Rubtsovsk (Рубцо́вск)

Monday, June 16, 2014 Rubtsovsk is twined with Grants Pass in the United States. A place we have very fond memories of. Started the day for a coffee from Arabica Coffee. For some strange reason the coffees here in Russia…

Monday, June 16, 2014 Rubtsovsk is twined with Grants Pass in the United States. A place we have very fond memories of. Started the day for a coffee from Arabica Coffee. For some strange reason the coffees here in Russia…

This post is about the government documentation we needed and obtained to bring our car and ourselves into Russia. Russia in General The Russia government website has a pretty good description of the process to temporarily import a vehicle into…

Saturday, June 14, 2014 Barnaul is twined with Flagstaff in the United States. And Flagstaff hosts overland expo each year. We don’t often pre-book accommodation, but we did for Barnaul. It is a bigger city and we didn’t want to…

Black Friday (черная пятница), June 13, 2014 Woke up early as our room did not have curtains and the sun got up early here. Still, we took our time and enjoyed breakfast and a mid-morning latte (our first ones since…

Thursday, June 12, 2014 Huge driving day today, covering some 445kms (278 miles) through the Altai Mountains. We had wonderful scenery along the way. It was so nice to see the dust and sand of Mongolia replaced by green valleys…

Wednesday, June 11, 2014 The drive from the border to Kosh-Agach was very painless. We were driving in search of a place to stay based on some loose information we had received from the Land Rover driving Norwegians we had…

Wednesday, June 11, 2014 We set off from Ölgii around 9:30 and headed towards the Mongolian/Russian border. Most of the road was sealed but we did have our last stretch of unsealed Mongolian road as well. In a strange way…

Sunday, June 8, 2014 On arrival we rushed around and picked a hotel. The one we liked was full. Ended up making a poor choice of room in a good hotel, which was fixed the next day with a room…

Sunday, June 8, 2014 We had a leisurely 6 hour drive to Ölgii. The roads started out dusty and bumpy but ended with near prefect sealed road (there was one very large pothole to be avoided). The scenery was wonderful and…

Thursday, June 5, 2014 Our hotel had the usual challenge, ie.:lacking hot water. But we setup our camping shower and used the kettle to boil the water. It was good to get cleaned up and wash away the dust and…

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 We woke up to find a dusting of snow on Sterlin as well as on the northern slopes of the surrounding hills. In our cozy hotel room we were completely oblivious to the weather outside, so…

Monday, June 2, 2014 The ‘improved’ road away from Uliastai headed up and over a pass and was in poor condition. But the views were wonderful and we took the driving slowly. Altai was 200kms away and we thought the…

Saturday, May 31, 2014 We sure must have slept well as we woke up to find it was past 8am! Not bad! Specially with the sun coming up around 5:15am. We enjoyed breakfast on this windless, warm morning, after which…

Friday, May 30, 2014 After breakfast in our room we drove about 20km west of Moron to go and see the Deer Stones there (link to follow). We learned about these while visiting the National Museum in Ulaanbaatar and were…

Wednesday, May 28, 2014 The plan was to head north to Khövsgöl Nuur which is the second largest lake in Mongolia. And as the lake was only 100kms away on a good sealed road, we decided to treat ourselves and…