt, but I gave him my phone, called Valera and the two guys chatted and worked out what to do with the foreigner who could find his way to the GPS co-ordinates because his GPS stopped working.  I was told to stay put and Valeri  would come and get me within 10 minutes.

While I waited I took out my tool kit and decided to take the battery out of the GPS unit … maybe water had got in there?  There was no water, but when I put the battery back in, the damn thing worked and I realised I was only a few hundred yards from where i was supposed to be.  He led me down to his garage, under his house, and wow … it was full of KTMs in there.  I havent seen any BMW’s or KTMs apart from my own since I said goodbye to Marcin and Jon … in fact I dont think I saw any other KTM’s since leaving Touratech, and here was a guy in Yalta with over half a dozen on his garage.  He asked what I needed done, and said no problem to everything, asking only that I had the oil filter required for my oil change.  Next he set me up with a neighbour who had a granny flat that is normally rented out in summer season, but was quickly made habitable for me.  So I am all set.  Just need to try and find an internet connection and the world is well.

Thats me signing off from Yalta.

PS … one  final bonus.  i finally worked out how to link larger pics to the blog.  So click on a pic and you get a larger version.  Hover your mouse over the pic and you should get a description / title of the photo.  Its progress of a kind.  I will go back and do that to all the other posted pics too, but that will take some time.  Bear with me.