We weren’t meant to be sitting back in our guest house at noon on this beautiful, sunny Friday in Kazarman, but after just eight kilometres on the bikes this morning, our progress towards Chaek was brought abruptly to a stop by a landslide on the road ahead. Alongside a few locals, and Kate Leeming, an extreme endurance cyclist from Australia who’s riding the course of the Naryn River through Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in aid of water.org, we awaited the on-site decision of the local mayor as to whether an old, unused road could be reopened to provide a bypass. When his decision came, it was a disappointing one; and frustratingly, while he told us that he was happy to make an exception for us on our bikes…he was subsequently over-ruled by the head of the local police.

With a natural sense of deflation, we turned around and headed back to Kazarman to regroup and make a plan for what needs to happen next. It’s easy enough to take a casual perspective on these kinds of natural events (and to assume that, unlike for vehicles, it couldn’t be too difficult for a couple of (reasonably!) fit cyclists to navigate some fallen rocks). After all, I’ve had to do that at other points on my ride from home to here. However, when we saw a video captured by a motorist who had just missed driving directly under the landslide, it transpired that this was no small-scale incident.

As I’ve said more than once through these blogs, I’m no stranger to unexpected challenges on my bike adventures, but the will to go on confronting them and solving them, while still intact, is at risk of being diminished! I’m certainly very grateful to have Thomas’s life-enhancing company (and great brainpower in finding a solution to a problem) in these circumstances; a problem shared really is a problem halved.

I don’t know that there’s a divine order to these things, but I feel so often that, even if there isn’t a natural ‘pendulum’ to the fortunes we can justly enjoy on an adventure like this, there is value in recognising that the good times and the difficult times throw each other into relief, and the latter no doubt help us appreciate the former.

Among the good times, it’s hard to look much further than the day we had on our bikes yesterday – a day that rendered the English language somewhat impotent when it comes to the adjectives required to describe what we saw. After a night wild camping at an idyllic spot next to a river still conveying the snow melt from a harsh, long winter (which gave us a great resource in which to swim and wash ourselves and our kit), we set off to ride the 3,000-metre Koldomo Pass, which at one point is annotated on Google Maps as being ‘the most scenic road in Kyrgyzstan’. Given that those who have travelled to this country often refer to it as “the most beautiful country on Earth”, the annotation is no trivial accolade.

We caught up with a French cyclist, Marion, as we ground out the climb. She sat back with an “ooh la la” at one point. We just kept saying “wow”. It was a tough climb to the summit, but one utterly transfixing in its beauty. I’m fortunate to have travelled to many parts of our world (a lot of them on my bike). I haven’t seen anything more stunning than the landscape of Kyrgyzstan yesterday.

The effortful ascent of a mountain pass like Koldomo really should foretell a descent of equal and opposite effortlessness, but it was not to be yesterday! It took us five hours to do the 52 kilometres from the peak down to Kazarman, and aside from the punctuation of a few fairly modest extra climbs along that descent, we were holding on to our brake levers for dear life. The road up and down the pass is unpaved, with alternate stretches of gravel and sand that hugely slowed our progress until a paved section emerged some 48 kilometres into those 52! But, just as on the climb, there was extraordinary beauty in everything we saw during those five hours on the way back down, not least as the golden hour threw a remarkable palette of colours and contrasts across the mountainous panorama.

In terms of what lies ahead, the father of the family whose guest house we stayed in here in Kazarman last night has kindly agreed to drive us to Kochkor – the best way for us to rejoin our planned route beyond the landslide. Once more, the non-cycling logistics required to solve our challenge are denting my commitment to riding, wherever possible, a continuous route around the world; but I’ve got better at putting that dogma aside and focusing on the enjoyment that comes from living in the moment! The ride so far through Kyrgyzstan has been beyond compare, and from Kochkor onwards we’re set to have some spectacular days on the bike. It would be foolish to let a natural event far beyond our control detract from the huge pleasure in this most privileged experience.