Surprise! Just when you thought I had given up writing these unnecessarily detailed blogs about driving for overly long days through unremarkable Russian scenery. Like a chocolate cake at a fat kid’s birthday party this blog couldn’t possibly be left unfinished, and like a cash grabbing reunion of a 90’s boy band we’re back whether you wanted it or not. Analogies aside I’m going to provide an excuse for the delay, and then batter through the remaining days like an ambitious chip shop proprietor, ok these might be getting worse I’m going to stop I swear.

 

A whole 11 months ago when we had arrived home and the memories were fresh in my mind I had cracked open my laptop, figuratively speaking, keen to finish these blogs. Once I had finished one of the remaining days, I put off doing the others for 11 months. Maybe it was the full sized keyboard which I was unaccustomed to, maybe it was the prospect of thinking of different ways to describe uneventful days driving. Trust me when I say the only thing more boring than driving through Siberian Russia is writing about driving through Siberian Russia. The more honest reason I never finished is that I just had other things I would rather be doing. Now that I was home and armed with the raw computing power of a below average laptop I could begin sorting and trimming down the endless video footage we had gathered over the two months. Which took two months in itself so it wasn’t until early January that our video dropped and set fire to the Internet; Well it might not have been a full roaring fire, more of a mild warming sensation. It has been slowly gathering up them there youtube views and has now reached over 11,000 people. The treatment of footage from the trip home gives an indication of how thrilling the events of the two weeks were.

 

Avoiding writing was going well until my brother decided it would be a good idea to print the blogs in book form for a Christmas present. Which although it is a lovely and thoughtful gift, it would be somewhat lacking with a big wad of blank pages at the end to remind me of my own lazy short comings on the rare occasions I ever opened up the book. He bound together a rough A4 version of the completed pages with the promise of a proper book if I ever finish the rest. Well Jonathan you’re going to need to load up your printer again because I’ve already rattled off 434 words and I haven’t even started describing the endless trees of the 50th day on the road.

 

Even the prospect of getting a physical book to put on my shelf couldn’t tempt me back to the Russian wilderness, plus after Christmas I had my final semester of university to use as an excuse. Now that I’m facing the prospect of a 26 hour trip to South Korea and a 36 hour trip home from Tokyo I may as well use this time to fall back into writing, that being said I’m almost halfway to Abu Dhabi and I’ve not really written anything about the rally yet, so maybe not. This is the most accurate simulation of life of the rally I’ve had in almost a year when we set off from London. I have hours to sit in a seat with very little to amuse myself armed with a tiny phone screen. That being said this screen is still comparably huge compared to the one from the rally, my phone might have survived a trip to Mongolia and back but it didn’t survive a drunken encounter with a pavement. This is much more my speed, I love being unable to really see what I’m typing it really plays into my wheelhouse of nonsensical rambling. It even meeans I can write away with blatant disregard for spelligh and grammar. Let’s d this;

 

The last thing I had written about before a year long hiatus was setting up camp in a flytip in Russia and being worried about bears, which may have caused some worry that perhaps we didn’t make it. Of the stories to come from this trip none of them contained the phrase “and then we woke up being mauled by a huge bear”, so you can probably tell that our night in the tip was uneventful. Clearly the Russian junkyard bears must have seen Chris carefully lay out his weapons in preparation for our battle plan because they didn’t mount an assault during the night, so we were feeling distinctly un-mauled when we woke up at stupid o’clock in the morning. We had decided over dinner that we needed to knuckle down and do a few boring days of driving, not that we hadn’t enjoyed messing around in Siberian cities or trying to avoid a prolonged period within a Russian gulag, but our visas run out in a few days - I’m going back to the present tense in case you were still under the illusion that we were still on the road. The plan was a simple one with only two main steps: wake up early and then drive non-stop till darkness. I don’t know if you have ever found yourself in a Russian tip at 4:45 in the morning but they’re dark, freezing cold and covered in rubbish. Clearly we weren’t in a hurry to hang around so were packed and on the road in no time. We had nailed the first part of the plan, but failed miserably at the second stage. We pulled in at our favorite brand of modern Russian petrol stations five minutes later and stuffed our faces with sausage rolls.

 

The best part about waking up so early is that you get to enjoy the sunrise, and let me tell you that you’ve never seen as mediocre a sunrise as a Siberian sunrise. Nothing brings out the blandness of uninterestingly flat landscape as a slight orange tint. Luckily the god of weather was looking out for us because they quickly covered up that horrible sight with a thick layer of fog. What’s the expression “you only miss it when it’s gone”, well the grey fog was considerably more boring than the landscape it hid. Yes that is right, the last few days of the trip were so unexciting that I’m actually discussing which view was more boring; why are you even reading this?

 

Either way when the fog finally lifted 100 miles down the road we found ourselves in the Ural Mountains which gave somewhat of an uninteresting high point to the day. Did you see what I did there? High point, get it, because we drove up and over a small mountain? Anyway the tree covered mountain scenery made a nice change, the only problem with mountains is that they tend to have an inclined surfaces. Which is fine if you’re driving a powerful car like our 107, but the endless string of trucks which trail across Siberia were suffering. We spent a few hours climbing mountainous roads overtaking trucks at any every opportunity, gone are the days in Romania of hesitant overtaking we have grown accustomed to the driving insanity. A few hours into the mountain stage we stumbled upon a morbid reminder of the unsafe nature of foreign driving, when I over took a series of stationary trucks and found ourselves at the head of a traffic jam. The trucks had been stopped while an accident was attended to, a car had clearly been overtaking a slower vehicle and had a head on collision with a truck coming the other way. The car was destroyed, but the truck had escaped relatively unscathed. Perhaps we would take it easy on the roads winding down the hill.

 

Can you guess what was on the other side of the mountains? Well if you said the lost city of Atlantis you clearly don’t know much about mythology, and you were also completely wrong. On the other side of the mountains was yet more of the exact same scenery we had seen in the morning. We carried on west for the remainder of the day until darkness, just like the plan suggested we did. When it came to picking a place to camp, we took a random turn onto a secondary road then pulled into the closest field we could find and hid behind a hedge. Gone are the days when we spent hours hunting for the perfect spot where we could never be seen and or saved, such as a certain mud covered forest in Slovakia. Given we didn’t have a TV to entertain us with educational programming, we spent the rest of the evening burning things instead which taught us all about what camping items are flammable and which aren’t. Since the day’s plan had been a roaring success we decided to do it all over again, but this time we would do it better start early, finish later, and get distracted less.

 

There we go one more day closer to finishing this bloody blog, and it only took a flight to Abu Dhabi to make it happen. Although I could take the easy route out and write a paragraph per day left, that would be doing a disservice and besides my brother is paying for it to be printed, I may as well drag this out as long as possible.