The friendly locals from last night had taken a lot of photos with us before they left, which I assumed they would have put on Facebook with the caption “Just found these weirdos camping in the field just outside of the ass”, only it would probably be written in Russian and have a real town name. I don’t think they did put it on Facebook because we made it through the rest of the night without a single other person arriving in our dark patch of the field. In fact we weren’t even bothered by the mutant cow villagers who kill any and every traveler who comes through this village with their kebabs, or whatever the locals’ parting sentence was supposed to mean. We snuck back to the main road, avoiding any potentially untrustworthy Russians on the way, and headed west.
The rest of the day, just like the start of the day, was uneventful. We drove from our field to the city along a tarmac road that lead directly between the two. The road was mostly brand new, in fact in some places it was so new that it wasn’t even finished yet. It seems the Russian tactic for dealing with traffic while they build a new section of road is to send everyone into the forest and see who comes out the other side. We spent the entire day driving along the only main road with a selection of other cars seemingly all heading from the same starting position to the same finishing position - Although I never saw a huge collection of cars waiting for us to get ready this morning in our field, so I assume they came from their own homes or fields. The Russians had the advantage on the open stretches of tarmac, overtaking like they had washed down breakfast with a pint of vodka, but they had no chance on the ‘diversions’. As soon as the tarmac disappeared they suddenly cared about damaging their precious 4x4s which meant we had the upper hand in our small Peugeot, we didn’t really mind getting another few dents or breaking the fuel pump to liven up our day.
At one point we reached a small city and followed Bing Map’s helpful suggestion of where the main road might be, instead of following common sense and staying on the main road through the center of town. We turned off and took the scenic route past scrapyards and industrial factories along a potholed dirt track. At least we weren’t alone, we were surrounded by large trucks and a few of our Russian convoy cars, most of who were slowly giving up and turning back through town. Not ones to be deterred by a little lack of road or directions, we continued ploughing our way through the forests and around the slow trucks until we reached civilization on the other side. We had been following a sign post for a random city that seemed to be far away towards the west all day, so once we found a sign post that looked familiar we continued to blindly follow it for the rest of the afternoon.
It was getting dark as the sign post distance decreased to towards zero so we decided to make camp in the city for the night. Our inflatable globe had mysteriously gone missing in Mongolia - not naming names, but Herman the German had sticky fingers and I did notice he didn’t owned his own inflatable globe – so we were stuck with heading in to a random Siberian city blind. Like a couple of cartography gods we circled around the city until I spotted something that looked like tall buildings, they were probably tall buildings but I couldn’t be sure. After driving in a straight line through endless repetitively bland soviet buildings we stumbled upon the main road into the city center. We reached the city center and found it to be a black hole on world hotel coverage, but I guess Krasnoyarsk doesn’t feature heavily on people’s dream holiday locations. We saw a lot of the city center as we circled pointlessly around it, there were some nice parks lined with expensive shops but for some reason Armani don’t like people sleeping in their stores so we continued our hunt for a hotel. There was a hotel shaped building that looked like it might be a hotel, as we approached it turned out to be a hotel, so we went inside the hotel to ask if they had any hotel rooms available in their hotel…hotel. The two women at reception claimed not to speak English but with a little help from Google we managed to find out that they only had one room available and it was just shy of $200. We turned to each other and agreed that it was expensive, then the receptionist turned to us and said “yes expensive”, a phrase she probably picked up from the response of anyone who has ever stepped foot inside their hotel.
With the hotel’s WiFi firmly in our pocket, we scoured the internet for a cheaper hotel. We chose a reasonably priced hotel at random and headed through the city to find it. Not only was this hotel cheaper than the previous one, the woman at reception spoke perfect English and checked us into the room. When we took our bags up to the room we found a lone double bed staring at us from across the room. I went back downstairs to the woman at reception to ask if the second bed was hidden somewhere in our room. She didn’t seem to understand the problem and asked if we didn’t like the room. I assured her it was not a personal attack against that specific room and said that we would prefer to sleep in two separate beds. She became very embarrassed and apologetic for mistaking us for a couple, and moved us to a room with two heterosexual beds in it – A heterosexual bed enjoys the company of other furniture, that’s why there was a bedside tables in this new room. After the room swapping we were pretty hungry, so went on a romantic date to Siberia’s answer to McDonald’s.
Day 47- A Field to a City
Start: In 'The Ass'
Finish: Big Yorker
