Our run through the Altai mountains was a bit too fast, but the weather was against us again and it started to rain on our second day in Russia, it was only patchy, but enough for us to put our wet weather gear on. The views as we passed through the mountains were spectacular with rugged snow capped mountains as back drops to deep valleys with rivers flowing fast in them. We didn't think the still camera would capture the views and relied on our helmet camera to capture everything for us, thinking that a video of us moving through the scenery would give more scope to how big it all was. Unfortunately our helmet camera let us down again and we got nothing, we did take one photo of the mountains and it doesn't capture it. We decided to find a camping spot in the afternoon and we found a great spot on a massive river in a pine forest and fortunately it even had a shelter and toilet. It was fortunate because in the morning it was raining and we decided to sit it out in the shelter, but is rained all day and into the night. By the morning it had stopped long enough for us to pack and leave. The road followed this river for a long time and it was very evident that this was a popular holiday destination and with it being the summer holidays there were cars and people everywhere. There were people camped along the river, there were holiday chalets, cabins, homes and shops all along the river and road and there were lots of expensive European cars on the road. We headed north to Barnaul were we found ourselves a hotel because it was raining and had done all day making the run very dangerous as the Russian drivers appear to only use the road rules as a guide. Even when it was raining too hard to have good visibility they would overtake whenever they couldn't see headlights coming the other way and even then that wouldn't stop them, they would simply push their way back into the cue of cars when the approaching car got too close and if you are on a motorbike they just expect you to move over and make room for them, it was crazy. Once at Barnaul we were well out of the mountains and into farming land so with rain on us again we pushed on to Novosibirsk where we stopped to get a new rear tyre and Ben a new front tyre. Fortunately we were given directions to this bike shop because it was right at the end of a road in an industrial park hidden by weeds, but they had what we needed. We were late getting back on the road so we found a great hotel/truck stop to stay at. We had been told about these places by a British couple back at the Oasis in UB. The next day we had some light showers and camped with a horde of massive mosquitos west of Omsk, they were that bad that we set up the tent with fly nets over our heads and all our riding cloths on, including gloves, minus helmets! From there we have been doing around 500Ks a day, the roads and traffic have been that bad that we don't want to do anymore. One 50K section through the Ural mountains we saw, men cleaning up the front parts of a car off the road, presumably from an accident, a truck with its trailer hanging off the side of the road on the verge of rolling over, a burnt out truck, a truck with its front wheel and hub off, an ambulance in attendance to some people in cars, a truck stop in the middle of the road, presumably broken down, a tyre blow out on a truck right in front of us and numerous cars and trucks pulled over for overheating, it was 35 degrease! And we have never seen so many cars and trucks, at times it is just a continues line of trucks for kilometres and for some reason, most of the time they are only doing around 70K or less in a 110k zone so cars just pull out and start passing traffic until they have to move back in, when they trust someone to make room, and it's not just one or two cars, at times there are two lanes of traffic going the same way on a two lane road! Sorry for another long blog, but we don't get WI-FI too often.