Geoff stayed back to post the latest blogs and when he came to take the lift down to the ground floor there were workmen repairing the lift and so he had to carry his heavy gags down from the fifth floor!!
The air filters were changed and the bike chains lubricated.
Geoff's pannier button was stuck and would not operate the catch to hold it onto the newly repaired brackets. Upon investigation it seemed that something had leaked onto the plastic button and welded it to the pannier!!
With a lot of force the button was freed and on taking it apart it looked like DEET or something similar had plastic welded the button in position. After scraping and re-shaping with his Leatherman Geoff managed to get the system working and could then attach his one remaining pannier to the support frame.
Dave, Frank and Paul were raking bets as to how long it would be before something else fell off Geoff's bike!
On our way out of a Tynda Ivan passed by in his car and waved to us.
The first 25 km out of Tynda the weather was misty and cloudy and visibility was very poor as we travelled along unpaved roads. Gradually the sun came out and drove away the morning mist allowing us to speed up and make good progress. Throughout the 150km south to a place called Never there were major road reconstruction works underway. At he point Dave was following a large Kamas truck and was about to overtake it when the truck without signalling decided to turn left directly in front of him. Dave did well to avoid what would have been a major collusion!!
At Never we joined the main highway to Vladivostok and the road turned into perfectly good tarmac road where we could make fast progress.
We made good progress, but tiredness was starting to affect everyone and so we started to look for accommodation. We had seen very few hotel looking buildings and were getting ourselves quite depressed that we may in fact have to ride some considerable distance before we found an hotel. Then just at the next fuel stop there was a new large looking cafe complex, and so on the off chance we asked if they do accommodation. Sure enough at the side of what seemed to be a building site stood a low level building, and inside we were shown clean accommodation. We took a single room with four single beds.
That evening we had a meal at the cafe and met lots of interesting people who insisted on sharing vodka tots with us. Some were staying at the same "hotel" and we spent a pleasant evening with a TV/radio repair man calked Vladimir and his co-worker Roman.
More later
RRs
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