We made it

Whilst this hopefully will not be the final post we are getting on for the final 100 miles of our run into Ulan Ude which for the car will be its final resting place, well almost, its really strange driving  a car on what we know will be its final journey, not that I have done it but it must be like taking a dog to the vet to have it put down. The car has been running well today we have driven 200 km without much more than a couple of pops from the exhaust, Neil seem to have mastered driving it and  changed his "old world driving style" Katie needs to kept on song, lumbering it up a hill in too high a gear just causes problems,. I have not found the exact problem with the car I think in fairness it was more than one single problem probably a series of problems. The hole in the filler neck which we found relatively early, followed by the filler cap one way valve problem, certainly were major factors, that was proved when we left the cap off for a hundred miles, when all the problems reoccurred, how fortunate we were to have balanced the cap on the roof for nearly hundred miles, unbelievable taken the state of the roads, but it did sit behind the spare wheel in a small well.

The car has been a real pain, not because of the problems, more from the fact that it ran so well for most of the time, the wheel bearing and spring I could live with, it was just the uncertainty, every day every overtake every hill, just like Russian roulette you didn't know what the car was going to do.

Yesterday we dropped down to a fantastic lake, lake Baykal, it's more

Ike a sea as in places you cannot see the opposite side, the whole area is surrounded by mountains and the air is mountain lair clean and cool. As we were trying to crunch miles we waited until as far as possible to find somewhere to sleep, it was too wet and cold to camp, and I had recently started using a fantastic app for travel "MAP ME" if you are traveling anywhere then this aid to navigation is a must. You can download street level maps of I think anywhere in the world and then use them off line, I think you need a gps enabled phone, if we had know about this app at the beginning of our trip we would probably have saved two or three days, also the rigmarole of trying to find accommodation, and banks, would have been so much easier. Be warned it does eat your battery in fact despite being plugged into the car, my battery went flat, so now I only turn it on when we need it.

So using our newly acquired app, we set off for a hotel  and it took us off the main road into back street which would normally not used, well not intentionally, and sure enough right where the app took us was a hotel or hostel we still have not worked out exactly what it was but we were given a room with five beds and a more than acceptable  hot shower and loo. It even had internet although tremendously slow, it had a well stocked bar, with everything from champagne to bottles of wine,but no beer, for beer you had to walk to the magazine, or shop, about 200 meters away.

Now I am not saying that all Russians are alcoholics but the availability of booze is somewhat amazing, theses magazines and they are situated everywhere even in the most rural of locations stock a vast array of beer and I mean vast, even those isolated shops would have probably three dozen different types and the more urban ones even have it on  draft, you simply take a lemonade bottle, or as we saw on more than one occasion a triple size lemonade bottle and they fill it from a pump especially designedfor the purpose, some shops had ten or more of these pumps, presumably with different beers the smaller shops always had at least two.

Neil with his Scottish background peaking through was examining bottle after bottle determining strength and price, well trying to he had forgotten his glasses,and had chosen three dubious looking bottles of ale when a very respectfully dressed woman of about thirty came into the shop and ordered. Now I don't know if your aware but a lot of communication is non verbal, and body language and this woman leaked her obvious disapproval at what we were purchasing. I thought it was just we were buying beer but when the shopkeeper served her, Russian as in many countries will do this stop serving you and serve someone else and come back to you, she was served with two large cans of what looked like premium beer, " and what's wrong with this beer" I asked she obviously understood my question and mimed her reply that we had chosen falling down water, so hastily two of our plastic bottles were sent back in exchange for hr premium beer, which she obviously approved of and we parted company with approving nods to each other.

The meal was basic but edible and surprisingly filling and there was no problems us having our beer at the table although there were no large glasses so we had to resort to drinking out of glass cups. 

Just to jump to the end 

                                                   WE MADE IT

We got here to the end yesterday at about 4:00pm with a probably more dramatic finish than we needed, despite our app telling us almost exactly where the hotel and finishing point was we couldn't find it, so had to dash back into the city to get wi only to find we were searching in the right direction, this time however we peered through the trees and saw the hotel about 100 metres from where we had been asking .