Day 116 Tuesday 26th July 2011
We discovered last night that we had crossed yet another time zone so we are now only 5 hours ahead of the UK which makes it a bit easier to communicate with home. Breakfast was a grander affair with a buffet style similar to the Hotel Vladivostok and so we filled our boots and set off to discover the delights of Tyumen which was a very important stop on the old Silk Road.
The walk to the centre from the hotel was around a couple of miles and by the time we had got back we must have covered a good 5 miles and my feet were aching and we had built up a good sweat in the baking 33 degree plus heat and, of course, this provided us with the perfect excuse for an “Ice Cold in Alex” moment at the hotel bar.
Some pictures from Tyumen.....
The job for today is to catch up on recharging all electrical items like cameras, helmet bike to bike headsets, computers, phone and all manner of little gadgets that require a few volts to keep them going. Also catching up with our clothes washing is important as we like to keep ourselves half decent on the road. The final task will be to decide on the route – do we go north towards Moscow and out of Russia through Latvia or do we head south and go through Ukraine and into Romania so that we can have a bash at the great Transfaraagan road 90kms across the mountains and better, so it is said, than the Stelvio pass that we had fun on a few years ago. It has not escaped our notice that we are now only a few days away from leaving this vast country of Mother Russia. Just how vast the Country is cannot really be described. We have ridden for hours on end day after day and when we look at the map we have only moved a relatively short distance and Europe never seems to get any closer. Tomorrow, however, we will probably head west to Ekaterinburg then south to Chelyabinsk so that we can head west to Ufa on the M5 (and that is nothing like the M5 in the UK so don’t get thinking that we will be riding on a motorway !). Ufa will lead us to Samara and then more decisions to be made on how we tackle re-entry into the EU.
Hello! We got your card but couldn't get wifi to go in Omsk at the Ibis. We are also in Tyumen today. We head to Yekaterinberg tomorrow. We are a group of 6 kiwis travelling from Beijing to Paris, shipping our trucks back to NZ from UK. Would have been nice to catch up with you and swap stories. I also had a shit of a time trying to get my vehicle released by customs but in China - not as long as yours though!
ReplyDeleteOur blog is www.aucklandtoparis.blogspot.uk
Best wishes for safe travels