McBorsh

Cassie:
Yesterday was not a very good food day. Breakfast was some bland cereal, lunch was at a "cafe" and was literally a leg of chicken and a ball of mince meat, a plate of plain rice and two extremely sugary teas (I don't have sugar in my tea but managed to drink it). I didn't realise that the food was sitting in plastic tubs behind the counter and after ordering, the guy picked up one of the mince balls with tongs and plopped it on a plate, then whacked on the leg of chicken (again, just sitting unrefrigerated in a plastic tub), whacked it in the microwave for maybe a minute. So we "ate" this stuff which was only luke warm at most. I thought for sure we were going to be sick later, but thankfully not. Stomachs of steel! Dinner was going to be meat with mash potato, zucchini and gravy but I ended up throwing the meat out before I even cooked it because it looked disgusting, not gone bad, just part of a leg of some animal (ewww, very sinewy and tough with animal hairs still stuck t
o it. Call me a city gal I don't care, but I like my meat packed onto a tray and not resembling the animal it came from and feeling like I'm finishing off the job of slaughtering it to prepare it for cooking). So dinner ended up being a can of kidney beans, zucchini and mash potato with gravy. Maybe it sounds ok to some, but it looked like a dog's breakfast and was a little bit gross. So yes, a bad food day. This morning Graeme told me that he dreamed about McDonald's last night and woah, so did I!! Weird! My dream was that we were driving through a town and I saw the golden arches, then noticed a sign that said "Drive Through". I then said to Graeme "Let's just swing through drive through and get something to eat", to which he replied "Nah, let's give it a miss". Naturally in my dream I was like "What, why!?". And that was the end of the dream. I've never dreamed about McDonalds in my life and wouldn't rate it as dream worthy, but nevertheless, we were both obviously cravin
g something we knew we could actually eat. Since coming to Russia we've been jokingly referring to borsh as "McBorsh" for some silly reason. Probably because it's something that we consistently order. They are good though.

Today has been about 200km of driving. It's only 3.30pm and we've stopped to setup camp for the day. It's still raining on and off so the dirt roads are still sloshy and more potholed than ever. We drove in on these roads and they were fine, they're all torn up by the rain and traffic now. It's rough, slow going and we're both exhausted from it. We've deliberately stopped before a stretch of maybe 100km of roadworks. We're going to tackle that when we're fresh tomorrow because it was extremely rough going on the way up when it wasn't raining. Goodness knows what we're in for tomorrow due to the rain. It'll be fine, it'll just be a long day.

The car is completely caked with three different colours of mud on the outside. Looks like a bit of an artwork. It's going to be tough trying to clean it because it's set like concrete. The front wheels get a bit of a wobble up every now and then as if they're out of balance, but it's maybe because there's so much mud on the rims. There's no point taking the wheels off to clean it off just yet, may as well wait until we've past the muddy roads. We just make sure we stop and clean the windows and headlights when we can. Wish we had a high pressure hose, nothing else is really going to do the trick.

This morning we stopped at the town on the banks of the Lena River opposite Yakustk. Sorry, I can't for the life of me pronounce the name of it, let alone translate it into english (our road atlas is in Russian). We needed a rubber bush for one of the shock absorbers because it had shredded to bits from the bumpy roads. Went to the first car parts shop that was open and was quickly met with a "nyet" when we asked for the car part, even though the person was standing in front of a row of shock absorbers as he declined us. That's ok, our spirits were not dashed. We're getting used to the first answer being a no. So off we trotted to the next one that was open. Originally that was met with a "nyet" also, but then the guy had an idea, grabbed a shock absorber off the shelf, pointed to the part on it we needed to clarify that was it. Yep, we nodded, that's it. We asked for three (a pair and a spare), and he then proceeded to pull some shock absorbers apart just to get those rubber
rings off for us! Lol, what the!? Anyway, 30 roubles (AUS$0.90) and two Australian coins later (5c and 10c coins), we had the part we needed.

Quite a few Russians have asked us for an Australian coin. We're starting to run out. Didn't think of bringing more with us to give away as souveniers to the locals. There's a tip if anyone wants it, carry some Australian coins with you when you travel and you'll make friends easily. Doesn't have to be large denominations, they just seem to be happy to be holding an Australian coin. And they almost always will exchange it for a Russian coin even though my purse is full of them and I'm trying desperately to get rid of some, they insist that we take their Russian coin in exchange for the Australian one.

Still in the town, and buoyed by our positive experience at the car shop, we went across the road to a lovely little cafe and had some teas and crepes with sweetened condensed milk (oh so yum), then into the a small supermarket for more supplies. I'm really glad we got to explore that town a little bit. It looked kind of interesting on the way to Yakutsk. The people were really sweet there too. One of the ladies in the cafe followed me as I was leaving because she wanted to ask me if we were Australian (spot on! How'd she guess, normally they say "Americano" to which I reply "Nyet nyet, Australian!". Don't know why but 9 times out of 10 people then give out a big "oh right!" kind of sound then say "Kangaroo dah?" It's getting quite funny how many times that's happened). Before I'd even got to the door of the cafe, the lady had already gone back to her workmates and was giggling away repeating our "conversation". They love to have a good giggle in this part of Russia which is
great to see and be involved in.

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Replies to comments (apologies if I haven't replied to your comment here, I'm losing track of where we're up to with this):

Brett: We'll try and get a picture of the rocks up on the blog, but it may have to wait until we get to a hotel with wifi. I'm sure your friend would love to examine all the rocks in these parts. There's certainly no shortage of them!

MumD: Thanks for the info on Kadykchan. We're missing the internet as an info resource and would love to know more about all of these places we're traveling through.

Nora/MumD/Chris: Just reporting that Graeme is still doing the washing up...and is currently having a nanna nap.
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Graeme: Yep - all the above. I'd not call it a nanna nap (a bit feminine!), but rather an hour power nap or something more manly. Also to Brett, I tried to MMS you one of the pictures but no success. I'm going to upload it with this post 'because you're worth it'. The image should be geotagged if that helps your friend. Four more pictures are coming once we get wifi's.We had the most fantastic Borsh for lunch today - hot, heaps of vegies and meat. Brilliant! I felt a bit sad knowing that once we leave Russia, the Borsh will be no more. It reminds me of that intro to 'An idiot abroad' where Karl is worried about visiting China for fear that he may develop a taste for Toad, and not be able to source it in England.

We decided to only do a real short today today and met our 200KM quota and plan to spend the day and evening doing nothing. It's been wonderful so far. Cassie just finished her book and I'm going to start assembling videos to upload when we have a chance. What do people want to see? Be mindful we're only posting politically correct content on the internet. As they say, anything written on the Internet is done in pen. Most of the footage is of driving (boring) or ranting (politically incorrect) but we'll see what we come up with. I'm torn between putting up all the good bits and risk having nothing good to show you all when we get home. It's a little bit laborious working with video because I don't have the skills to use anything more than the most basic editing package... which often crashes half way through rendering projects.

We've got a day of roadworks tomorow, so it felt fitting to just knock that over in a day because camping within it's bounds will be rare and noisy.
Since leaving Magadan, we've been carrying less fuel. Rather than filling both tanks, we're only filling the main tank and only putting excess fuel we've ordered into the sub tank. We're doing this for a few reasons:
1) Fuel is much more readily available, so carrying less weight means less strain on suspension and better economy.
2) The second tank hangs behind the rear differential, so keeping it only 1/4 full means all the weight isn't at the back of the car. I visited a weighbridge before we left found that when fully loaded, the majority of the weight was on the rear axle. I can't remember the exacts but I think it was 1.2T front and 1.7T rear. This could be a contributing factor to our tyre failures which have all been at the rear.

I've noticed most of my posts are fairly technicial, but hey, I have to talk to someone about this stuff.

Where we have pulled up today, we noticed a bread loaf in one corner so we idled to the other corner keeping our distance, assuming the driver might be sleeping. Well as it turns out, there were 6 or 7 people in there. Wow, we thought it was stuffy in here! We also have 1.2 trillion (about 6) microscopic bugs in here which fly around rapidly in 1" holding patterns in front of your eyes. Just enough to annoy, but not enough to warrant their immediate death.