To say that we had a restless night would be an understatement. Here we are 1200 kms up a rough road with a broken truck, cannot speak the language and cannot even get the truck into the city where we may just have been able to find decent repair facilities. But our mood has been somewhat lightened by the folks at GXV who have given us an undertaking to essentially "do what ever it takes" to get us moving again, also by Alexander who has both helped us get organized and has taken it upon himself to guide us to the local sights of interest.

So what are the repair plans? At this point they are only tentative and there are some alternatives. The options seem to be; I fly to the US (or maybe Germany) to get parts and tools to do the repair here myself (with local help) or some GXV folks fly here with parts and tools. The complexity in the later option is that the GXV folks would need to get Russian visas - not usually a fast process. So we are still working through the options. I will post on these developments.

After the business of making plans this morning we used the afternoon to do some tourist type things. In particular a visit to a local Regional Museum (we have seen one of these in every city we have visited and they are surprisingly well done). There is understandably a lot of overlap between all the regional museums as the big national and global issues of the last 150 years have effected each region in a similar manner (the revolution and WWII being the biggies) but they each also display history of the local inhabitants. So at this museum the interest was on the Yakutia people. An asiatic looking race who came to this area about 1000 years ago bringing with them horses and a way of life that seems (at least superficially) to have strong links to the Mongols. Today the Yakutia people number a little over 900,000 and form a politically semi-autonomous group called the Sakha Republic. They occupy a region of north central Siberia about 2/3 the size of the lower 48 states of the US with Yakutsk as the capital. Based on the people we talked to, and various buildings and monuments around the town, the Yakutia people seem to have a very strong sense of identity and strong connection to their history.