Pelotome –
around Kyrgyzstan on a bicycle.
“A divergence of seventy-five miles from the regular post-route was made in order to visit Lake Issik Kul, which is probably the largest lake for its elevation in the world, being about ten times larger than Lake Geneva, and at a height of 5300 feet.
The ascent to this lake, through the famous Buam Defile, or Happy Pass, afforded some of the grandest scenery on our route through Asia.
Its seething, foaming, irresistible torrent needs only a large volume to make it the equal of the rapids at Niagara.”
~ Across Asia on a Bicycle, Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. & William Lewis Sachtleben (1894).
My Life and Times
by Jerome K. Jerome
From £4,75
May 1892 – Published in 1894.
Across Asia on a Bicycle.
“The journey of two American students from Constantinople to Peking” is a beautifully illustrated book “made up of a series of sketches describing the most interesting part of a bicycle journey around the world,” in which the two young riders set off the day after graduating from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, in June 1890 and, over the next three years, “covered 15,044 miles on the wheel, the longest continuous land journey ever made around the world.”
Cycling through what was then Russian Turkestan, – they passed through Pishpek (now Bishkek in modern day Kyrgyzstan) from Taraz (Kazakhstan) on their way to visit Lake Issyk-Kul, before taking “an unbeaten track over the Ala Tau mountains” to Almaty (Kazakhstan),
- by Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben.
- Published by The Century Co., London.
THE JOURNEY FROM SAMARKAND TO KULDJA.
“Overtaking a Cossack courier in the early part of a day’s journey, he became so interested in the velocipede, as the Russians call the bicycle, that he determined to see as much of it as possible.
He stayed with us the whole day, over a distance of fifty-five miles.
His chief compensation was in witnessing the surprise of the natives to whom he would shout across the fields to come and see the tomasha, adding in explanation that we were the American gentlemen who had ridden all the way from America.
Our speed was not slow, and frequently the poor fellow would have to resort to the whip, or shout, ‘Slowly, gentlemen, my horse is tired ; the town is not far away, it is not necessary to hurry so.’
The fact is that in all our experience we found no horse of even the famed Kirghiz or Turkoman breed that could travel with the same ease and rapidity as ourselves even over the most ordinary road.”
~ Across Asia on a Bicycle, Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. & William Lewis Sachtleben (1894).