Preparation to leave Chita

Day 105 Friday 15th July 2011 

We didn’t bother with breakfast today, the thought of fried eggs and pancakes took away any hunger pangs. As we started to pack our gear there was a knock on the hotel door – it was the American owner of the GS 800 in the car park and it turned out to be none other than Ben Myburgh from Tennessee who we had exchanged emails several times months before when it was a possibility that his group would share our container out of Seattle to Vladivostok. I say his group because the original starting members were Ben, his mother and his uncle. He explained that they eventually decided to ship to Lisbon and his mum and uncle stopped at Kiev and he was carrying on solo to Magadan. It was quite unreal chance meeting someone in Siberia at a random hotel in Chita which is quite a large city. We had a chat for about an hour or so and then we packed our steeds and said our goodbyes.  We followed Yuri in his pickup back to his house where he left us with his nephew, Dmi,  whilst he went off to work. This gave us time to carry out some maintenance checks on bikes, tighten nuts and bolts, check tyre pressures, oil levels etc.

Yuri was tied up at work so Dmitry called in around 4pm and we went off to a local Kafe and had some typical Russian snacks which included the inevitable meat wrapped in dumplings but nonetheless very tasty. Yuri stopped by and had a bite with us too and we went back to house to settle down and rest before the day’s riding ahead of us tomorrow.

At around 9 o’clock Dmitry came back with Juliana and her little daughter and Alexander came with his daughter and we all posed in Yuri’s yard for some pictures which Alex said he would make into a picture present for us. We said our good byes to Juliana and agreed to meet the guys tomorrow morning as we left for the picture presentation.

We took supper with Yuri at around midnight and said hello to his wife Olga when she came in from work an hour or so later. It was getting late so we headed off to the land of nod to refresh our batteries.