Tag Archives: roads

I don’t think I mentioned what route we’re taking this year on our road-trip, so here it is: Irkutsk > Yakutsk > Magadan (not necessarily the route shown on the map at that link; that’s just to give you an idea of the where and the how long?!!).

The expedition is going well, but I soon realized I’ve no energy in the evenings for full travel reports. After all, I’m behind the wheel for most of each long day. Accordingly, I won’t be writing often along the way – just occasionally when something “stop the presses” happens. Like it did, 700km east of Yakutsk, for example…

We were on the Old Kolyma Highway (Stariy Kolumskiy Highway), hoping to drive from Tomtor to where the mostly abandoned old road meets the “New” Kolyma Highway (the R-504), here:

Driving on old, mostly abandoned roads in the middle of nowhere is only for the… brave at the best of times; in the middle of winter in Siberia – only for the crazy; in the middle of an especially snowy winter in Siberia – only for… (what comes after crazy?!). But, the crazy crazies that we are, we still went for it!…

Read on…

Longtime inhabitants of this cozy corner of the internet will remember that if ever one of my posts begins with a photo of the Magadan restaurant in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport (SVO), it’s done for a reason, and also means that that and upcoming posts sure won’t be boring…

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The next day (after visiting Chaka Salt Lake) of our China-2024 trip was packed with tourisms. We were set to explore and admire a full three… and a half attractions. They may not be 5K-rated, but all together they were to make this section of our route a real treat…

As we ventured deeper into rocky desert, the scenery became increasingly striking:

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After Oymyakon, we decided we needed to check out the local disused airport – in the village called… Airport (in Russian – Aeroport)! ->

In WWII it was used as a back-up airport for ALSIB Lend-Lease aircraft. After the war it became a civilian airport, and now – as you can see – it’s well and truly abandoned:

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I left you in the previous post with our leaving Oymyakon heading in the direction of the original Kolyma highway. All righty – let’s go!…

The Old Kolymsky Tract is the highway road the R504 replaced. You might think it’d be abandoned by now, but you’d be wrong – kinda. A long stretch of it is fully serviced and regularly cleared of snow and has the odd small village alongside it. In places – near Tomtor – it even has street lighting ->

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Still with plenty of time to spare on the return leg of our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition, what else could we check out along the way? Answering that was easy: Oymyakon – for the third time in as many years!…

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Intro

Luck was on our side when heading back south on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition: we’d narrowly missed being stranded for several days in Tiksi, and were way ahead of schedule. And it was this latter spot of luck that permitted us to spend plenty of time examining and enjoying a very special feature of the North – which I’ll be writing a lot about and showing a great many photos of in this here mega-long post. And as the title to the post indicates – the special feature is… the Indigirka Tube ->

So, what is the Indigirka Tube?…

Read on …

What with several business trips the world over since the spring, plus a few Kamchatka-2024 posts already sneaking onto these here blog pages of mine, you might think that my tales from the extreme-north side (our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road expedition) could be over. How wrong you’d be!…

But even I admit that it’s been a while since my last Tiksi-post. Accordingly, quick rewind to where I left you months ago…

I left you with our having left Tiksi heading back in the direction of Yakutsk just before Tiksi was cut off completely for over a week due to a particularly intense arctic blizzard, and our realizing that we were waaaay ahead of schedule – as in: we’d be back in Yakutsk in half the time we’d planned; yes – a full 10 days earlier!

So what were we to do? Arrive back earlier and that was that? Of course not. No, instead, we decided to head back toward Ust-Nera and investigate much more closely Indigirskaya Truba – the Indigirka Tube. Well why not? After all, we’d plenty of time, and – more importantly – the naleds there were fully frozen, thus posing no danger…

// What’s the Indigirka Tube? Find out here.

So – back to Ust-Nera it was. Not that it felt much like our second time in as many weeks on this expedition, since the snowstorm had changed how the landscape looked so much. Here it is two weeks earlier ->

And here’s the exact (see the same road signs?!) same spot after the storm:

Onward – through the only-barely-cleared road – the Kolyma Highway…

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Today’s portion of Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition took us from Topolínoye on the winter road to the Kolyma Highway, and along the latter for a short stretch until our next overnight stay – in the village of Tyoply Klyuch (Warm Springs). The road was smooth and wide, the views – exceptional:

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Ahead of us – taking the incredibly picturesque (permanent, but not asphalted) road from the village of Topolinoye roughly south all the way to the Kolyma Highway, and then hanging a right (westward) and back to Yakutsk. That was the plan, anyway…

Read on…