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| Sailing lads on the road...Joe, Rob, Gordie, in Vladivostok, 8 May 2013 |
[Second part of this trip report is here]
We're now in Krasnoyask, which you can see on the map below, Siberia's third-largest city.
So, we're about half-way on our current drive across Russia: Vladivostok to Moscow. 10,000 km, give or take.
The idea was Rob Bottomley's, a Yorkshire-based sailing buddy of Xena crewmate Gordon ("Gordie") Ketelbey, with whom I also did the Cape to Cairo Rally in 2011. Rob is here with his son and fellow sailor Joe. Yorkshire lads.
We're in a Toyota Voxy that we (Rob and Gordie, that is) bought in Vladivostok, a right-hand drive number imported from Japan, for which the aim is to sell her in Moscow. She's no Land Cruiser, but a plucky road warrior for all that.
While the Trans-Siberian Railway has been in place for century or more the road through has only recently been completed -- the last bit, the Zilov Gap, driven by Putin in 2009, in one of his he-man stunts. By the way, and for what it's worth, no Russian in the Far East or Siberia has had a nice thing to say about the he-man...
Since the road has only recently(ish) been completed, there's very few who have done the trip by car. In most of the places we've stopped we're the first tourists they've seen, and we ourselves didn't see another tourist till Ulan Ude, 3,800 km west of Vladivostok (in between Irkutsk and Chita on the map below).
And what's this "treacling" business?? Answer later (maybe; I'll see how I feel)...
As always, click on the photos to enlarge.
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| This map says "Early 20th Century", but nothing much has changed on the rail since then, other than the new BAM railway north of Lake Baikal. The Road more or less follows the train's track. Newby writes about it amusingly in "The Big Red Train Ride" of 1978. |
