We've laid out on our blog before how a day in our life as desert cyclists looked like. This is a typical day in the Pamir mountains:
4am: Wake up and realise we're cold again. This happens every hour or so, because the nights get gradually colder. Outside our tent it's -10 degrees. 6am: We wake up, because it's getting light. The sun is still behind the mountains, so it's too cold to get up. We stay in our sleeping bags, covered by an extra one, and dressed in several layers of clothes. 6.45am: The sun will start peeping over the mountains soon, so we manage to get up. We have a first hot drink from the thermos. While one of us is boiling more water and making breakfast, the other one starts packing up all our camping gear. The key is to keep moving to shake off the cold. 8am: Start biking. The first kilometres are hard. You know immediately you made a bad decision the previous day, when you said: "let's leave that steep part of the climb for tomorrow". 9.30am: Time for second breakfast. we're pretty exhausted already. A look on our route planner shows us we've done only 7km. We've set ourselves an ambitious goal again. We now know already that we probably won't make it. 11.30am: We're getting near to 4000m. We still have 15km to climb and we're starting to feel the altitude, in the sense that on the steep parts we have to stop every couple of hundreds of metres to catch our breath. 1pm: Lunch break. In the Pamir there's hardly any fruits or veggies, so we enjoy our very dry bread. Sitting and looking around us makes us realise again why we're here. We're surrounded by the high peaks of the Hindu Kush. The view makes up for all the suffering. 2.15pm: We're climbing the last 10km. We can't see the pass yet. After every corner we're hoping to see it, but there's just more endless switchbacks. By now not even the stunning views make up for the suffering. 3.45pm. We can see the pass! We're at 4300m altitude and we're exhausted, so now we have to stop every 100m to catch our breath again, but at least we know now the climb doesn't go on forever as we had started to fear. 4.10pm: We're at the pass. The view is incredible! This was totally worth this whole day of suffering (that's at least what you think in a brief moment of euphoria, possible caused by the altitude) 5pm: It's getting dark. We've descended a couple of kilometres and we find a valley full of big boulders. They should give us some shelter if the wind picks up. 6.30pm: It's dark. One of us has cooked, the other one has set up our tent and rolled out our beds. It's too cold to sit outside, so we're in bed. Too early to sleep, we say, but a half an hour later we are asleep. 9pm: Wake up for the first time. It's getting colder. Time to put an extra layer on.
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