After a restless night with the window open to escape the unbearable heat, I got up early to prepare my bike. By 8:00 a.m., I was ready for breakfast, but I had forgotten the redeemable ticket I was given. It took me fifteen minutes before I realized about it and got served.

At around 9:00 a.m., I left the hotel and navigated through the city toward the road leading to Petropavl. However, my progress was soon halted as roadblocks forced me into a long detour before I could rejoin the main route.

A roadside breakdown

Just as I was about to get back on track, I noticed something unsettling: my front brake had stopped working, and the handlebars were vibrating unnaturally. Worried that something was seriously wrong, I pulled over near a café where several trucks were parked. As soon as I got off the bike, the problem became clear: one of the front wheel bearings was broken. Frustration stepped in.

Fortunately, due to the same problem I had in Mongolia in 2019, I had spare bearings. However, I didn’t have the right tools so it wouldn’t have been impossible to fix it myself. Luckily, Arman, one of the truck drivers, came to my aid. After searching through his tools, he found an Allen key that fitted and we quickly got to work, removing the damaged bearings.

I decided to replace both to ensure both were at the same capacity. Unfortunately, we accidentally scratched the rim during the process. To make things worse, I realized too late that I had forgotten an important assembly part when we thought we had fixed it. We had to remove one of the new bearings again, insert the missing piece, and reassemble everything from scratch. The whole process took two hours, but thanks to Arman’s patience and generosity, I was back on the road.

Arriving in Petropavl

After six long hours of riding, I finally arrived in Petropavl, where Vadim was waiting for me. He led me to the “Северный Ветер” clubhouse, where I also met Vasili, Denis, and Vitali. More members gradually joined us: a pair of Alexanders, Nikolais, and Andreis, along with Viktor, and Stanislav. Marushka also stopped by, bringing cakes from her shop, which was a warm and unexpected gesture.

As the evening unfolded over dinner and drinks, I shared the reason for my journey through Kazakhstan. I was driving to Tyumen instead of heading West toward Volgograd due to my search for a Soviet-era concentration camp near that area. Some days back my brother asked me if it would be possible to find where his future wife’s grandmother was born. He couldn’t provide more than the little information written in her passport and birth documentation.

Nikolai corrected me as soon as I said “concentration camp” because it was not the same as in the Nazi sense, but rather a labor camp from the Soviet Gulag system. The distinction is crucial. While Nazi concentration camps were designed primarily for extermination, Soviet labor camps were meant to extract forced labor from prisoners. Conditions were brutal, and many perished due to starvation, disease, and harsh environments, but the primary purpose was economic exploitation rather than mass execution.

By 10:30 p.m., everyone had left, and I was alone in the clubhouse, remembering today’s events and thinking about tomorrow’s. My journey will start around 7:00 a.m. with Vadim, who will accompany me to the city’s northwestern limits. From there, a long ride ahead, a border to cross, and a camp to find. I would need every hour of daylight to make it happen.