78KM north of Tynda

Graeme:
Cassie's currently preparing dinner. Tonight it's bacon burgers with fries. Healthy I know! So far the rain is just holding off long enough to cook. A cool fog has developed over the water.
We've struggled to find decent meat as most of it is frozen and looks like a cross-section of a leg... just above the ankle.
Tomorrow at Tynda, we plan to upload our photos and videos from the internet cafe. Exciting times.

Cassie:
Despite how Graeme described our dinner, it was actually quite healthy with vegies on the burgers and the "fries" were just strips of potato cooked in the pan.

There's really not much to write about today. It's been a fairly mundane day, just driving along heading towards Tynda. The roads have been potholed like crazy but they were in the same condition on the way up. Perhaps the recent rain in the area has made it slightly worse. Because of the rough roads these past few days we're struggling to make any decent distance which is a little bit frustrating as late afternoon comes around, we've been driving all day and only done 200km at 20-50kph. Yes, the roads are that rough.

Again, the cabinet in the car has shaken loose so will have to be fixed again. I think that's going to be a ritual every few days until we get onto some smoother roads. Graeme is continually jumping at every new sound the car makes, which is understandable but exhausting him (and me!) at times. I told him this afternoon that he's to stop it, stop listening for new noises unless it actually sounds like it could be something we need to fix. I don't care about new rattles, I'm sure us and the car are going to come home with a few more squeaks and rattles and there's nothing we can do about it. We had a bit of a laugh that my new "rule" could mean something important has broken on the car and we've just ignored it because I said so. Oh well, I'm sure Graeme's not going to stop picking up on every new noise, so that's not a concern. And I'm sure we'll have this conversation many more times along our journey.

It's nice to be driving towards civilisation again if I'm honest. The remote parts of Siberia have breathtaking scenery, but the same cannot be said for the towns as I'm sure we've already covered in previous blog posts. It's kind of comforting to be driving through a town and seeing multiple businesses that could be useful to us rather than realising that the collapsing building across the dirt road with all the rubbish piled around it is the one you're looking for.

As Graeme mentioned, tomorrow's plan is to try and find an internet cafe in Tynda that'll be useful for us to upload some more stuff to the blog and get some supplies. From there we'll head down to Chita. Our road atlas that we bought in Vladivostok says that it's the current 2012 edition, but that's been very questionable a number of times on this trip. It's missing roads that are actually there in real life and still says that some roads are under development when in fact they're completely finished. So, according to our road atlas, the highway doesn't link up to Chita yet and you have to take a whole heap of goat tracks from just after Tynda to get there. I'm thinking that's not the case because when we were heading from Vlad towards Tynda, the beautiful highway we were hooting along had signs to Chita. I think our plan is to just head back down to that highway and see if it connects up to the one to Chita. It would be awesome if we could be treated to those wonderful road
s again. Even if we just had a day or so of it would be wonderful before driving the "roads", or from what I've seen and heard a better way to describe them would be "meandering dirt tracks", in Mongolia.

It feels great to be going in the direction of Mongolia. I'm looking forward to seeing new towns and roads within the next few days once all our backtracking is done.