What's new?

Graeme:
Not new tyres ;-) Apparently it's not done out here, they just keep repairing them. That's fine though.
We started the day with a good sleep in, breakfast then a great drive to Ust Nera. Most of it was seriously good. Like much better than most of the tar roads here.
We climbed to the top of a mountain pass and pulled over to put our rubbish in the bin. Bin's here are an up-ended 2M diameter concrete pipe. Oh well, it does the job. At that point Cassie noticed our 'brand name 4wd tyre' tyre leaking. nooooo. Thankfully again in the tread of the tyre. It took four plugs... but even then not fixed and 40KM out of Ust Nera. It needed refilling every 3-5KM depending on how fast we drove. Our refilling dance is enacted very quickly. I pop the bonnet, Cassie who has the hose at her feet hops out, hands me the hose end for the compressor while she heads for the tyre. The process takes five minutes, again with a similar dance we pack up as fast as possible and start driving. Towards the end we started getting smarter. We were stopping with the puncture facing the ground so it wouldn't leak while we were filling it. That probably halved our filling time. Oh how boring it is talking about tyres.

We came into Ust Nera. We called the local contact who had mysteriously said she had forgotten her 'perfect english'. Not good. We'd passed maybe 10-20 buildings, all which looked like they had just been bombed. No signs of life. After reaching the 'town limits' sign, we crossed back over the bridge and thought we would see if we could figure this out without the contact. We got directions from the first lifeform we encountered who said drive 4KM over the bridge and tyre repairer will be on your left. Across the bridge we go again, one or two more top ups we found one! Relief we thought.

The first sign that something wasn't right is the owner (lets call him Al, as in Weird Al) said Rubles and made the money gesture before he'd even seen our car. Al was not interested in dialogue surrounding what the scenario was or even how many needed fixing. We rapidly discovered that there were no new tyres in sight. None outside, none inside. Oh crap. Al took our worst tyre (the one with the gaping bulge that we know wasn't repairable) and started working on it. Oh well, might as well see what he comes up with. All this time 'Alex' a gentleman in blue/grey camouflage was working so hard communicating with us. At this stage, Al seemed to have an assistant (which was a tall rotund smokey fellow with 3 gold teeth, we'll call him Philbert). Philbert was pulling Al into line continually. Like don't say that, you're confusing them, don't be silly etc. Eventually (some 30 minutes later) after a very intensive unrelated discussion with Alex, Philbert and Alex said that Al was ind
eed weird, quite crazy in fact, and to follow them down the road to a better tyre shop. We arrived at a padlocked door protected by the 'Extra Top Security' brand of padlock. Alex, who we have adopted as a translator who still knew virtually no english had made the call - how nice. Now we wait 5 minutes.

An older gentleman arrived who looked too soft to be working in a tyre shop. The kind of man you'd imagine making doll houses. Lets call him Gipetto. He softly pointed us towards the worlds longest trolly jack. In all seriousness, it was outside, sheltered by the weather by an old door... That covered half of it. We got him started on the tyre that looked good enough to repair whilst we removed one from our car that had been leaking today. He worked very slowly and meticulously. He used the slowest grinder in the world, and waited timed amounts for glues to set etc. It was a pleasure to see a true tradesman at work. I was desperate to take photos of him working, but between Cassie needing support from the intense language forum of three men outside, and the poor lighting inside, I only got a few rubbish photos.

It turned out Philbert was waiting at Al's to get a tyre repaired and gave up on him and lead us to Gipetto. The conversations with Alex, Philbert, Dennis and Uzbekistan were full on. Everyone desperate to practice their english and engage at every opportunity. How many children do you have? How old are you? Do you live in Sydney? What do you do for a job? We feel like we must be the most annoying people, but they seem so thirsty for interaction they put up with it.

Alex would usher me away from Cassie (just out of earshot, like just on the other side of the car) for secret men's business. It's amazing how much communication is non verbal. On one occasion he gave me a microscopic vile of 'Ross' for men - eluding to the fact that this was some magic potion and the women would come flocking. The second occasion I was ushered over to a bread loaf to Alex's closest two friends and offered a very sneaky shot of Vodka without the policeman looking. The comraderie was phenomenal even though I declined maybe four times, they still thought I was cool - One of the guys!

Alex it turns out was a military man, who had served in Chechnya (spelled wrong) as a sniper. Again to highlight the non-verbal communication, you could clearly see that it tore him up. I asked how he copes sleeping? He just shook his head very slowly and purposefully with tears in his eyes. It sent chills down my spine.

At one stage, we were escorted in Philbert's car to Alex's father-in-law's house to poach his smoked fish. I'm not a big fan of seafood at the best of times, but when offered the freshly plucked fin of a smokey, entirely dehydrated 6" long fish with such enthusiasm and sense of privledge, I had to give it a go. Well as you can imagine, it tasted of filth. Dehydrated, emaciated, unhygienic filth! Wow, did I try and pretend I liked it. As we followed him back to the car with 6 of these buggers in my hand, I made sure what was in my mouth was now on the ground. Philbert helped himself to two of them as well!

It was Philbert's car (some Toyota crown mk II with no back window) that we'd taken to drive all of two blocks. Alex had climbed into the driver's seat and quietly implied that Philbert was good at driving trucks, but not fit for driving cars. Not really sure how to take that positively because he'd just driven us here, was about to drive us back and would no doubt be barreling down the highway one day towards us!

Not sure why they have all the fancy alarm systems, climate control, but no back window. PRIORITIES GUYS! They love fake woodgrain. And I don't mean like dash insert woodgrain, I mean like keyfob woodgrain. Anything that is a remote control you can be sure it's fake plastic woodgrain.

At many opportunities, they would try and take the work away from me. Not from a 'he's not doing it right' kind of way, like a 'you're my guest, I'll do that for you' kind of way.
I was finger tightening the wheel nuts when Philbert comes over tearing strips the smokey stick of death with his teeth as easy as we'd eat a chicken tenderloin. Blood all over his hands, he gave it to Cassie insisting that she has been given the best bit. She declined. He put my wheel nuts on which are now bloody and then stepped out of the way for Alex to tighten them. Amazing.

So the net result is we now have two professionally repaired tyres, one that we fixed and one that is still shagged. I think we're going to use the shagged one first, to at least ruin it for good. If it gets us 50KM, then that's 50KM we didn't have to use one of our good ones for. That, or I might salvage the tube from it one evening if I get bored. It's a decent job breaking the bead to remove the tube, so I'll need to be very bored and energetic. 2000R ~$60AUD for half a days work, one tube and some very well done patching.

This trip is the most amazing roller-coaster. I don't think one day has been plain-sailing, but as Cassie has said below, the photos and memories are terrific. We instantly forget the bad times and remember the good times for an eternity. If anyone's read Ted Simon's - Jupiters Travells, I think he takes a few months to relax to the 'it'll all work out' mentality.
We cleaned our the fridge tonight. One of the UHT milks we brought from home inflated like a balloon and started leaking. Not really sure why, but may have had something to do with altitude changes and resulting air-pressure changes. That and the inevitable blood that leaks from meat trays encased in several plastic bags! How does it do that?!

About 40KM out of town, we threw out the fish Alex had given us. Although they probably appreciated the sunlight on our dash, we did not. Sorry world, I threw out a plastic bag too :( We were offered security escort/informed that to not camp within 40KM/60KM of town by four locals and Mum D who was relaying a comment from Jon which we shall receive shortly when we post this. We have camped 70KM out town. We're not sure what the risk actually was, except maybe baddies pretending to be broken down. Our 'No stopping for strangers' policy instituted a few days ago (after the Vodka's) was in force on our drive out of Ust Nera. Whenever we saw someone stopped, we slowed down enough so as to not shower them with rocks, but just enough to get into ramming gear! I'm sure in Australia they would call that 'threatening with a dangerous weapon' but hey, I'll deal with that later. It's weird how when threatened there is a surprising wealth of fight inside you. On our limp back to Kyumbeme
, I had certainly gone through the motions in my head of how we could slip through the Vodka's pedestrian checkpoint without running them down, but without stopping. In saying that, the my plan was less sophisticated then it sounds. It was, we'll drive 'purposefully', look and sound like we're going to run you down and hope you jump out of the way!

Wow - look how much we can write when we actually have stories to tell!

Cassie: What a day! Actually, what a three day stint we've had! First the road of bones consumed all our spare tyres plus one on the car, then today on the way to Ust Nera we got another busted tyre - as Graeme has already explained so I won't go into it. Tyres are such a boring subject at the moment. I'm paranoid at every strange sound that happens and every stone that kicks up and hits the underside of the car. We're both constantly sticking our heads out the window to look at the tyres as we're rolling along. After getting the tyres repaired today we Graeme said, "No more checking tyres unless we actually do hear or feel something worth looking at them". It's a silly dance we've been doing these past few days. Ugh, we've got to drive these thousands of kilometres of sharp rocks again from Magadan! Not looking forward to that if I'm honest. I can't believe we've gone through four tyres. That's a whole set of tyres in three days! Yikes. Thanks again Jay and Corely for the ty
re repair kit. We would still be on the road of bones if it wasn't for that little kit, and we wouldn't have made it to Ust Nera today. I had tears of gratefulness in my eyes yesterday and today when we used it...seriously I did.

Well, we are definitely on our way to Magadan so we'll see what tomorrow throws at us. Hopefully it's finally a good day of driving with no problems. I'm over problems! We're totally in the adventure spirit now. It's Magadan or bust. Haha we may bust, but it won't be for lack of trying, that's for sure.

This is a tough trip. Never during the preparation and planning did we call this trip a "holiday". We knew it wasn't going to be that. At least not until we got to Europe where we could relax and pretty much have a camping/sightseeing holiday. This isn't a walk in the park, but whenever we take a breather and take stock of what we've done and where we are, and when we look back over photos and videos from previous days, we can't help but think, what an amazing adventure. How far we've come and how much it's taken from us and of us. The first part of our trip is nearly complete. To get to Magadan has always been the priority - hence TwoMagadan. We knew it would be a heck of a lot of driving. We also know we're in for a lot of back tracking on some tough roads, but we know what we're in for which is ok, and we know some great places to camp on the way back if we can find them again.

Something I do truly miss is our washing machine at home! I've washed our clothes by hand, scrubbed them to within an inch of their life in basins, showers and rivers. Between that and helping to change tyres my hands look and feel like they belong to an old babushka!

Happy 8th birthday to Charli for the 13th! We had to call you today for your birthday while we had mobile phone reception at Ust Nera.

After getting the tyres repaired, we asked Gipetto where there would be a cafe and a grocery store. Gipetto (apologies we don't know his real name!) jumped in his car and asked us to follow him because he didn't want us to get lost. He took us to this quaint little cafe that had a small grocery store right next door. We had borsh (it's the only thing we can order without a menu) and it was again different to any of the other borsh we've had on this trip so far but still yummy. Graeme then ordered a piece of cake and a tea each. As we're sitting there eating, in comes the policeman that came to the tyre place today. His wife worked at the cafe and his daughter was also there. His daughter gave me a sprig of dill as if it were a flower (nawww, so sweet!). She then gave me two little rocks shaped like love hearts and two lollies. Graeme grabbed a stuffed echidna toy from the car and gave it to her. She was going around showing everyone in the cafe then went next door to show the
lady in there. Her dad, the policeman, spoke a bit of english and said that she was very happy with her new toy. We got a photo with them which is a lovely reminder. We also wrote in the guest book at the cafe, so if any of you are going to be stopping in Ust Nera for a cuppa, you'll see our entry.

One thing we cannot find in this country is plain potato chips. Weird. We've literally bought every single different type of potato chips we can trying to find what they translate as "plain". Ended up buying crab flavour the other day. A little bit ewww really.

Thanks again everyone for your comments and for always lifting our spirits. We are continually grateful to have such lovely people in our lives. As Graeme said in a previous blog post, those who are feeling a bit too shy to leave a comment you shouldn't be. It's a great way for us to connect with you while we're so far away.

Position: 12-07-12 18:24:38 +1000 +0000
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