We must be getting either really tired or really sick of each other because the car was pretty quiet today. I think it’s the former because we generally get along quite well, which is fascinating given that we all hardly knew each other before we did this. I know I slept a lot and it seems like everyone else did as well.
On our way out of Omsk we stopped at a bakery and stocked up with a couple day’s worth of pastries, cleaning them out through a twisted game of charades and skillet communication (yelling and talking slowly). It’s hard to screw up baked goods, no matter what country you’re in, and our Russian commrades scored, especially with this sugary, cherry tart thing.
We took a massive wrong turn somewhere and ended up logging two hundred miles on a terrible dirt road. We were worried that we’d hit our last pavement for a moment and that we’d be subjected to a 2000 mile pounding rather than the 1000 miles we expected. But we finally made our way back onto some asphalt. We also blew a tire on the way, most likely our first of several. And we pulled over to help some stunningly drunk Russian who had run his car off the road. It actually felt like an almost typical day.
We made it to Novosibirsk, which could probably be called Mosquitosibirsk due to the Ivan Drago-sized bloodsuckers it produced. We stayed in the most Western hotel we’ve seen since England. The staff even spoke English. We viewed this as our last hurrah before hitting the desolation of Mongolia.
Finally, the team made the major decision to to take the western border entry into Mongolia as opposed to the northern, which we’d decided upon previously. Essentially, the western entry provides us two more days of Mongolia including traversing the Gobi Desert, and more importantly for right now, two fewer days in Russia.
