Altogether we stayed a full week in Barnaul waiting for mail Borut had kindly posted in Perth for us. I have to say the staff at he Barnaul Hotel proved to be unbelievably helpful in retrieving our parcel (which Post Australia was not, actually that was quite a frustrating ‘customer service’, or rather ‘non-service’ experience). Once we had communicated that we were waiting for a delivery receptionists called the Russian Postal Service to find out about the whereabouts of the parcel containing some 4WD goodies and did the best they could to get things going. Meanwhile we enjoyed living in a clean modern hotel room which was for our standards unprecedented luxurious, i.e. the bathroom appliances did not fall off the wall and there was hot water all day around :o))))) The price for the room was one of the most economic we had come across on our tour and so we took the time to relax, read books, go for coffees, do some internetting, plan the route to get back to Europe and to sample Russian food-stalls (restaurants are really expensive and our budget did not include any extras given that we stayed in a hotel).
However, we were glad once we got the parcel to able to head off. In Barnaul we had decided to drive first a bit up north to go around Kasachstan and then head west along the Southern border of Russia via Omsk, Kurgan, Ufa, Saratov and then stay a day in Volgograd before reaching the border to the Ukraine. The weather was by now surprisingly chilly and every night was below 0° degrees hence we had to skip our plans to enjoy some more camping. As a consequence we stopped over in truck stops and motels the numbers of which were increasing as this was a major truck route through Russia. I have to say from now on accommodation deteriorated significantly until we reached Poland with the exception of Volgograd. There were many deserted army barracks on the way which served as privately run ‘motels’. The little huts with a communal ‘bathroom’ and two or three bedrooms/dorms were often arranged like satellites and connected by a pipe system delivering hot water for showers and heating. One camp was situated in a copse and enclosed by a fence, to enter the compound and get to the administration office you had to pass a turnpike and fill out a form with a stern looking military-clad guy. Usually, there hardly was more furniture other than a table and some beds and chairs in a room. For the sake of the experience and because the better-looking truck stops were often fully booked we stayed in one for a night. By the looks of it, in this army barrack they had not even bothered to change the mattresses which were really a bit disgusting and very likely the original mattresses – good thing we had the sleeping bags and hence did not have to touch the mattress and the linen :o)
To go easy on the budget we planned to do the last bit of driving through Russia in a week which basically meant doing around 600-800k’s a day, with an average speed out of town around 80-90Ks. The road conditions were most of the time good, even with some stretches of Autobahn in between, but still it was a hard drive and we had to pull long hours sometimes driving for 10 to 12 hours.
Of course with this schedule we were less inclined to stop and cook therefore we fed mainly on the widely available goulash. It is usually the most economic option, the quality and the meat contents vary greatly and it is either served with bread and rice or pasta or, that was a bit odd, fries.
We drove once more for a while through Siberia and had one of the most surprising encounters on the whole journey. While we were taking a nature break a large 4WD truck honked and once the inmates left the car we were staggered to realize that we had met these guys, father and son, before when driving from Khabarovsk to Chita in Far Eastern Russia where they had stumbled in a road side café with their pet-snake Jeanette. How weird is that to meet the same people twice in a time period of 7 weeks in a different place in a vast landscape such as Siberia!?! They had easily recognized Melville, couldn't believe and stopped. After a big hello, we each made some pictures. Such Lovely guys, as a farewell present they gave us a CD of a Russian singer and we gave them some German schnapps in return.
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