It seems everytime we make plans for breakfast they turn out to be made of lies. After opting for Papa John's over KFC last night, the idea was to go to KFC for breakfast - surely they would do Egg McMuffins in Russian KFCs. Plans were altered when The Mongoliers, keeping with their tradition, weren't awake in time. We tried to find KFC but the golden chicken eluded us, or more it wasn't on the one street we walked down. We settled for a cafe and returned back to the hotel to wake the sleeping Monoliers instead of leaving town without them. We drove out of Barnaul along the motorway till our stomachs rumbled. I'm guessing what drew attention to this particular cafe was the huge half-assed Shrek statue outside, which just screams fancy eating establishment.

 

Outside of town the roads continued being boring and perfect, there weren't any potholes to dodge or any speed bumps to scrape on which means nothing particularly interesting happened. We found ourselves in a Russian North America driving through forests past holiday resorts, which look a lot like British holiday resorts only a lot more Russian. There was a long climb to a high pass where I had flash backs to our time on the Pamir highway, luckily the car slowly managed to climb its way over this time. On the other side of the pass the road opened up with long straights leading to a nice mix of shallow and tight corners, all of which was free of traffic and surrounded by nice landscape. In a way it was better than the Transfargalbargle Highway in Romania, mainly because this time I didn't set fire to the breaks as we sped downhill. I left the others in my dust, well I would have but the stupid perfect Russian roads weren't producing dust, and ended up having to wait for them at the bottom of the hill.

 

Once they finally caught up we ended up back in the forest which meant I had to calm down. As we drove through the forest with the rest of the convoy, an Australian voice came through the radio asking to stop at the next available spot. Assuming it was probably the Khan boys and not a clever ploy by a lonely trucker, we pulled over outside a restaurant. It was Silver Fox, they had managed to find the one peice of rock on these roads and driven straight over it. To quote the Mongolier's blog "it had bent their sump guard which was hitting their engine or something". Luckily they had been given a police baton by a random Iranian man which Sharkey was using to pry it back into shape while we all ate ice cream. Sharkey finished his work and was rewarded with an ice cream of his own, that is after all the best way to pay your local mechanic. After a quick fix we pushed on towards the border semi-hoping to find the Lion boys in the wilderness. The road ducked down towards a river in the bottom of a valley, we decided to drive for another hour before we stopped. Exactly on the hour we took a turn off the road and set up camp beside the river. A few people decided swimming would be a good idea, then quickly regretted it once they had dove into the freezing river.