Day 29 – Barnaul to Gorno-Altaisk

High point: Run club. Finally, finally we managed to fit some proper exercise in and we all attempted to go running today.I think attempted is probably the right word as the air pollution in Gorno-Altaisk is pretty high (even the Lonely Planet which is normally so complementary about everything calls this place ‘a concrete scare on the landscape’), it affected our breathing, so what was discussed as a good quick 10km run turned into more of a shorter plod. Oh well at least we gave it a go!

Low point: Gorno-Altaisk. As mentioned above, is not the prettiest place in the world. Its seems rather strange to me that whilst the surrounding area of the Altai Republic is absolutely stunning, almost Swiss Alps-esque, the towns themselves are pretty non-descript places. Gorno-Altaisk consisted of one 7km long road of nothingness.

No point: No point today is random point. After really camping it up in our ‘Total Eclipse of the heart’ video we managed to surpass this by pulling over in the largest sun flower meadow all of us had ever seen and we then proceeded to take photographs of ourselves hiding behind them. Why? Who knows, Russia is doing weird things to us.

Russian word of the day: g’dear resauran = where is a restaurant? 10pm on a Sunday night is not the ideal time to be looking for one.

Authors comments: Today was supposed to be quite a restful day and our total km was only about one hundred and fifty. In the last month we have only really had only one day off (and that was forced upon us in Switzerland with Martha’s fuel tank), so I think we were all quite looking forward to it. Although it was nice, it also felt a little bit strange. I think we are all so accustomed to being on the move, and getting on with our designated day jobs (navigation, photography, entertainment, communications, truck maintenance) to suddenly have nothing to do we were all at a bit of a loose end, and felt in some way that we were cheating. Steve went to catch up on communications at the local internet cafe, James took himself off on a walk and met some awesome Russian firemen, you can imagine how much they loved Martha, Dave naturally slept, I tucked into my book and Ben took a look at the local war memorial; strange how the dates are from 1941-1945, I’m sure history tells us the Russians were involved in WW2 before this!

Moral was given a good boost when we found a nice restaurant at about 10pm. Now some of you may think this is late to eat but we are very use to it considering 99% of the time we don’t arrive at our intended destination till just past 9pm. A few beers before bed and a little bit of a sushi did just the job (I’m sure this is a re-occurring theme in my blogs).

Ross

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