July 1, 2026
Four days to Yakutsk Airport.
Leaving Zyryanka, it struck me: the nearest airport with regular flights to the capital of our vast and boundless homeland is a full four days away by car! Well, if you really push it and don’t sleep at night, you could manage it in a couple of days. But if the rule is daytime = driving, and nighttime = sleeping, there’s no way it comes out to less than four. Whether to Magadan or to Yakutsk, it’s still a full four days: Zyryanka > Sasyr (day one), Sasyr > Ust-Nera (day two), and then we’re exactly halfway along the R-504 Kolyma Highway, with about a thousand kilometers either way = another two days on the road.
Not that we were complaining! After all, we chose this bonkers route ourselves, and it’s not as if it was our first time on this or a similar winter-wonderland road-trip adventures…
