Wild bears, Snow and Siberia

Sorry to lie to you, but we haven’t seen any bears, not yet anyway.
We stayed in Gorno Altaysk, a decent sized town with teenagers in school uniforms behaving like any other teenagers in every other part of the world on a Friday afternoon, and a lot of military propaganda. We had noticed many memorials all through Russia, all with 1941-1945 on them. We have seen big ones in towns and small ones by the side of the road, but this was the first time we were seeing large billboards which looked to be enticing the young to sign up to the military. It was here we also finally came to the conclusion that the Russians do not do ‘curb appeal’ nor a lot of eating out. Our search for a restaurant led us to find approximately 25 supermarkets, two wedding receptions and a strip club. In the end we gave up and ate take away blinis, which were pretty damn tasty!
Onwards and upwards we go. Literally. Climbing into the Altais things were changing. It was getting significantly cooler, the psycho drivers were easing (although still in right hand drives), and the people were appearing to be more clearly of Asian descent. Whilst we hadn’t crossed any official borders it was beginning to feel like a different place. We drove higher and higher. We could see snow on the tops of the mountains, then the snow was on the tops of the trees on the side of the road, then we could see it falling and it was settling on the ground. Maggie was working overtime and we were starting to smell the engine heating up. We reached a plateau and discovered markets so seized the opportunity to give Maggie a rest and to check out the range of yak’s wool gloves, socks and underwear. This also served as a toilet stop. There was no tree cover, just a dodgy looking wooden shack on stilts down behind the stalls. I’ve never been a big fan of the long drop, partly due to the fact that I used to be scared of falling in and mostly because of the stench. These days I’m not so concerned about my balance and it was pleasing to figure out that frozen excrement holds next to no smell! Winning.
We ate a delicious ‘meat thing’ for lunch and drank some tea to warm us, whilst Maggie was cooling. We gave her some more oil and Hayden used his ingenuity to cool the header tank for the radiator by using clean snow!
On the downward stretch of road the view was spectacular. The vast landscape stretched out in front of us with a never ending panorama of golden trees, snow capped mountains, near freezing rivers, cows (both on and off the road) and the occasional man on horseback.
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.