The road to Novosibirsk

---

There is a saying that Russia has two problems: ‘fools and roads’. The poor condition of many roads and causes thereof (including, prominently, corruption), is frequently a topic of conversation here. However, Russia has a couple of advantages regarding roads: it’s a rather flat country and it has lots of space to build them. I’ve been impressed by the number of new roads under construction and have enjoyed whizzing along long, wide, straight, recently build roads. What make driving here difficult are the sudden changes of road quality. A smooth new road will suddenly transform into a gravel track or battered tarmac surface with more hole than pot. I’ve also, since driving in Russia, become a huge fan of road markings. It’s unexpectedly difficult to drive without road markings, especially on a wide road with an unspecified number of lanes in each direction.

So far the roads have been generally good. On my route from Chelyabinsk to Omsk I had to take a slightly indirect route to avoid going into Kazakhstan (I thought it best to avoid visas and border crossings). In my road atlas a stretch of this road was marked grey rather than red. I looked in the key and read it indicated a ‘difficult to pass section of road’. It turned out to be pretty bad and we slowly negotiating the potholes and bumps. However, my journey was made difficult by other things. Some sort of aggressive biting gnat flew into the car and I opened the window wider to try and shoo it away. Unsurprisingly, other members of its band joined the car and I found myself under attack. After failing to get rid of them by other means I took decisive action: I stopped the car, closed all the windows and, armed with only a notepad, carried out a massacre.



Agatha’s windscreen wipers operate adequately in light or moderate rain, but, being modest both in size and power, they are unequal to strong downpours. On a couple of occasions I’ve had to take unscheduled breaks by the side of the road while the rain passes. However, I was unprepared, as I bumped along the ‘difficult to pass’ section of road, for them to stop working altogether. It is, I’ve conclusively discovered, impossible to drive in even modest rain without windscreen wipers. So I ‘broke down’. It seemed somehow humiliating that my journey was suspended not by some complicated sounding engine problem (‘some sand got into the carburetor needle’) or by some impressive sounding mechanical fault (‘I broke an axel’), but by the refusal of two piece of plastic to move across the windscreen. Having checked the obvious possible causes (battery, fuses, obstructions) and failed to fix the problem, I was left to listen to the remainder of a P.G.Wodehouse novel and wait for the rain to finish.

---

Photos

P1010026
Driver attention! The section of road for the next 30km is in an accident state Speed of movement 40km/hr

P1010065
Road markings: an optional extra

P1010056
Stuck in the rain