Dusk to Dawn

It’s been tight situations, early mornings, sleeping debt, cool terrain, new people, wheel turning, blood, sweat and tears for the past couple of days. Let’s start with Chita.

We warmed up the engines on Wednesday night and left towards unknown Siberia. I hoped Siberia isn’t going to teach us. The Amur road wasn’t on the map and we heard from many people that it is in bad shape. The road goes near to Amur river that is on the Russian-Chinese border. There was more bad news as the boat company had cancelled the ferry that we were supposed to take to Japan. Other than that we had three thousand kilometres to Vladivostok. It was looking less than promising.

We did some two hundred kilometres through the awesome scenes of Siberia until it was too dark to drive. We had to camp up and grill the normal meal of cat food fish from the can. The night was bloody cold, in the morning I had to scrape Nipu’s windows. The day was going to be all driving with minimum stops, almost up to the point of soiling the pants. We were able to put almost 700 kilometers behind us on the road that was changing from tarmac to gravel to sand and bumbs. In the evening the same ritual, can food special.

On the next day we did over seven hundred and got close to the city of Khabarovsk. At this point the weather started changing. As Siberian early autumn’s cold air was dropping the first leaves off the trees the Russian far east still lives in the late summer. The temperature is 25 degrees of celcius, the leaves are green and the nights are warm as well as the water. Not bad, had to find the shorts from the furthest corner of Nipu. Time to sweat again.

On the Saturday morning we came to Khabarovsk. It is right next to Amur and something like 25 kilometers from China. I noticed on the way that there are watchmen on the bridges, like in good old Soviet Union. The city looks European, the buildings are like the ones in St.Petersburg and the streets are like Frisco. We went around for a bit. There were some locals hanging around Nipu a couple of times, laughing at the car, it’s bald tires and us. They were pretty interested in the trip, though. When we were leaving some guy came along and started to ask all the normal questions. He called his friend there and they asked if we need a garage. At that point we only needed a filter for the car since it was drinking faster than Toni downed vodka. The guy offered to find us a new part with his car. He speeded us to some car shop and found us the spare part. He insisted to pay for is. We started to feel a bit suspicious.

We were getting ready to leave for the second time but as the guy invited to his cousins place to eat we didn’t dare to say no. We ate delicious borsch with vodka, and some coffee and cookies. After that we dropped the cars at their garage and went to buy beer and snacks. The guys turned out to be real nice and genuine, so we got to have another garage party, a bit different than the first one. Ville found new love in 8% beer. We spent the night at the garage talking and tinkering Nipu. The guys couldn’t believe it made this far. Later we crashed at Igor’s place.

We were planning to leave early in the morning but it took us longer than expected. We had lost Patrol keys during the night and had to broke in through the side window. It went smoothly until I was taking the back bag out and the window fell on the ground and broke. We fixed it with some tape and a plastic bag. We said goodbyes to our new friend Igor and Ivan and left for Vladivostok. The trip took another day and a half and we got to spend some time again with the militia jerks. Not a big hassle though.

So, now we are at Vladivostok. It took us five days to get here from chita. We heard we could take a boat of a different company on Tuesday. There is some trouble ahead as we heard that we need to take the cars through customs. Wonderful, we have been running around custom offices and travel offices and have achieved nothing yet. If we can’t get these things settled we will miss the boat and have to wait for a week. This custom stuff will also cost us another 300 euros. It isn’t always that simple, lets see if we can come through.