Altayskoye is the kind of place a rider passes through without noticing the name, and that is the right way to treat it, with one good reason to stop. It is a large village by any standard, close to fourteen thousand people, set in the green foothills of the northern Altai where the plain begins to crumple into ridges. Belokurikha, the spa town that most visitors are heading for, lies about twenty-four kilometres away, and Starobelokurikha, a much smaller settlement, sits between the two.
Because of its size, this is where you can count on the ordinary comforts: a petrol station or two, shops, cafes serving soup and dumplings, and enough pavement to park a bike and walk for ten minutes. A hamlet in these hills may not offer any of that, so top up here before heading into the mountains. Nothing about the main street is pretty, with low houses, wooden gates and the odd Soviet block, but it has the unhurried feel of an agricultural centre where tractors share the road with the family car.
The riding around it is easy and pleasant rather than dramatic. The surface is mostly decent asphalt with some patched stretches, gradients are mild, and the corners are wide enough to let you look at the scenery, which here means fields of sunflowers and wheat giving way to birch groves and then pine on the higher ground. Summer afternoons bring heat and the occasional thunderstorm rolling off the mountains, so an early start pays off, and the light in September, with the slopes turning yellow, is the best of the year.
If you want a story to carry on with, think of the larger picture. The Altai region here sits where the Siberian plain, the Kazakh steppe and the Mongolian uplands meet, and it has been a crossing place for herders and travellers for thousands of years. The modern settlements are young by comparison, mostly grown from Russian farming colonies in the nineteenth century, and many of the place names still reflect the river and the mountains behind them. Treat Altayskoye as the practical hinge of a loop, buy a bottle of water, eat something warm, and carry on towards the hills with a full tank and a rested back.