Day 17, 2016.07.25 Nowaja Tschara

We went to bed at 3am of course we slept long. Johann waked us up with a phone call at 9am luckily “Wild One” the nickname of our driver hasn’t called yet. Antonina mentioned yesterday that our Driver is her father and revealed his name Ruslan. The Kuanda river had high water a that day. The Russians that warned us not to go were completely right in that case.

We wasted some time in Kuanda said goodbye to Johann, Sergei and Alexei and left around 1PM to cross the Kuanda via Ural Truck. It’s cheaper to cross via train bridge but not that interesting. Ruslan was in company of his sons. After loading I wondered when he opened the hood to start the engine. The engine started fast but the truck started driving while Ruslan was standing on the hood. He swang himself into the drivers cabin and brought us safely through the river. Very impressive the water already came into the trucks bed. After that we paid him and gave an extra tip to his sons. I guess he spend the extra money for his family anyway it felt good to pay him. Standing in the bed is impressive but watch the truck cross was impressive too.

Kai fascinated me a few minutes later. He explained that his bike still runs just with one cylinder. I couldn’t believe that somebody pays money to be brought over a river into the wild with a bike that is not running. Kai is so impressively optimistic that a realist like me can drive crazy from that. An hour later he changed the broken sparkplug. Before you call me a dick I asked if I can help before I took this picture. The following road to Nowaja Tschara is more a highway with some technical specials:

After a late start we still reached the city at the same day. When we arrived we expected a nice hotel, when we entered nothing changed, after we were standing under an icecold shower we changed our mind even if we had good WiFi.