The past three days have been a real test of patience and endurance as we picked our way along 1000km of rough roads to arrive at tonights camp near the village of Solov'yosk a mere 45 km from the southern end of the M56 (or the Lena Highway, the road to Yakutsk). Tonight we are in an old gravel pit next to some water and have enjoyed a few minutes in the waning afternoon sun. We are looking forward to getting a respite from this road and its pot-holes, and hope that the M58 (the main Vladivostok-Chita road) west is in better condition.

From Friday nights camp on the side of the road about 130km south of Haptagay our confidence in the repair to the camper mount has grown as the miles have passed.

As hard as we found it to believe, the road conditions have deteriorated since our northward journey. The warmer weather, rapidly melting snow and ice, and recent rains had resulted in pot holes; pot holes everywhere; vast fields of pot holes and they continued for miles and miles, and they could not be avoided, one simply had to pick a path and bounce through them. While experiencing this bouncing for hours on end we naturally thought of those camper mounts and were very pleased that we had not tried to take a short cut in the repairs, and that we had made the effort to travel to Berlin for the correct replacement parts.

We should point out that locals travel this road in small Japanese cars, Toyota Landcruisers, large trucks, semi-trailers, and on the southward journey we even saw a convoy of trucks carrying large prefabbed buildings and trucks carrying earth moving equipment. They all seemed to be having less trouble with the road and its pot holes than we were, and moving faster than us also.

This last observation has started me thinking about our truck and why it seems to handle rough roads less effectively than the many other trucks we have seen over the last 3 weeks.

Signs of accelerating spring were all around. The forests were much more colorful. The needles on the pine trees were a much more vivid green, the vast expanses of larch trees were showing budding green needles and even the birch were showing buds but not yet any green leaves. The rivers are almost all ice free, some with a few small floating icebergs, some with ice on the shore but all flowing.

Water is flowing everywhere and we decided to take advantage. At one roadside stream we pulled over, unpacked our electric water pump and proceeded to fill our camper water tank. We will not use this water to drink or cook but only to wash. Nina could not resist and used the opportunity to clean some of the dust and mud off the truck; at some point a thorough wash is needed.

Since starting our travels in Russia I have not been able to use the coffee maker we had installed in the camper. One of the reasons for this lack of use is that the water system is not operating correctly to use it (more of this in a future post) but a more important reason that we should have foreseen is that we are not able to get potable water to fill that camper tank. This is a situation we encountered in South America also; so we should have foreseen it. We drink and cook with store bought bottled water and only wash with water from the tank. Since the coffee maker is plumbed-in it can only use tank water and our assessment is that the coffee making process does not sufficiently boil the water to make it safe. Hence no coffee maker.