Day 20 – Ufa to Chelyabinsk

High point: By far the highlight of today was the drive into the foothills of the Urals. The Ural mountains are traditionally seen as the division between Europe and Asia; they stretch nearly 200km from the Arctic in the North to Kazakhstan in the South. Although this was quite a long section with roughly 420km to cover and each of us doing two lots of one hour stints at the wheel, the scenery more than made up for the long drive. Long gone were the barren featureless landscapes of central western Russia and we welcomed the beautiful birch and pine forests of the Urals, punctuated with inviting lakes and rocky outcrops. Oh fresh air finally, I think we all took a huge gulp and it surprised me how long the conversation about our surroundings lasted; I think twenty days without a little TLC from our girlfriends and our feminine sides are blossoming.Up until now one has always taken Martha’s wheel with a degree of apprehension; deeply scarred single lane narrow roads with lorries screaming past at speeds in excess of 100km an hour is always a sure way to get the adrenalin going. For once, today, probably for the first time since we left western Europe the roads were good and the oncoming traffic was down to about one every twenty seconds rather than one every two! Don’t worry stage one guys, Poland is still on top of the most awful roads podium.

Low point: We arrived at our destination Chelyabinsk at our usual designated hour – 9pm (tremendous work by navigator Ben / Sat Nav). I have no idea why but we always seem to roll into our intended destination at the same time; it’s been like this for almost three weeks. No matter what time we leave we just can’t seem to break the habit. Yesterday we made a concerted effort to arrive early but even then the time zones conspired against us and as we were booking into our hotel we were gutted to see the clock flick just past 9pm!

Chelyabinsk itself is not a place I’d recommend (although our hotel was rather smart). On first sight it looked pretty much the same as any other Russian city we’ve visited (Moscow excluded) with a mixture of pre and post socialist architecture, grey tower blocks and western shopping and entertainment centres. However Chelyabinsk holds a sinister past which wasn’t discovered by the rest of the world until the 1990’s. In 1957 the Mayak nuclear complex in Chelyabinsk suffered a meltdown similar to that of Chernobyl (Ukraine) this was kept quiet by the old Soviet regime until 1991. Since then the lake next to the nuclear plant has been declared as officially the most ‘polluted place on earth’. Needless to say we all washed our teeth with bottled water tonight! Proper scary stuff.

No point: Diet & Exercise  – Sitting in Martha for twenty days on the trot is not great for a post ironman exercise regime but eating a Mc Donald’s for breakfast and a Subway for lunch is plain silly. I am so going running tomorrow.

Russian word of the day: chuchu = little ( “Do you speak Russian?”  “Little, little.”)

Authors comments: Time is now beginning to move so swiftly. The first couple of weeks, notching up so many countries so quickly, seemed to slow time down and when the stage 2 team joined us in Moscow it felt like we had been away for ages. Now however, apart from being ‘groundhog day’ everyday, time is really beginning to fly. We must all take stock of this and remember how lucky we are to be able to do this adventure and why we are doing it.

The morale in the cab is really high at the moment. No swearing Friday provided all of us with an extreme challenge; I find the easiest way to cope with this is to bury myself in a book and only speak when spoken to, the other boys think this is deliberate cheating but I think it’s very sensible and, to be fair, there is no way I could have kept up with “Potty-mouth Dave” – swimming the channel must have left a nasty taste in his mouth! James also made a very good start for a rookie!

The excitement of, hopefully, crossing the border tomorrow into Kazakhstan is definitely noticeable and a new country to tick off will give us huge momentum. However, at the same time, although not spoken about too much, Steve and I are just praying that it’s not a replication of the Latvian / Russian border……watch this space.

Ross

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