Underestimated

Hello. I’ve just finished reading a blog of a two couples who are from Brisbane.

http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog/threeinatruck/1/tpod.html

It seems I’ve underestimated the kind of road that the road of bones is. It’s doable, but it’s not just going to be a gravel road with a few rocky river crossings. I’ve borrowed all of these pictures from their blog, so consider this me referencing them.

I imagined more of this:

… and NOT so much of this.

The other good thing about this blog, is we now have some clear distances between Vladivostok and Magadan…. 5000KM, two to three weeks of driving or roughly four weeks since arriving in Vladivostok. The road to Magadan is effectively a figure-eight. Meaning there are four segments, allowing you to swap roads mid way if you have a failure or have had enough. It also has the advantage of us not retracing exactly the same steps to and from Magadan (that could get boring)

The white truck above arrived into Magadan with no brakes… relying on the handbrake. To be honest, I can’t quite get my head around all of the mechanical failures. From what I understand, they have had FOUR flat tyres. And they don’t look like the cheap all-terrain tyres that came on our truck, these look like top of the line brand name off road tyres! It does look like they are carrying more weight than us and it turns out that the brake failures were due to a damaged brake line due to some after-market air-bag suspension. We’re they running lower pressures? Should they have been driving slower? One of the cars (the bogged maroon v8 turbo land cruiser) was AVERAGING 105KM/Hr one day. Not on this road, but on some highway closer to Mongolia. Oh my god that’s still crazy.

So to summarise, I’ve underestimated:
How long shipping and customs clearance will take
How much time the travel will take
The distances involved we must travel
How many failures to expect

Good news is that they used the same shipping company. It’s so important to use a Russian company as the days of paperwork on the ground in Russia is immense and I would say impossible to translate and organise without their local knowledge.

So, enough about them. What's new with us? Well, not a great deal. Since recovering the Rodeo last weekend, my headlights, taillights, and indicators all had condensation in them to some degree. The degrees ranged from a light haze to our own portable river ecosystem.
Here they are, all washed and drying in the sun. So much for ‘semi-sealed’ globes, there is a huge gap at the bottom even with the rubber boot on all the way.

Sealed it up. The roof rack has now been emptied. I’m still yet to discover the source of the leak in one of the boxes, but I will. I’m trying to work out the logistics of how we get the car packed and unpacked from the shipping container. The roof rack needs to be taken off to fit in the container. Apparently they deliver the car to your hotel… so that alludes to them putting the roof rack on?! I’m not sure if they will eh. It seems the boxes and hi-lift will actually fit in the back of the car, but with the rack, I may have to dissemble it entirely and pack it in the car. No great big deal, but it’s probably an hour’s work to assemble it again.

Here is a new idea for securing the flyscreen mesh over the grille. It was taped in place before, and although the tape stuck to the grille, It wouldn’t stick successfully to the flyscreen (I’m a slow learner ok!).
It’s tough aluminium flyscreen, so it does bend over the back side and the clip just holds it still.