A Spanish cyclist will likely spend the New Year in Far East Russia with no ticket home after being rescued by locals who found him spending the night in a summer tent in freezing weather, Russian media have reported.
Jose Andres Abian Pajares, who runs a blog documenting his travels around the world, flew from Moscow to Magadan earlier in December with plans to cycle to Lake Baikal. Three residents told local media that they discovered the Spaniard, who they called Marcus, in a thin summer tent on a mountain pass in temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius last Friday and took him to a local hospital. The man reportedly suffered from frostbite on his hands.
“The administration contacted Magadan to buy Marcus tickets since they couldn’t buy anything for the nearest dates, there were no tickets,” one of the rescuers who gave his name as Vakha told the vesma.today news website.
“We have no plane tickets to Moscow. We won’t be able to buy them until January, probably,” the state-run TASS news agency quoted an unnamed Magadan administration official as saying Monday.
The regional airport confirmed to the agency that all flights to Moscow, which run four times a week, have been booked until early January.
An unnamed administration official from the town of Susuman, 400 kilometers north of Magadan, where the man was hospitalized, told the state-run RIA Novosti news agency that he “could have died” had he not been found.
“It looks like the guy didn’t have a good understanding of what the frosts in Kolyma are like,” he was quoted as saying by RIA, using a colloquial name for the region.
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