Tag Archives: russia

I left you yesterday with our arriving – on our (March 2024) Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road-trip – in the village of Ust-Kuyga before lunch. We didn’t stop there, as we wanted to keep up the pace and crack on – all the way to Khayyr. And the pace was indeed kept up, for the road became a winter (ice) road upon the smooth surface of the frozen-over Yana river. And smooth = fast!…

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And so, it was farewell Deputatsky, and hello, once again, the long and winding road north. More of the same? Yes. We were ever bored? Yeah – right!…

But what made this day stand out from being “just another” day of wonderful whiteness were… the halos in the morning! ->

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Ahead of schedule, we were fast approaching the destination of our road trip – the northern-Russian-coastal town of Tiksi.

Already behind us were the towns/villages of Khandyga, Ust-Nera, Sasyr, Khonuu, and Syagannakh. All was hunky-dory with our Chinese vehicles. And since we made it to the town of Deputatsky much quicker than expected, of course – that meant only one thing: a walk around this village that’s some 400 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle (to give you a taster-teaser – just in case any of you, dear readers, may fancy one day visiting the place)…

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You know the drill already: a new day on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition means another early rise, another quick breakfast, and minutes later piling back into our cars and setting off again on our way. On this day we had around 300km ahead of us taking us from Syagannakh to Deputatsky…

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“The winter road won’t get us there on its own!”

It was with such words in our minds – or something along those lines – that we’d awake every morning on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition. And this particular morning was no exception: time to get up and be off. So, as per, we were up at the crack, and back on our way northward…

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I left you yesterday with us on our way out of Khonuu early morning heading to the nearest filling station. As you’ll no doubt know, refueling is normally rather straightforward; however, up here – just outside the Arctic Circle – it’s far from simple…

First of all, you have to find a filling station, for there aren’t many. That often means heading to the next village – or the one after that – and in northern Yakutia that can mean serious distances (an extra hundred kilometers, for example). But there’s more to refueling than just that; accordingly, I hereby announce that this post is dedicated to… Yakutian gas stations!…

Now, filling stations in the Far North aren’t the all-singing-all-dancing minimarket-cafes with hotdogs and assorted other bells and whistles like you get in more temperate climes across the developed world. In a word, here, they’re simple:

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In the previous installment in the series of blogposts on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition, we’d just arrived in the small village of Khonuu after nightfall.

Now, since Far North villages fascinate me – particularly how life can and is lived in such places – I really wanted to get a closer look at what’s what here to be able to then convey it to you, dear readers. Not that we ventured out far: we literally just walked around our lodgings, but still…

Here are those lodgings:

You see the pipes in the above pic? Those carry hot water to all buildings in the village from a centralized heating plant. I was rather astonished to find out that this – a holdover from Soviet times – is a mandatory attribute across the whole of Yakutia – even its northern reaches.

So what’s it like inside apartment buildings like this one?… ->

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Hi folks!

So many business trips – so little time for… continuing my tales from the deep-frozen Siberian Far North side! But since flying back from China, let me get back to it. So, where was I? Ah – yes: arriving in the village of Sasyr after nightfall and, given there are no hotels or guesthouses to stay at, we were bedding down in the village school’s gym hall on rubber mats!…

Unusual circumstances? Yes. Original? Indeed. Uncomfortable? No!…

We were warm (here – crucial!), there was food, there was fuel at the nearby filling station (we drove there later), and – most importantly – there was table tennis. What more could you ask for?

The following morning – on the fourth day of our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road trip – after breakfast, we were back on our way on the winter/ice road. Next destination: the village of Khonuu (see the map at the very end of this post). And what an interesting and gorgeous day it was too…

First – warm-up pic:

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With conference season still in full-swing, I’ve been busier than a bee of late. Just recently I only had two days at home and it was back on the road again. This time though it was a domestic business trip – albeit it a thoroughly important one …

It was for CIPR in the city of Nizhny Novgorod. CIPR?…

CIPR is a transliteration from the Russian ЦИПР, which stands for “Digital Industry of Industrial Russia”. That was a direct translation that came out clumsy in English (curiously due to the fact that there are two words for industry/industrial in Russian; only one in English:), but it’s now taken on the more modern and pertinent (in terms of content), and appropriate (in terms of English language sense) name of “Digitalization of Industrial Russia”.

CIPR: conference, exhibition, presentations, speeches, agreement signings, meets, greets, handshakes, chats. Never dull, and always a pleasure (it takes place yearly in Nizhny Novgorod – Russia’s sixth-largest city, 500km east of Moscow) ->

That fine historical building is where the talks and panel discussions take place, while the exhibition – needing a bit more room – is in the large, modern hangar-like building next door. That’s where we head first…

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I’ve been asked rather often already about the vehicles we undertook our road trip to Tiksi in. And that’s understandable – especially since they aren’t quite the instantly recognizable household-name vehicles like, say, Land Rovers or Toyota Land Cruisers…

First off, I have to say that we didn’t choose the vehicles ourselves; we left that to the experts – Arctic automotive-expedition specialists Alexander Yelikov and Yevgeny Shatalov. Alexander – Sasha – was in a specially tuned Great Wall Wingle 7, while we – the tourists – were in the three Tank 300s, as supplied by Yevgeny – Zhenya. Here are all four vehicles – somewhere between the settlements of Nayba and Tiksi upon a frozen Laptev Sea:

And here we are in the Indigirka Tube:

So – why were we in “Tanks”?

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