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Old 02-25-2009, 12:34 PM
BlueGerbil BlueGerbil is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2008
Location: Germany
Posts: 89
February 11, 2009: (2)

There was no time where we didn?t receive hospitality and helpfulness from the Russian population. It will be very difficult up to impossible without those friendly Russian helpers. You suddenly need a special tool, welding equipment, a lathe, a garage or whatsoever. At this point we want to say thank you again to everybody who we were glad to meet and who helped the expedition team directly or indirectly - we are really grateful.

The next evening we continued our journey with a 380 km long and stressful drive on the Kolymar River. This mogul piste covered with ice holes - a result of air blisters which have been crushed by passing trucks ? was a challenge. Numerous times the tires broke through, into little razor-sharp ice caps and we drove through them, ran over stones and trunks etc. That we did not have any tire damages so far, neither with our PNY-Jeeps nor with the trailers, encourages my opinion that we definitely have the best off road tire in the world with us on that expedition - The Goodyear Wrangler MT/R.

It took us 16 hours for this nonstop driving in -50? C - where we crossed the arctic circle as well - until we finally and totally exhausted reached Schritnikolimsk, a little village in the middle of nowhere. Within minutes after our arrival we were welcomed by townsfolk and journalists. It is a really nice little village built out of wood on the bank of the Kolymar River. It is clean and the tiny little houses are mostly beautifully presented. That this tiny village ? where they have winter nine month a year ? even has town privileges results from the time of Katharina II as we heard.

Due to the extreme winter tracks that demands everything from us and the PNY-Jeeps we have to stop every couple 100 km for checks and repairs. Luckily we once more had a little garage with a temperature of around 0?C, where we were able to do the necessary work.

If anyone asks about the tracks we are driving, there is only one thing to say: Every ordinary off road vehicle would already have failed at the slope angle without e.g. a broken bumper etc. You can hardly explain how destructive those tracks are. Thousand of holes and bumps, high ripples, trunks and branches, steeply up and down rides in riverbeds and much more while we are additionally dragging the trailers behind us. Everybody knows, that this is not possible until the end without any damages. We just did not know when the first big problem would occur. Of course it was possible any time near under these conditions and then - tonight - it happened. It happened in a narrow pass around 50 km after Schritnikolimsk. High taluses with a height of up to 1m left and right, so narrow that only one PNY-Jeep at a time was able to drive through the way which was covered with high ripples and fractures. We tried to drag our trailers ? driving in first gear with gear reduction - as I saw my trailer through the rear-view mirror with the front pointing to the sky. Firstly I thought the trailer coupling broke but that was not the case. It was the frame where a part was broken off. Now we had to improvise very quickly due to the coldness and Ural-trucks waiting behind and in front of us to drive through. We built a kludge out of tension belts and cleared the street within one hour dragging ourselves in the scarp 300 meters further.

After the Ural-trucks passed we had to make a difficult turn in order to drive back slowly towards a small village named Nalimsk which we passed 30 km before. We asked the mayor of that little village where only traditional people from Jakutia live in line with the nature, if he knows somebody who can provide us with welding equipment or maybe directly weld something for us. He told us, that there is only one possibility the next morning and invited us to stay overnight in his mayor room. Ulrich Kaifer, Kaspar Mettler, Marco Schwarzer und Konstantin Savva slept between chairs, flags and tables while I slept in the PNY-Jeep to make sure that the engines ran smoothly in the -50? C cold environment.

The next morning, we received the repair possibility as promised by the mayor. Ivan, an employee of the local coal-fired power plant took us to his place. He had a little transformer to run a welding machine. After he spread furs underneath the trailer and created a frame out of a steel door box he began to weld. It took him the whole day for the repair and the preventive measures ? of course outdoor as they do not have any garages there. In the meantime he invited us to tea and cookies even to horsemeat afterwards. Due to the extensive amount on horse intestines in that meat it was not easy for some of our team members to finish the plate off, which the nice mother in law loaded brimful. At around 5 p.m. we were going to leave and when we slowly and carefully drove down the main street of the village more and more children, juveniles and adults showed up. They even waved out of their windows while they were watching us.
We had to stop several times to explain, take pictures or let them sign the PNY-Jeeps. They even baked bread for our 700 km long way to Tscherskie which we will have to drive in walking pace. It just started snowing when we finally left.







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