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Old 02-14-2009, 01:44 AM
BlueGerbil BlueGerbil is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 89
February 11, 2009 - Part One

We are crawling forward with 3 mph - actually too slow. The extremely intense, hard, and bumpy winter ways do not allow higher speeds. After approximately 3 days of non-stop driving behind Ustnera (we always slept only few hours in the taiga) we reached Syrianka yesterday afternoon. We immediately started the search for a warm garage and accommodation for the night. Thanks to some friendly helpers, we succeeded in both. The garage was big enough for the vehicles and the trailers and despite Sunday break, we have been allowed to start with the check and repair of cars and trailers. Meanwhile, a part of the team bought supplies for the upcoming 1500 km to Bilibina. Konstantin organized a room for us (5 men in 3,5m x 3,5m) where we finally were able to stretch out (see Ulis notes *). Irina, the friendly, elderly matron cooked for us and in the meantime we were able to wash some things.

Matthias Jeschke

*Ulrich Kaifer
Finally a hotel

We had a small, cute apartment with one room and a small kitchen. The bathroom gave an extremely good impression. I had the honor to use it first, which I thankfully accepted - after 3 days of abstinence. In contrast to all past showers, this one had a shower cubicle. This is very helpful, because otherwise the bathroom is always totally flooded. Directly when entering the cubicle I realized my mistake. Firstly, the cubicle was not attached to the shower tray, whereas it was skewed and secondly, it was not possible to close the door completely. Gosh! Flooding again. Much worse was the fact, that the temperature of the small jet of water was only adjustable between burning hot and freezing cold. Finally wet I had to realize, that my shampoo and lotion were frozen, as they have been stored behind the back seat during the last part of the track. While getting out of the shower, I carelessly grabbed the towel bar which broke out of the wall and dashed to pieces. Finally, I left the bathroom dry, clean, and happy.

Another small misfortune was happening to me a little later. We had the opportunity to clean our dirty clothes in a washing machine. Kaspar looked after it and was astonishing quickly finished with washed but wet laundry. The washing time could not have been more than 20 minutes. The heating was not - as usual in Russia - preset to sauna temperature. I intended to change that with a red rotary knob, keeping in mind that normally the heating in Russia are working on full power - the room temperature is only adjusted by opening the windows.

The existence of a red rotary knob should have made me hesitate, but as more or less greenhorn in this area I courageously turned it up. The opening of the fairly big air relief valve resulted in a reasonably amount of really brown mud on the relatively new painted wall. I was totally puzzled, that I closed the valve even after estimated 3 seconds. I was able to clean the wall and left the slop in the room corner as it was. The damage was kept to a limit.

Afterwards we had a quite nice evening in our little kitchen. The lady at the reception made a warm dinner for us with food that we bought for that occasion. Two beers and the warm meal later I was quickly so tired that it was hard for me not to fell asleep at the table. Kaspar and I (as oldest members) have been allowed to share the bed, the others were sleeping on the floor in their sleeping bags. Unfortunately, there was only one blanket for us both, what makes me decide to make my own blanket out of two bedcovers. At the beginning that worked perfectly well as I fell asleep right away, but in the middle of the night I woke up, because I was freezing. After a hard struggle against the well-known inner temptation, I put on my sweater, was continuously freezing at my legs, and had a barely good sleep.

All in all, I was happy to experience civilization again, and about the opportunity to have a shower and sleep in a bed.
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