As The Missus is getting rather tired of hearing me say now:

"There is no path to Transorientale - Transorientale is the path".

Just watching it, the whole Russian thing, makes me want to do it. And we've not even got to the dunes yet.

Patricia-Watson Miller had an interesting day. The special stage had been cancelled due to the weather - thunder and lightning storms - so it was one hell of a long liason. What she found, and I didn't know either, was that Russian petrol stations won't let you fill up your vehicle during a lightning storm. But they'll let you use a mobile phone. So she had to nurse her bike over 300km on just over 20 litres of fuel.

If you look at a Dakar route, then you'll see a lot of looping and dog-legging going on. It's only a couple of thousand miles from Nador to Dakar, so the only way to make it 6,000 miles is to do a bit of meandering. There's nothing wrong with this - in some ways it was one of the things that gave Dakar its character and romance. I mean, you might be only 500 miles from Dakar as the crow flies, but you've got to ride a thousand miles in the opposite direction first.

When you look at the Transorientale route, it's almost a straight line across Russia, Kazakhstan and China. No loops or doubling back. It's one hell of a long way.

And I've always had this thing about Russia - I'm not sure what it is or why. I can totally relate to the Russian sense of humour - i.e. things like:

Back in the days of Stalin, a guy gets sent to prison. When he arrives at the prison, the other inmates all crowd round him wanting news and stuff.

"What did you do?", they asked.

"Nothing" replied the guy. "Absolutely nothing".

"How long did you get?"

"10 years".

"Then you are a LIAR! When you've done nothing, you only get 5 years..."

I have always wanted to see the Pamirs. The Pamirs are a mountain range smack bang in the middle of Russia which are caused by the junction of four other mountain ranges. Alexander went this way, then took a bit of a right turn into India - how he managed to get an entire Army through the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush is something of a miracle.

Transorientale runs pretty much along the route of the Northern Silk Road - an ancient route used by oriental traders in days gone by. It passes through some fantastic places and some fantastic history.

Turfan, for instance, where the rest day is. It's pretty smack bang in the middle of a desert, and the temperature is over 100 degrees at this time of year. In Winter, the temperature is in the minuses. It gets less than an inch of rainfall in a year yet, due to some rather brilliant engineering a coupleof thousand years ago has got one of the most effective irrigation systems in the world. So effective, in fact, that they manage to produce massive amounts of very high quality fruit - in the middle of the desert, and using engineering that is thousands of years old. Think about that for a second.

There is a distinct possibility that my ITM is cooking a plan for Beijing next year. The email I got from him that basically said "Right! That's It! We're doing Transorientale!" was a bit of a giveaway.

We wait and see the outcome of this first year's event before any plans get properly made but, still, Russia ...

And, the best part of all, is that I know enough Russian to get my face slapped. Which will be OK, since I'll be wearing a crash helmet.

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