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…

The “beware the bumps ahead” and “beware the sharp bend ahead” signs on on-land stretches of winter road always bring a chuckle. Like – where aren’t there bumps and bends on the on-land stretches? 😊

Here’s our overnight stay in Sasyr:

The black door there on the first floor is the entrance to… a billiards club! It’s got three Russian billiards tables – something totally unexpected! Alas, we had zero energy left to go knock some balls around…

The settlement is heated with coal (what else?) – so the snow around it is a slightly blackish-gray color.

Lunar halo! ->

Some of the buildings sit upon buttresses – clearly this is a seismically risky zone…

Ancient remnants of old navigation systems – triangulation markers. You sometimes come across them along the roads around here.

Another beautiful day on a very beautiful winter road:

In places (though not for long), it was simply wonderful – flying across the endless whiteness, absorbing the contemplative hypnosis, blending into this world with your soul… but your body is still in a steel box on inflatable rubber wheels with a combustion engine inside – so the stream of consciousness had to be interrupted. You absolutely mustn’t get distracted from controlling the motor vehicle! Even under this endless white hypnosis.

Next came ruts and other bumpiness…

And assorted other unpleasantries:

Approaching a mountain pass…

The distances: substantial; our speed: slow. Nothing you can do about that, so we meditate while we drive…

On the plus side, this season it was reaaally snowy!

Somewhere up over there – the mountain pass ->

And here we are at the top:

Just look how much snow fell this winter!

Next, we left the winter road and returned to the year-round federal (“Kolyma”) highway R-504. This very spot is kilometer-zero of the “Arktika” winter road:

And here we all are – in battle-ready formation:

Next in our sights: Ust-Nera…

Now – a few words about Ust-Nera day-to-day living and lodgings. In a nutshell: the farther north you go, the more basic it gets. Read about our trip to Tiksi and back, and how we once slept on a stage on that trip. The farther south you go, the more choice and comfort there is – but only marginally ).

So, Ust-Nera. It has one (1) hotel here (we stayed here on previous trips) – opposite the Petrovny Café – but it was full: packed with shift workers. There are a few other roadside places to sleep, but we couldn’t book those in advance either. Oh well – there is one other option (alas, no Hiltons or Radissons spotted around here yet): a guesthouse.

Here’s OR settled cozily in the kitchen – for some reason not too thrilled about our photo session!

…I wasn’t too thrilled either! ->

Next morning, we move out of Ust-Nera back on to the R-504:

Asphalt at first:

The bridge over the Indigirka:

Onward; homeward!…

Ahead today: just under a thousand kilometers of driving across winter landscapes ->

Along the road there are still artifacts from days long gone by. When this road was being built – something like in the late forties or early fifties – there were no cranes for unloading heavy machinery from trailer platforms. So they built side “docks” where bulldozers and excavators could roll off under their own power. Here are the remains of one such platform:

No stopping around here this year – since the views aren’t as oh-my-gorgeous as usual:

In the fiercest cold, at -50°C and below, the exact same view looks completely different:

As soon as it warms up, the whole “winter fairy tale” sheds its magic almost instantly. Only hellish cold makes it piercingly beautiful. The harder the frost, the more sumptuous the views:

It’s a pity, of course, but in early March we weren’t expecting to find the “white fairy tale” here anyway – so we simply kept grinding back. It’s still great, all the same. And contemplative. We’d already clocked up almost nine thousand kilometers, and the finish wasn’t all that far away – just some 700-800 kilometers.

They’re gradually improving the Kolyma Highway. Last time (in 2024), the road wasn’t quite so elegant.

In some places, it used to be a lot less comfortable:

This damaged bridge over the Setorym River was one we’ve bypassed over the ice about four times already while driving back and forth in 2021, 2022, and 2024:

And now, it’s been rebuilt! ->

Lush! ->

Indeed, the road has become much more comfortable on many stretches. A roadside “cultural layer” has even formed.

A new café has appeared on the highway:

A new, second café is the nearest to Ust-Nera on the road – several hundred kilometers away. That’s a long way to go before elevenses!

Well, let’s wish them success! Maybe they’ll force the previous monopoly-holder, Cuba, to become less crappy better.

Ooh – yes, it’s much nicer here! And the food’s pretty decent too.

Occasionally – burned-out, abandoned trucks on the roadside with signs saying “Please do not touch!”:

Now and again – risky rockiness on sharp bends:

But then the mountains end – and everything somehow turns a bit sad, dull, and nostalgic…

We stayed overnight in Khandyga, leaving just over 400km remaining to Yakutsk.

On previous trips I showed and told you about Khandyga. They have this flying-saucer-shaped… Children’s Aesthetic Center here!

After that, the road gets a bit dull; the mountains and passes are far behind, but there’s an ice crossing over the Aldan River:

Various scenes on the road to Yakutsk:

Near a roadside café with the cute name Uyut (“Cozy”), we discovered a whole collection of metal art installations. Some of them are even pretty good:

And that, more or less, is how we returned to “civilization”. The closer you get to Yakutsk, the more often asphalt appears on the road, and the smoother and fresher it gets. The vegetation around you changes quite noticeably too – no longer bare tundra and swamps, and no more feeble little larch trees but pines (also a bit scrawny, yes, but pines all the same) ->

Nizhny Bestyakh = we’re directly opposite Yakutsk. Almost there….

Fuel prices here were more modest than in the distant districts:

Civilization!

Why does the sign say “Nizhny Bestyakh” and not “Yakutsk”? Very simple!

That’s just how history played out: way back when this place was founded… in 1632 (70 years before St. Petersburg!), Cossack pioneers of Siberia built the Lensky Ostrog (fort) here – on the right (i.e., correct!) bank of the Lena River. But a short while later, in the 1640s, it was moved to the other (left), flatter side of the river.

And the result? A mess – that’s what! But who could have predicted that back then? So, all the land transport lines (the highway, and now the railway too) run along the right bank of the Lena, while the entire city of Yakutsk, all the local authorities and government, the river shipyards, and even the airport are on the left bank. And there’s no bridge :0)!

In other words, Yakutsk (in the broad sense) is cut off from the “mainland”. Well, in summer ferries cross the Lena, and in winter you can drive across the ice crossing. Sounds normal? Ha – not even close! Summery weather doesn’t last long here – June-September – while the ice takes a long time to set – two or three months – before heavy trucks can drive across it. And in spring, the ice breaks up and gets carried away, and that doesn’t happen instantly either.

So the city of Yakutsk, with its population of nearly 400,000 (incidentally – the largest settlement in the world in a permafrost zone), has practically no land transport connection with the “mainland” for nearly half the year. How about that?! It’s on the other side of the river.

The practical need to connect the banks of the Lena has long been clear and obvious to everyone, but only recently is something getting actually done about it. More on that in the next post in this series…

The best hi-res photos from our Irkutsk–Yakutsk–Magadan–Yakutsk road-trip are here.