Dave is accused of having a wandering eye and tells us how he deals with travelling with a married couple. Jo hits the wall today and can’t be bothered with the silly boys today and why does Gareth find Khabarovsk so interesting!
Today’s ride pretty uneventful, all tarseal. Only the mandatory downpour as we came into Khabarovsk made to remind us where we are.
We’d seen this city from the air as we landed here en route from Vladivostok to Magadan. From above the impression was how an earth could there be roads down there navigating through all that water – it reminded us very much of Alaska, land of a million lakes, courtesy of the permafrost. And smack through the middle of the city flows the Amur river down to the Sea of Okhotsk. The view from our hotel is across that wide river, the 10th longest in the world and one that defines the border between much of the Russian Far East and China, and the one the M58 road we’ve been riding is named after. In Khabarovsk it is frequented by barges much like the Mississippi. We don’t get to see any of the famed 6m long Kaluga fish that live in it however.
Apart from having our first Korean meal at a restaurant today the highlight was sitting at the Harley Davidson Bar on a major city intersection sipping pina coladas and watching the commuting foot and vehicle traffic jostle for primary position in the daily race to go home. It reminded me very much of sitting at a similar bar in Riga, the capital of Latvia in 2008 doing the same. And as with that evening in Riga we marvelled at the number of luxury SUVs going by – certainly a far cry from the ubiquitous Ladas and Russian Kombis that populate the rural towns.
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