At 8:30 Alexander knocked on the camper door to get us up and moving. I accepted his offer of coffee and we spent an interesting period consuming the coffee, looking at off road pictures on his computer, and talking to each other via Google Translate. One of the pictures he showed me was of an off road event in China and two H1 Hummers with Chinese plates. He also offered to give me one of his USB-Wireless Broadband chips and to help us buy a month-by-month data plan for it. So Alexander, two sons (one teenage and one pre school) piled into the truck and we made the short drive into the center of town.
Getting the plan for the wireless broadband proved a little challenging even with Alexander's help but was eventually done; so now we have a limited internet connection whenever there is cell reception. Frankly I should have thought of this a lot earlier.
In the street where we had parked Alexander introduced me to one of his friends who it seemed was to lead us out of town - eventually I understood that there was a special truck route we had to follow and that the obvious main road out of town was closed to heavy vehicles.
The remainder of the day we spent covering miles (or kms) on a good quality paved road.
We picked one of the road side rest areas near the town of Ushumun for our nights stop. When we pulled in there were two small trucks parked there, one with 3 fuel barrels in the tray and another was a small fuel tanker and the drivers where sitting in the sun talking. We wondered what was going on. It did not take long to find our as vehicles pulled up to take on fuel from these guys. Small vehicles (like cars, vans and small trucks) were sold fuel from one of the drums and large trucks got fuel from the tanker. Now fuel stops are relatively scarce on this section of the highway but not so scarce as to be a problem for most vehicles. We guessed it was some kind of black market operation.