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The three magic lines

 Blue Team
Oct 052011
 

Looking at the map of the world gives me goosebumps these days. Not only because I can look at what we already covered, but also because what’s still ahead. Yes, we are about to hit the road again for another big drive….

Oh… and there’s those lines. Three of them. The Arctic Circle, the Equator and the Antarctic Circle. I grew to have a little obsession with them. Visiting the Northern one just gave me the kick to go and see the rest of them. Well, at least to try and get as close as possible. I guess that’s why we are getting ready for another journey. This time through Central and South America aiming for the bottom – Patagonia.

Big Bend Hot Springs

 Latest
Aug 152011
 

From Mcloud we take the Highway 11 through the mountains to Big Bend. It’s only 20 miles or so but the rocky road is best done in first or second gear; steep inclines, clinging to the mountain wall, switchbacks and hairpins that lose any sense of direction gained by following the glittering blue reservoir a hundred feet below.

Towards evening we reach a junction to find a few parked cars and people milling around. This must be what we are looking for – no signs on the road to alert us to the jewel that lies a quarter mile off down a river. The springs are on private land and, while the owners are happy to let the public use them, they cannot be allowed to become too popular as then the authorities would step in asking for restrooms, fire extinguishers and other boring stuff.

There are half a dozen pools, the last constructed just a few months ago. This is an example of a good hot springs – with a fresh river flowing by its side and no one taking money at the gate…

BBCRC

 Latest
Aug 142011
 

Just outside Weed, down a dusty road lined with trucks resting, we find refuge for a night at a place for which there is no real equivalent in Europe. Here is a big plot of land right beside the Southern Pacific Railroad, owned by a small collective who celebrate the culture of train-hopping those long, long freight trains that pass slowly around America. In an old junk yard they have acquired several cabooses, converting them into homes and two box-car wagons that have a library specializing in punks and hobos, gallery space and a stage for bands and performers. Black Butte Centre for Railroad Culture also works in conservation and has a big workshop for constructing human-powered vehicles.

Scrapyard *1: Vernon

 Art, Latest
Apr 172011
 

After seeing a fair selection of American TV shows and films over the course of a life, it is quite something to actually be on that continent at last. Continue reading »

Russian Myths…

 Information, Messages
Jan 232011
 

Russian Highway Truck Tow

Driving through Russia represented a big unknown on our trip around the world. It’s always interesting, now that we have completed that section, to think how perceptions of a country change completely once you have been there.
Before we left we had a whole bunch of negative stereotypes to choose from our on-line research into driving the Trans-Siberian. Not to say, the stories and words of ‘advice’ handed out from friends and others. Not even to mention the truck drivers on the Latvian-Russia border trying to scare us about the road ahead.

Shall we list them: Continue reading »

Krasnoyarsk

 Latest
Aug 012010
 

It’s becoming something like the Groundhog Day driving this section of Russia. The hundreds of kilometres between cities always seem to take twice as long as thought – not so much because of the road conditions; certainly not because of too much traffic and despite spending practically every waking minute of the day driving. What is it then?

We’re driving east. And we’re not driving at night – the chance of hitting some deeper than expected pot-hole is too much. Plus, we haven’t a clue what time it is; we’re still running on Kazan time – our own little private time zone out of sync with our surroundings by 2 or 3 hours. But we can’t escape the fact that the sun is rising that much earlier every day and setting sooner and, with the short summer nights at these northern latitudes but falling asleep with exhaustion after dinner every night anyway, our body clocks are getting a little messed up and we’re in a kind of permanent state of jetlag.

Novosibirsk

 frontpage, Latest
Jul 292010
 

The fifth largest city in Russia – the designated capital of Siberia – we’d had big hopes for this city but the weather turns bad as we arrive and doesn’t lift until we’re back on the road heading east. In the grey and gloom, Radka likens it to Ostrava in Czech Republic, 4000km ago.

I get stopped by the traffic cops for the first time and another illusion we had about Russia evaporates: the police aren’t after bribes and don’t see us as foreign cash machines. The best way to deal with them is to smile alot, say how excellent Russia is and then brandish an English-Russian dictionary for them to use to communicate the penalty that must be paid. They will instantly shy away from this book, with its tiny printing and many pages, and, after you have translated the words for ‘sorry’, ‘confused’, ‘honest mistake guvnor’, the cops will pretend that some more important call has come through and send you on your way.

Urals

 Latest
Jul 192010
 

We’re out of the Ural Mountains which were neither almost impassable nor full of bandits – both things we’d been told by daft truckers back west. Now we’re trying to decide if that means we are now in Asia, and thus Siberia, since, traditionally, Europe stops at the Urals.

Overnight we’d stopped near the road by a river in quite a beautiful spot once the anti-mosquito cream had been applied. To get there was a bit of an angle from the road but it didn’t look too bad and I argued it was a good chance to test the vehicles’ ability to get in and out of tight spots. Getting down was O.K. – just a little scraping on the low points of both trucks but getting back on the road in the morning… Well, we should have reversed out, keeping the same successful orientation of the vehicles because the Iveco nearly tipped over while Jigsaw nearly pulled the back lights off – something I had wanted to do anyway (repositioning them higher up) but in a more controlled fashion.

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