Russia > Water on the hood

At quarter past eight there’s a knock on the door. Breakfast is ready in the restaurant. This morning we take it easy. Wilco’s fuel filter is leaking, so he needs to fix the leak first. Outside, it’s raining cats and dogs. Fortunately, he can do the maintenance under cover. By around midday we’re ready to go, but it’s still raining. Large puddles cover the entire width of the streets of Borzya. Finding an ATM proves difficult. The navigation points to banks, but we can’t find anything at the locations indicated. We’re getting wetter and wetter. A man drives ahead of us and leads us to the station. Carefully, we try to make our way through the large puddles to reach the station building. There really is an ATM there. Luckily. A young man next to me translates our question via his phone. I type in our journey from Amsterdam to Tokyo. Immediately, everyone wants to read the answer. The unpaved roads have become slippery due to the rain. We drive carefully over them, but the roads are still better than what we’re used to in Mongolia.

Russia - A simple bridge in Russia

At least they’re flat. When we pass a roadworks sign, we see that the bridge has collapsed just after it. The roadworks only involve a detour through the river. We assume we can get through with the car, although the water is probably higher than usual due to the recent rainfall. We drive Brutus into the water. The water flows over the hood. The river, with more than a meter of water, is deeper than we had anticipated. Fortunately, we reach the opposite bank safely and dry. We quickly message the motorcyclists, advising them to take a detour. This river is too deep for them to cross. In the afternoon, the weather clears up a bit. At least it stops raining. Upon entering Nertchinsk, we also hear from the motorcyclists. They found the dirt roads too slippery and are taking a detour via Chita, which adds over 300 kilometers. It’s unclear whether they will reach Nertchinsk today. We start looking for a hotel. In the center, we find nothing. The village mainly consists of run-down wooden houses, with old industrial buildings on the outskirts. Many factory buildings are empty or have collapsed. The place feels bleak. A few kilometers outside Nertchinsk, the navigation points to an overnight spot along the Nertcha River. The gate is tightly closed and doesn’t look like it’s been open in years. We find one more location via Google Maps. From the outside, it hardly looks like a hotel, but the courtyard looks better. There are rooms—nothing more than two beds and a shared shower/toilet—but that’s fine by us. In the adjacent restaurant, we order a beer and wait to see if the motorcyclists will come to Nertchinsk. Around eight o’clock, we conclude that they won’t be coming. Perhaps they sent a text, but SMS messages can sometimes take hours to arrive. The menu is again only in Russian. The three girls behind the bar look a bit helpless trying to explain it to us. We had seen a dish we liked at a table with three boys sitting near us earlier. We try to explain to the girls that we want the same dish as those three boys, but they only understand if we want three soups. When we ask about meat, we discover there’s steak on the menu. We order that with a salad and fries. That settles our dinner plans for the evening.