Russia by Night
So much of the distance on this Russian leg has been covered in darkness. The days are short and the distances long. But I love it. There’s something about the night walk that calls to me. If my legs are still good as the sun sets, so help me, because I’ll struggle to stop.
Monday, October 20th, 2025
My right foot is in agony.
It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’ve just pressed my way into the damp groves that line the Volga river to lay down. The same old Achilles tendon and the shin splint in my right leg are flaring, but the real sharp pain is in my middle toe. It’s so swollen with pus it’s obscene. I rarely ever get blisters, but here at the end of my second-ever 70-kilometre day, my feet are in a mood to make an exception. Tomorrow (or today I guess, it being 2am already) I’ll reach Astrakhan, the last city before the Kazakh border.
The night walking mixes of calm and urgency, and brings with it a strange bliss. The world shrinks to the 10-metre pool of light cast by my headtorch, or the shadow realm laid on by the moon on a clear night. Everything not immediate disappears behind the inky black veil. But the world also expands. My ears, straining against the cold, pick up sounds I’d never hear in the day. The distant, steady thrum of a massive gas pipeline station, audible for kilometres. The howls of wolves cut through the darkness until it sounds like there are hundreds of them, destroying my wilful pretense that they are just dogs.
And the lights. A cold mist hangs over the earth, and through it, the oncoming headlights of a truck dance and flicker, their brightness building for a full minute until the machine wails past, buffeting me with its dirty air. Then there is silence again, and again all the world is mine.
On a clear night recently I was treated to the best starry canvas of the walk so far. I lay down in the dirt, my head propped on my rucksack, staring up into the infinite while Frank Herbert’s Dune played in my ears. I looked up just in time to see the best, brightest meteor I have ever yet seen pierce the atmosphere. It burned up in a fraction of a second but for a frozen moment, a bright yellow trail hung in its wake, and in those moments I can hardly believe I get to live this way.
But it’s a madness. That’s the only word for it. It’s a kind of madness that drives me, on and on, long after my legs and feet are screaming and my mind has turned to mush, and my whole being seems alert to my total exhaustion and yet somehow above it. What I want most in those moments is simply for my body to lay down in the dirt and sleep for eternity and for my mind to go on wandering for just as long. Yet on we go together, in answer to something that does not speak, something that is after pain. Something mindless, almost forbidden.
I am addicted to thinking, perhaps we all are. The night walking brings with it a kind of relief, for a little while. I’ve been reading Eckhart Tolle over the last couple weeks, and it’s during these night walks that I plunge into what he terms that state of no mind, the place beyond the pain. Navigating by landmarks because the GPS is spoofed; feeling the soft sand or the rough road slide under my feet; witness to a soft yellow crescent moon that lights up pools of water across the lowlands; the sheer, grinding physical effort, the hours of just putting one foot in front of the other in the cold and the dark, finally silences the part of me that is always imagining, always reliving, always elsewhere.
