Mongol Rally - Ufa to Tomsk

Mongol Rally - Ufa to Tomsk

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There was a fair bit of mossie action at this campsite - the grass was long and it was by a thick hedge - we opted for hay fields after this - short grass = less insect life!!

Fantastic scenery and some utterly loopy driving demonstrated by the long distance truckers - eg not using the brakes AT ALL on the downhill sections, or using them so much they actually CAUGHT FIRE!

Crossing the Urals took a whole day, but the countryside was amazing!

The attractive Soviet-era grain silo in Wyybe...Still, if we had stayed there we would have been spared the worst motel in the world - so awful it didn't even have a toilet! Dave made some useful suggestions for improvements in his post-rally questionnaire...

A wonderful sunrise as we make good our escape from the Motel of Doom...(about 6am)... and head for Kurgan.

Our first taste of Russian road-building. The secret is to keep the road fully open to all traffic, even though it hardly constitutes a road at all!

We met this Lada Samara enthusiast at a cafe / truckstop outside Omsk! Dave's new bessie mate!!

24TheRoad's car 'Dave' and Sammy parked outside the Hotel Maya next to the river station in Omsk. No air-con. Boooo.

Dave gives Sammy a much needed bath. We saw the only tick of the whole trip on the patch of grass Dave is standing on!

The mother of all thunderstorms which we ran into shortly after saying goodbye to the friendly taxi driver. It was full on for about 15 mins - visibility practically nil. Luckily we had THE FUNK to protect us!

Eventually we stopped and had our first great hay-field camp, just short of Novosibirsk...

Amusingly, a swarm of flying ants was attracted to Dave's tent! Obviously they had heard about his phobia!

Personal hygeine Siberian-style AKA the liberal application of Right Guard down one's shorts! Huzzah!

Dave sampling the mysterious green lager we had bought from a truckstop (errrm, at least that's what we think it was...)

Steep hills and the evil trucking legend known only as 'Kazakh Stan'.

We turned off the M51 in search of a hotel and were confronted with the horror that is Wyybe. What a total utter DUMP! Needless to say we turned on our heels and kept going!

Much of the country between Chelyabinsk and Omsk looked like this ie 'orrible mosquito infested marshland - one big 'mossarium'. We later found out that the area around Chelyabinsk is the most polluted on the planet after a series of accidents at Mayak, the local nuclear plant...

A beautiful morning, despite the hideously early start, with the mist sitting by the roadside... or it could just be the radioactive glow from the swamp! Urk!

Major gravel action. Still, it could be worse! (Like it got after Kansk -see next set of pics!)

We also met this chap who raced Kamaz trucks! Uh-oh! A nutter!

"Hold the button down!" Eggy bread at a rather lovely cafe in Omsk...

The taxi driver who led us out of Omsk to the road to Novosibirsk. Lovely chap, but gave me a scare by driving off with Dave in his taxi to, as it happened, pick up his next fare, leaving me stranded in the middle of a housing estate in Omsk for 20 minutes!!!

Once the storm had passed, we spent the rest of the day on lovely roads like this!

There was some midge-action (although thankfully no mossies to speak of) so the bug-hats and bugminton rackets were duly deployed...

Sammy's wing-mirror is botched into place using the ubiquitous gaffer tape...

The hellish traffic of Novosibirsk - a big city with no ring road! Nice one! Yet again, a friendly local led us out to the road to Tomsk, when we inevitably got lost!

Contact Team Scraz using someone elses sat phone. Then realise that it doesn't actually work, and give up.