Episode 11

Just to inform everyone that we made it out of Russia on due date, whoopie!! In the end we had a good run from Tyumen departing there at 3.30am on Tuesday 18th and arriving in Irkutst, 3200k's later just before miday on Friday 21st June. What a relief. Despite being told on the phone that the visa office closed at midday it stayed open all afternoon, my humans put in for their Mongolian visas there and then and got the urgent expensive ones by 3.30pm the same afternoon. They could have opted for a cheaper version and collected them on Monday at 3pm but D didn't want to drive into Irkutsk again, once was enough for him so we waited and collected them same day. It seems that stuffed toys like me still don't need passports and visas for which L is very thankful.

The trip was sort of uneventful, David drove for a few hours then would stop and have a rest or a sleep then carry on again. With it being daylight most of the time, and the sun rising soon after 4am and not setting until 10pm or later there wasn’t really any night time driving and we all tried to sleep through the darkest hours though that didn’t always happen as we got caught up on a bad road in one region and put with a 2 hour time change it meant we camped just on midnight.

The traffic was heavy and slow with trucks averaging no more than 75k’s per hour, and that was good until we got to Novosibirsk after that they seem to lessen somewhat, then from Kemerovo there was very few until we neared Irkutsk where there was plenty again. It’s the trucks and bad roads combined that really make the going slow and difficult. Getting past them can be hazardous, and often when David hit a pot hole I would fall forward onto the coffee cups, empty fortunately and L would have to prop me back up again. I should be well and truly concussed.

The countryside was flat steppe from Yekaterinburg all the way to Novosibirsk. There is much broad acre agriculture with wheat and or barely being grown, after crossing the river at Novosibirsk it become a little hilly then after Kemerovo much more hills with a pass about 50k’s east of this city. There is some coal mining in this region and we saw several long coal trains. Krasnoyarsk was smothered in thick smog. There is also coal mining in this region.

L says her mind boggles when she thinks of the amount of wheat and barley Russia must now produce, we have seen it growing for the last 6000k’s. It’s not continuous by any means but the farming belt is probably 500k’s to several thousand k’s wide in places. That’s one hell of a lot of grain, and there are still vast areas of cleared land untilled.

As you know this was a rushed trip so we didn’t have any time for the niceties of sightseeing. Omsk was the only major city we drove through there being no ring road. Apart from a major traffic jam that took us hours to negotiate we didn’t see anything else only the gold domes of the cathedral off in the distance.

With those visas in hand we then went back 110k's to Mikalovka and visited the friends from our previous trip. The older woman's husband had died back in May so we were taken to visit his grave and also that of Maxim who had helped my humans in 1998, he was killed in 2004 and his father had died exactly one year after L and D left in 1998. We, me too, I had met them last year when David called in, spent a wonderful day with these people, the youngest girl came home from her job in Irkutsk especially to see us and another sister came along too, but only because her baby, 7 months old had been taken to the hospital for some reason. L will endeavour to find out if the baby is now well again.

Mikailovka is on the trans-Siberian train line, the local station has a special name as it’s exactly halfway between Moscow and Vladivostok.

We left Mikailovka on afternoon of 23rd and made a fairly easy trip around Baikal to Ulan Ude and on to the Mongolian border. At one point we drove down to the lake shore, not easily done along this route where the trans-Siberian train line runs between the road and the lake shore. I was sat on the sandy shore and had my photo taken quickly as the strong bitterly cold wind kept blowing me over. For a lake it was very rough. D had filled up our water bottles from a nearby village well, that water was even colder, liquid ice, so D said as it sprayed over him.

Lake Baikal is the largest fresh water lake in the world, it is renowned for its very clear water and cold temperature. The southern part of the lake has become polluted from the industrial city of Irkutsk 50k’s from it’s shore.

The closest Mongolian border crossing we had considered, some 300k’s from Irkutsk, L was told, when she asked at the consulate in Irkutsk, is not open to foreigners so we still had another 700k’s from here to Ulan Ude and on to the Mongolian border..

As for the car it still has some problems. After the mechanics fixed the wheel bearings in Tyumen it seems that they have upset the sensor on the ABS for that wheel and it has a squeak now and again but seems to be working OK. The air suspension pump seems to be coping thank goodness. A bit more of Heather’s nightie was used to appease the local spirits as a prayer flag on a shrine not far from the Mongolian border, perhaps that’s why we got there OK.

Took us about 3.5 hours to cross the border into Mongolia on 25th:

Now L with have to transfer the photo’s from the camera before posting this blog.

© Lynette Regan 27th June 2013