Day 1 - Tired

Graeme: We've setup camp in a disused gravel pit which
To summarise today, we're tired.

Driving has been absolutely mayhem. We've done 430-450 kilometers on what has varied from brand new multi-laned hotmix highways, to tracks that there is no way you would drive your everyday car on.
The road is frequented by hired drivers taking brand new cars north. Why it's more viable to put 3000KM on brand new cars on the worst roads, I don't know. That combined with the fact it's had a thorough hiding would make me think twice about buying one.

By the time you read this, you'll have a more accurate idea of our location that we do, but we suspect we're about 50KM south of the 'Kabarovskiy' region border. According to the GPS 2716KM to go... till Yakutsk. Just a side note, I'm not in the mood to spell Russian names in English, I'm just roughing it from here on.
In true fashion, I am down in the dumps on our first night. What's good about it, is it's a travel trend I've spotted over many years so I'm not too worried. As I was doing a video diary, it occurred to me that it sounded a lot like the one I made last trip... reoccurring thoughts consist of:
-What a huge waste of money for something I'm not enjoying.
-How much more satisfying it is watching others do these adventures the actually doing them ourselves... you don't see the hard times on tv.
-We've just calculated roughly 7.5 days at 400 KM/Day to Yakutsk... that's immense and depressing all at once.
-It concerns me that we're not going to relax and enjoy this trip. We could come back from this trip more exhausted than when we began.
-Cassie feels a bit down that she's not able to contribute as much to the driving. She's naturally not as confident driving my car as her own. Mine is heavy, high centred, slow and vauge. She's driven a bit today, but the traffic now too crazy for her. She'll be used to it in no time.

Not wanting to alarm anyone at home, but the driving is really risky. We'd only be doing 80kph, yet the more than ten times we've needed to drive on the shoulder to avoid oncoming traffic. It's awkward enough driving on good roads in Australia, but here with reckless traffic, it's very hard work. We just continue to go at our slow pace.
What's also funny about this traffic, and no doubt one of it's faults, is the different speeds of vehicles. One car/bike/truck will happily do 50-60kph whilst a steam of traffic builds behind it and explodes in a fit over simultaneous overtaking OFTEN three cars wide. And that's on the tar. If it's dirt and everyone is crawling along, the traffic widens further.

On a side note, the traffic in Vladivostok is brilliant. It looks like chaos, but everyone is very capable and it flows perfectly. This traffic however, is a different ball game!

With the length of daylight hours, we suspect it might be better starting later in the day, with the view to stopping about now (8PM) so that there is some shade and the heat of the day is behind us. The sun makes it too hot to stop in the middle of the day for lunch. Others before us buy lunch and breakfast... this could be why.

The point of this blog is to document the downs as well. We're going to soon have a shower, climb into bed to watch some recorded TV and have a cuppa - which will no doubt make me feel good again.

Cassie: We tried to navigate ourselves out of Vladivostok this morning, but it didn't take long before we were lost. Thankfully we had got up and ready early so were on the road by 7am before the peak hour traffic started. In the end we relented, pulled over and turned on the navigation system and we were outta there in no time. Getting lost meant we saw another part of Vladivostok that we didn't get to. We were sad to leave Vladivostok in a way. We had been there since Sunday afternoon and had begun to know our way around, where to go for good food and coffee, even where to do grocery shopping. We were also comfortable with the chaotic traffic in the end.

We're not sure if this disused quarry thing we're staying at tonight is the same one where Jon and Amanda stayed on their first night out of Vladivostok. It would be amazing if it is because we literally chanced upon this place! We were getting exhausted and decided we had better start looking for a place to stop soon before we get too tired. We saw this obscure dirt track off the "highway" and it quickly opened up into this place. It's certainly not the nicest place on earth and we'll hopefully find better camps from here on, but it's a good start considering we're not yet remote enough to be choosy about our camp spots.

On the menu tonight is some marinated chicken and cooked tomatoes. Not sure what the marinade is on the chicken because it's in Russian but it looks and smells good. Graeme's being chef tonight while I type this up. Then later maybe a cup of tea and chocolate.

Today has been quite hot and tiring so it's lovely to be sitting here in the shade with a slight breeze, smelling our food cooking, sipping cold water and unwinding. It was impossible to find water to fill up our water tanks today. No fuel station has a tap or anywhere that allows you to do this simple task. In the end, out of desperation we pulled into a fuel station, I grabbed one of the 20L water containers out of the car along with a little drinking bottle of water. I then asked the station attendant if we could fill up our water containers with drinkable water by miming drinking from the water bottle and tapping the 20L container. He didn't say a word or smile, he just nodded and indicated I should follow him. He took me to the car wash office and asked the guy in there if he would fill up the 20L container for us. I then indicated we had two of them and the car wash guy was too happy to do this for us. He came out with the bottles brimming with beautiful clear water. Ma
gic! We're not taking any chances though, we're still running the water through the filter.

It's amazing how closely our experience is mirroring that of people who have traveled this route before us. It's to the point where we feel like we're copying their words and photos but we're seriously not meaning to. We're just telling it how it is.

It's starting to cool down now and that's seemingly one awesome thing about the Russian summer we've experienced so far. Once the morning fog clears the summer days have been sunny and beautiful. The wonderful thing so far is that the evenings seem to cool down nicely. Well, that was the case in Vladivostok, and hopefully that continues to be the case.


Position: 12-06-29 18:39:30 +1100 +0000
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