Day 63 Saturday August 30th. 480km from Vladivostok

Up after a good nights sleep in the four berth dormer, and after breakfast of two runny fried eggs and fried spam like salami we got away towards Vladovostok.

On our approach towards the city of Kharbovsk we crossed a large river and halfway across the bridge Geoff's front tyre suddenly developed a puncture. There were some road works on the bridge and this provided a safe refuge to do the repair and so we set about changing the inner tube. We put in a new tube and straight away it developed another puncture and on removing the tyre we noticed that the wheel had no rim tape protecting the inner tube from the ends of the spokes. This is a mystery as to where the rim tape has gone because Dave is convinced that when he took the tyre off yesterday there was no rim tape. Geoff has since remembered seeing a mess of rubber next to the damaged tube yesterday and he now realises this was the rim tape which must have come out with the inner tube when the drunks were changing the tyre yesterday!!

We taped the inside of the wheel and now it is holding ok!

So after a hot and sweaty repair on the bridge we set off into Kharbovsk to find the road to Vladivostok. We hit traffic jams and the weather was very hot (29 deg. C) and Franks bike started to smoke from the engine and make a "tappity" noise.
We stopped and checked the oil levels which were ok so just let the bike cool down and the noise reduced. We set off and ran up the sides of the traffic instead of waiting in the queues and the bike worked ok for the rest of the day.

It is still a long way to Vladivostok and so we ploughed on making good progress, except for a section of roadworks for about 2 miles where we were in a total dust storm.
Most of the roads were single carriageway and fast where we had to take a lot of care overtaking lorries.

We decided to stop for the evening, but hotels are very few and far between, but Paul spotted a sign he recognised as a hotel group and we are nicely settled into a modern hotel with one double room and two single rooms. What luxury!!




There is some sort of festival taking place in town and before we found the hotel we toured around and stopped at a place to ask a policeman if he knew where there was an hotel. He and his comrade were dealing with a situation where a man was so drunk he was sprawled in a ditch and absolutely out of it. They seemed happy to just leave him in the ditch to recover at his own pace.

More later
RRs



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