Chelyabinsk

Day 117 Wednesday 27^th July 2011  

We chose to take the road to Ekatrinburg and had pre-booked a stay in a hotel in Chelyabinsk so we set off at the moderately early time of 8am and we found the way out of Tyumen city without problem.  We refuelled on the city outskirts and met a Russian biker on a Goldwing who was travelling around the area, he was disappointed that he hadn’t known we were staying in the city as he could have shown us around all the “good” places – whatever that may have meant – maybe it was good that we hadn’t met earlier !  Despite making a couple of wrong turns (that actually turned out to be the right way) the road conditions were good, it was clear and sunny so we made excellent progress throughout the day and even managed to stop for a pork shashlik at a roadside cafe and this compensated us for missing out on breakfast. The 600 km trip to Chelyabinsk was finished by 3.30pm and my Garmin sat nav took us directly through the busy city to our hotel.

Now I use the word hotel loosely. It was set in amongst the residential tenaments and at first I thought it bwas a derelict building.  We only paid 1300 roubles for the night (about £30) so we didn’t complain but everything about the Uraloshka was basic but at least the staff were friendly. As with Novobirsk  the people at this hotel in Chelyabinsk were obsessed with “hooligana” (Russian is where we get the English word hooligan) and they begged us to put our bikes in the nearby guarded car park. More for their peace of mind than ours we aceeded to their request and put our steeds in the trusty care of the attendant for the princely sum of 50 roubles each (about £1). We found the local shop and bought a big bottle of beer, some bread, cheese and tomatoes and set about making ourselves something to eat back at the hotel. Our room was actually a small apartment boasting a sitting room as well as our bedroom but sadly no air conditioning but even nine floors up it had the required number of mosquitoes to annoy us through the night. To make matters seem worse there was no wifi signal in the room – we suspect that it was possible to connect in the reception area but the dodgy lift coupled with the fact that we were now sat around in our underpants meant that we just couldn’t be bothered.

Room With A View

Tomorrow we head for Ufa which is a relatively short  450 km ride so we may make it in time to do some sightseeing as well.