We took a day off in Bratsk yesterday. The city has a typical soviet layout, with the main street being ulitsa lenina and a big lenin statue. We could already feel it is getting colder here, and the summer has ended. It was around 10 degrees and people wore jackets on the street. I had also noticed it in the forest, the colour of the leaves was already yellow or brown for some trees. We both realised it was time to leave Siberia and head back to the West.
The problems with the water in the Far East also played part in our decision not to go further East. As can be seen in the news the summer of 2013 is catastrophic for the Chabarovsk area with a historic high water mark level. The Amur river has reached to about 7m and people are being evacuated. But it is not only this area that has lots of rains for over a period of one month. Also Magadan area is affected and parts of the road have washed away.
One wonders if this is coincidental, or perhaps a reason is behind it. A possible reason would be warming of the ocean water caused by the submarine volcanic activities. Higher water temperatures cause higher evaporation. This damp is carried via the wind over the landmass. I am not a geologist but it seems like an acceptable theory which I would like to further review, because if this would be the case, it would not stay to just this summer… I also wonder why this specific area was hit by the heavy rains.
Anyway, not only the water catastrophy, but also the colder temperatures felt at the end of August, made us not go further east and north, but rather back home. My friend Ivan who lives in the coldest big city in the world, Yakutsk, told me they already had temperatures of -2 degrees C. The ideal period to go to the Far East would rather seem June or July at the latest.
The third reason is a resource reason, we have run out of resources which is basically time. The reason behind this was mainly mechanical problems, remember the rear shock. But also leaving home a bit later than planned, and staying a bit longer than planned in some nice locations, stretched the planning. An even more flexible planning and more time could resolve this issue of course…
Back to our story now, as we are ready to leave to the West.
We carried our luggage down from the room, and I went to the stayanka to get the bike. Before riding back, there was friendly russian guy who gave me some clay so we could glue a broken mist light of the GS. These little but strong lights, typically can break or come loose with a fall. He had noticed one of mine was loose.
I also took my spare oil can out, I had about 0.4l synthetic 10W60 of a french brand high grade oil left and poored it into the bike. The oil mark was back just above the middle now.
Larisa was waiting by the hotel when I got back. We loaded the bike and road along the lening street outside of Bratsk. I don’t know why, but I also like to ride via the Lenin street and watch the statue when I leave a city. By now I guess we have seen about 50 different kinds of them 🙂 One remarkt though, in Russia, there are still many of them, while in Mongolia and Central Asia, most of them have been removed. I will not go deeper into this, but there is a reason behind it.
Once outside the city, it was a nice asphalt road, which runs for about 200km to the city of Tulun southbound. From Tulun you hit back on the M53 which is the transsiberian highway in this area and leads to the next big city which is Krasnoyarsk. If you look well on the map you can also see there is a small road from Bratsk to Tayshet, a city on the M53. This looks like a serious shortcut, but I had no documentation whatsoever about this road and decided against it. I still wonder however how this road condition is.
The M53 is a pretty boring highway if you ask me. Many trucks are seen here which leave massive dust clouds once you are on a gravel stretch. There was not a lot of gravel left, it was mainly asphalt. You also have the railcrossings.as the road follows the trainrails, or is it vice versa?
Anyway, we rode well into the evening, and into the sunset. A bad thing to note about riding in this direction is obviously that you get the sun in your eyes in the evening. This can be bad for eyes and dangerous as you can be seriously blinded in some cases.
Once it got dark we were on the lookout for another gostinitso and we found one around 10pm. It was a typical truck stop place with cheap food and beds. The guy who watched my bike was armenian. We noticed that in this area there were more and more armenians and georgians looking people also.
We had a beer in the cafe and talked to a truck driver and watched the local girls dance on the latest russian hit songs. I had ridden about 600km today, so I wanted to go to bed. I also had a problem with one of my eyes, it was aching a lot. Maybe it got a cold by riding with open visor during the darkness. Rest was needed, but the ride of tomorrow would be shorter, about 300km to Krasnoyarsk.