122. Day 79 – Good roads and bad roads, ice covered rivers and bushfires

Wednesday 7 May 2008

We were away at 7.50 am on a beautiful day. We put our watches forward one hour the night before. This means that we are now only one hour behind Sydney time, so we are getting closer and closer to the longitude of home.

What an extraordinary day. We started off on beautiful roads, but by the last 1 hour and 50 minutes we were on the most atrocious road you could ever imagine. It appears that the new highway was opened by President Putin in 2004. Unfortunately, whereas in the old days people might have been able to get through on a horse or a motorbike beside the Siberian Railway, nowadays it is a highway in the making. We spent 1 hour and 50 minutes driving at an average speed of 39 kilometres per hour. The corrugations were horrendous! I could not believe that the vehicle would hold together.

Even before reaching the dirt, while still on the quite good bitumen, on a routine two-hourly inspection of the vehicle we found that the rear fibreglass cover (which encloses the grey water tank) had started to come off. Look at the photograph. If the cover had fallen off it would have been a catastrophe. Dick managed to hold it up to a certain degree, but after driving a short distance we stopped and removed the cover completely.

We found that as this is an early model Earthroamer, the mounting screws were simply put in to captive nuts which were not held to anything substantial. This meant that the small metal clips which held the captive nuts in place were holding 50% of the weight of the fairing – which is quite heavy. With the enormous shock load of the bumps, the fairing nearly came off. It ended up dangling on the outlet pipe for the grey water tank – we were very lucky.

When we eventually stopped, Dick took the cover from inside the Earthroamer (where we had stored it after removal) and lifted it with a rope to the top of the vehicle. It is now attached to the roof rack with rope. We will have to be careful when going under trolley wires in Khabarovsk because it may now be a bit high!

Fortunately this is not going to cause us any problems. In Khabarovsk or Vladivostok Dick will try to re-mount the whole unit properly, as we did with the fairing around the fresh water tank.

All day we were passed by gaggles of Japanese cars being driven to the west. There were also huge convoys of trucks and small vehicles. It appears that white is the favourite colour.

It froze last night and the rivers are still frozen, but ahead of us were bushfires. In fact, we drove through a bushfire area. It looks as if the locals set fire to the grass to try to encourage spring time growth.

We are now quite concerned about the condition of the road ahead. We have a feeling that we are going to have to drive nine or ten hours a day at an average speed of about 30 kilometres per hour. At that rate it could take six days to reach Khabarovsk. We can’t see how the vehicle would stay together otherwise – the bashing on the suspension is truly colossal.

It is interesting that the Japanese vehicles being delivered used to go like mad, and when they arrived in Moscow they simply weren’t worth selling. Now it appears that the drivers are paid $500 for the trip, and the cost of any damage to the vehicle comes out of that $500. The drivers have done a good job of using masking tape and pieces of cardboard on the front of the vehicles. Some vehicles even have the front bumpers removed – obviously stored in the boot. We also noticed that on the rough section of the road they were driving extremely slowly – around 20 or 30 thirty kilometres per hour.

The only traffic going in our direction consisted of huge trucks. Every now and then we would find a road crew working on the road. It appears that they can work for up to 24 hours, and the Russian Government is spending something like one-third of its road budget on completing the road between Ulan-Ude and Khabarovsk to a top international standard – all bitumen.

We understand that we have about 1,800 kilometres to go on dirt roads, driving at an average of about 30 kilometres per hour. Today we averaged 65 kilometres per hour on the bitumen section of the road, and we only covered 72 kilometres during the 1 hour 50 minutes on the dirt – an average of 39 kilometres per hour.

We have now camped at a little wayside stop. I’m not sure if it is clear where it is on the Spider Tracks – we don’t quite know. It appears that we are about 15 kilometres to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway. We crossed the Trans-Siberian Railway once today, and again saw huge trains.

Today 567 kms. 28,980 kms since Anchorage, Alaska.

Click here for the next day.

Click here to return to the Smith’s Overland main index page.