The Silk Way Rally

And here I am in Kazan, at the Ak Bars Arena stadium, where the teams, who are participating in this largest international rally in Eurasia, are bivouacked in the vast parking lot.

Huge trucks, mighty buggies, ATVs and, of course, motorbikes are gradually filling the territory and the racers are being registered, then tested by doctors. They check their equipment again and make a pre-start hustle and bustle around.

Everything is so interesting and unusual! I'm a little bit nervous, but feel that it's gonna be cool!

Tomorrow the ceremonial start of the Silk Way Rally will take place on the central square of the capital of Tatarstan. Then we will spend 9 days and go 5227 km of unpredictable roads (it's better to say off-road) of 13 regions and republics of Russia.

The most titled rally participant is the Kamaz-master team.

That's blinding!

Alexey Naumov, the champion of Russia, the participant of the Dakar Rally and the winner of last year's Silk Way Rally, is in our team!

The most experienced participants of the "Silk Way Rally – 2023" (by the Adventure Trophy statistics) are Stas Chvizhenko, Eugene Pyatigorsky and Alexey Naumov.

The Magnitogorsk Arena

The third day of the Silk Way Rally raid ended at the bivouac of the Magnitogorsk Arena.

1500 km of adventures are behind, almost four thousand more are ahead.

My first impressions of the race are following:

I could not imagine the scale of this event, as it was the first time I have taken part in such a big international sports competition as a competitor, not just as a spectator. To see everything with your eyes and feel the atmosphere and spirit of a multi-day race, which goes through 13 regions of our vast Homeland, is an unrealistically cool experience!

I've got plenty of emotions! The race has been difficult. I have never driven 300 km off-road in a day at a temperature of 35°C above zero, what's more, in a race mode, when you drink 3-4 litres of water in a few hours, sucking it out through a hose from a hydrator in a backpack behind your back. And then you have to overcome another 350 km along the asphalt road up to the next bivouac. Heat and dust hung in the air.

It's boiling hot. And this kind of roads make up most of the stages of the race.

It is almost impossible to distinguish the road when you're behind the racing motorcyclist, since the dust becomes a dense fog. It's a blessing that the KAMAZ trucks leave the start a few hours earlier, otherwise they would have a plume like from a nuclear explosion that would follow several hundred metres behind them.

Sometimes there are rivers that you have to cross.

The route can be very insidious. For example, the straight sections of field roads, where you keep the speed at over 100 km/h, can suddenly end with a sharp turn, which the KAMAZ trucks loosened to the state of sand baths. Huge boulders in the grass and inconspicuous hollows are waiting for their victims along the whole route. And they find them. We have seen all the inevitable victims of the race in the first days: they were trucks lying on the roof, cars with their bridges torn off and broken motorbikes.

You become feeling exhausted gradually.

And that's how we look during the race.

It is also not always possible to get enough sleep… But all this is nonsense in comparison with those impressions that will surely remain in memory for a lifetime.

And I have also met a lot of my friends there.

Well, the show must go on!

The extreme heat. The middle of the way.

More than 3000 km of incredible adventure are behind us!

If I had been asked 10 days ago whether it was possible to ride a motorbike along 250 km of rocky, dusty steppe roads, fields and ravines in one day while the air temperature is +40°C and the sun is scorching (and then another 300 km along the hot asphalt road, overtaking trucks), then I would have confidently answered that it seemed impossible.

But it turned out to be possible!

The limits of the human body's strength and stamina in extreme conditions are amazing.

In the latest two days of the Silk Way Rally we drove about 1100 km from Magnitogorsk to Samara, having done a stop in Orenburg. Almost a half of them were off-road in such extreme heat, that my brain felt like it began to melt in the helmet. That's the time when you drink 4 litres of water in one day of the race. And you actually don't go to the toilet at all. The equipment does hardly withstand the weather conditions. Radiators are boiling and engines are overheating.

Even mice and ground squirrels hid in their burrows, escaping from the boiling hot weather.

But today the God of Rally, watching all this outrage, took pity on us and turned off the sunny oven.

Therefore, we quickly overcame a 620 km distance from Samara to Saratov, which includes two special stages 260 km long together. This time the temperature was comfortable, from +20°C to +25°C.

There are four days of the rally ahead. Now we are not afraid of extreme heat anymore! :) But we pray for no heavy rains.

Today we finished our way in Volgograd.

The last breakthrough

The rally was a very hard test both for the equipment and for the drivers. Personally, I am happy that I went the whole way from beginning to end.

5000 km in 9 days, including more than 2000 km off-road (sometimes at temperatures up to +42°C) were so tough!

The eighth stage was the most difficult. The sands of the Volgograd region are almost like the ones in the Gobi and Sahara deserts. The heat was over +30°C. Driving a heavy motorbike through loose sand, looping up and down the dunes is very difficult, almost impossible. I lifted my heavy BMW three or four times and had no energy left. Just zero.

BMW R1250GS Adv isn't a good match to deep and loose sand.

Sand is everywhere! It creaks on teeth, in ears, hair, eyes…

And how many times can you lift a 260 kg burden and go further through the sand at +33°C heat? Three? Five? Or maybe ten? :))

One moment I realised that I would not be able to lift these 260 kg of iron and plastic, buried with the front motorbike wheel in loose sand again.

My friends did help me. They were close to their fatigue limits as well, though.

Even a powerful SUV could not overcome this desert. We were digging it out with our hands for one hour and a half.

But then we got our second wind, made the last effort and left the most difficult part of the race behind.

No one could describe the feeling of joy that this hell had finally been passed.

That's what I can call happiness!

Epilogue

So, the extremely exciting and at the same time very difficult raid "Silk Way Rally-2023" has ended.

The finish line was on Red Square. Imagine a huge podium, music, cups, medals, ovations, enthusiastic spectators and happy winners and participants. Such a great atmosphere! ;)

It was really cool!

The race exceeded all my expectations. Personally, I have participated in such a big competition for the first time. The organization was on the highest level! Thousands of people and hundreds of means of transport had been working for ten days as one well-coordinated mechanism. Every day we started our way in a new city and covered more than 500 km, 30-40% of which were off-road.

We needed a full concentration of our physical and mental resources to complete all 5000 km of this marathon.

The rally was especially difficult in the end, when accumulated fatigue, heat and hard road conditions altogether seemed to take away the last remnants of strength.

But we did it!

Of course, there were unpleasant moments for the participants. In our team of the Adventure Trophy category, one of the drivers was evacuated with a broken leg on the very first day. Among the participants there were falls, bruises, critical equipment breakdowns and offensive withdrawals from the race.

From the first day of the Silk Way Rally I felt like I had gone into a parallel reality, into another world. During these ten days everything that I used to live with in ordinary life no longer existed for me. Tight timing didn't allow us to relax even for a minute. We were getting up early, having a quick breakfast, then checking our equipment and departing from the bivouac to the start of the special stage. After that we started, raced, finished SU, reached the liazon, started again, went another hundred km along field roads, finished, then another 100-200 km to the bivouac in another town. Then we were refuelling and washing the motorbikes, checking its technical condition, repairing if necessary, having late dinner and going to bed. And that was our daily routine.

On the third day you already do everything like on autopilot.

Rally, as if it was one single organism, lives its own life and absorbs you completely. At night, the bivouac (and this is like a big city built for one day) does not sleep. The spotlights illuminate sites with equipment, generators and welding machines keep working, grinders cut metal, participants discuss the past day and put up the tents. Everything is bubbling around like in a hive.

And all this is Incredibly interesting and unusual!

Over time all the frustrations, annoying mistakes, equipment breakdowns and other troubles will be forgotten. But the brightest moments of the rally, the admiring faces of village boys watching the space cars whizzing by at crazy speeds in dust clouds, mutual help of friends and unbelievable adrenaline from everything that happens will remain in memory forever.

I think this is how real happiness feels like!

P.S. …especially when everything is over. :)

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