Rally Day 16

Here's the missing text that goes with the day 16 pictures

"The floor of the hut was of hard black dirt. Outside the squiggly streets of Tyumen were either mud or dust according to the season. Lining the squiggles were horrid wooden huts. Sometimes wild pigs would rage into town and bite children to death...it was not a setting to sing about".  Irving Berlin - born in Tyumen where the rally has now arrived. 

I can imagine the squiggly streets and wooden huts Berlin describes because the villages along the way are just the same today. 

Richard and I stopped at a village shop that sold everything from bread to clothes amnd vodka and we bought some ice cream. We stayed around to watch our fellow competitors come through and shared our packet of mini Twix with the locals who came to watch. Richard found a fellow motorbike enthusiast who was keen for him to take his bike for a ride. 

The countryside here is unrelentingly dull. If you fell asleep in the car and woke up two, three or four hours later you couldn't be sure that you weren't being driven around in a circle. Richard and I have played several rounds of eye spy - something beginning with SB. The answer is always Silver Birch. When the landscape isn't silver birch there are dystopian industrial wastelands that belong in Call of Duty.


Another day of nearly 700 km and I thought I was going to be able to say that for the first time ever that we didn't break down. But it wasn't to be. The old fuel problem returned and we spent time at the roadside. 

Looks like we will have to flush the petrol tanks out and change the fuel pump filters but we can't do that until the next rest day. In the meantime we soldier on.