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Crossing 2000 Miles of Siberia to Reach One of the Most Isolated Cities on Earth
- mykowebhn 6y agoOn a similar note, and for a great read, I highly recommend Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia." I found out about it because The New Yorker had published some excerpts from it, and I was instantly hooked. Frazier's writing is both engaging and laugh-out-loud hilarious. It was written several years ago, so things are probably a lot different in Siberia now. https://smile.amazon.com/Travels-Siberia-Ian-Frazier/dp/0312610602?sa-no-redirect=1 https://smile.amazon.com/Travels-Siberia-Ian-Frazier/dp/0312...
- p_l 6y agoI'll have to find the title, but long ago I recall my parents listening to an audiobook of a polish emigrant (to Switzerland) deciding to go around the northern hemisphere on car. Asia was crossed by driving through Siberia, though I'm not sure if he followed the same land route to Kamchatka as described in the article. This was in the early 1990s, I think it might have been just after dissolution of USSR, and more than once it was his quick talking that helped. Ultimately, the road trip ended in USA, where highway patrol took offence to his heavily-modified Land Rover or something like that.
- pomian 6y agoRomuald Koperski, A Duel with Siberia. That is my own translation from the Polish title. It is a phenomenal book, I found it in audiobook format- possibly YouTube, with a great reader. Very engaging, exciting, sometimes funny, and often philosophical. Unfortunately haven't found it in English, and have contemplated having it translated.
- gk1 6y agoTravels in Siberia is a terrific book, as is Midnight in Siberia by David Greene. Both of those books inspired my own trip through Siberia: https://www.gregkogan.com/journal/russia-trans-siberian-railway-st-petersburg/ https://www.gregkogan.com/journal/russia-trans-siberian-rail...
- jyriand 6y agoI would also suggest a movie called Derzu Uzala, directed by no other than Akira Kurosawa himself. It's about surveyor and a local hunter. Taking place somewhere in Easter Siberia.
- mykowebhn 6y agoIt's a wonderful film, and the book it is based off of is also wonderful [1]. FWIW, both the film and the book take place north of Vladivostok in the Sikhote-Alin Mountain range and along the coast of the Sea of Japan. It reminded me of the Pacific North West in the USA and Canada, but it was just foreign enough and a little bit different to make it seem incredibly magical. For example, you would have brown bears and eagles, but you might also see Siberian Tigers. You could meet an indigenous hunter, like Derzu Uzala, but you could also meet Russians, Chinese, and Koreans. I second the recommendation for the film, and I'd also highly recommend the book. [1] https://smile.amazon.com/Dersu-Trapper-Recovered-Classics-Arsenev/dp/0929701496/ref=sr_1_1 https://smile.amazon.com/Dersu-Trapper-Recovered-Classics-Ar...
- Arubis 6y agoAh, this was a delightful escape. I've scarcely left the city limits since March of last year, and this is food for the soul right now; thanks for sharing.
- blunte 6y agoThere are many excellent youtube videos of people doing long solo hikes through beautiful lands. Those can also be a nice escape, especially while having a lunch break "at work" (at home).
- theklub 6y agoYou might like "the long way down" or "the long way round". Sounds like this expedition would have been cool as a mini series too.
- grecy 6y agoI recently drove right around Africa - 54,000 miles through 35 countries, basically around the entire coastline. I have a bunch of videos from the trip [1] and I've just published a book about it too [2] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX1gG0CUhHCsad_hv2qZbGzXc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX... [2] https://amzn.to/3pnVKu6 https://amzn.to/3pnVKu6
- mssundaram 6y agoWow, amazing! How did or didn't covid change your journey?
- nuker 6y ago"welding using daisy-chained car batteries" this is hardcore
- s5300 6y agoIt's really not. Using car batteries for various types of welding is common hobby practice
- freehunter 6y agoSomething tells me most hobbyists are not doing their car battery welding on-the-fly in -60F weather in the middle of Sibera with the stakes of failure being freezing to death though.
- s5300 6y agoI inferred that he was simply saying the fact of using chained car batteries for welding is hardcore, which I obviously think is not as I've seen it done by many people in many places. As for the situation in this context though - sure, that could be said to be hardcore.
- pengaru 6y agoYou're right, car batteries are a very accessible source of high-current DC power. It's especially common for budget DIY spot welding.
- nuker 6y agoIt is, it was likely some big thing, like strut support, not small hobby things like jewelry.
- avhon1 6y agoArc welding structural steel with lead-acid batteries is well-established among hobbyists. Here's somebody who reinforced their truck bumper using six 6-volt golf cart batteries, jumper cables, and filler rod, in 2008: https://www.instructables.com/Golfcart--Welder/ https://www.instructables.com/Golfcart--Welder/
- howlgarnish 6y agoThey're building a new highway from Magadan to Chukotka, which will be 1800 km through some of the most fearsome territory known to man. It will only cover a small portion of the route to Petropavlovsk though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadyr_Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anadyr_Highway
- ryandrake 6y agoAfter the "Ghost Road" story on HN a few days ago [1], out of boredom and curiosity, I did a little browsing around online maps in Russia and noticed there really aren't any major roads at all connecting northern/eastern Siberia to the rest of Russia--unless Google Maps and Openstreetmap are woefully incomplete, which is possible. It seems so alien to my pampered US sensibilities, all spoiled by our glorious interstate highway system and regional State highways. How can the vast majority of a country's small towns and land area be not even remotely accessible by so much as a dirt road?? I get that few people live there, but the ones that do, how do they go anywhere else in Russia? In the US, most of the country is at most 5-6 miles from some kind of road. Maybe there are spots in Yellowstone that are 20 miles from a road, but thats orders of magnitude less remote than what Maps depicts about Siberia! 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25574180
- monkeybutton 6y agoPerhaps a better comparison to Russia would be Canada rather than the United States? Similarly much of the north isn't accessible by roads year round or at all. It either doesn't make sense based on the population of the towns or is very impractical over the hash terrain.
- nkozyra 6y agoI think it could also be argued that the proliferation of roads and highways in the United States led to more mobility for citizens. A chicken-and-egg question, for sure, but people are unlikely to move to a place that is largely inaccessible.
- pomian 6y agoCanada, and especially "the North", has many towns, only accessible by winter; ice roads. After freeze up, they are plowed, and maintained. After break up in the spring, those towns are only re supplied with groceries, medical supplies, traveling doctors, etc. By airplane. There is a lot of pressure to stock up in the winter. The region is covered by muskeg ( swamp), rivers and lakes. Winter is the only time many places are accessible. This also is true for mineral, oil and gas exploration. Winter is a blessing. Global warming, will give rise to many interesting questions about accessibility. See Norman Wells, Tuktoyaktuk, and Aklavik. New highways, old ice roads.
- pomian 6y agoGreat book by Louis L'amour, "Last of the Breed". Escaping and walking across Siberia to North America. One of L'Amour's better books.
- 1e-9 6y agoThis reminds me of Bertha Benz who made the first long-distance automobile trip in 1888. Bertha wanted to convince her husband Karl that his invention had great potential and should be marketed. So, early one morning, without telling anyone, she loaded up her two teenaged sons and set off over 65 miles of wagon tracks between Mannheim and Pforzheim. Through ingenuity and determination, she overcame numerous obstacles to complete the illegal trip. Fascinating woman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz
- irrational 6y agoWow. Some of their kids lived until the early 1970s. The things they lived to see from the late 1880s to the early 1979s include so many things like 2 world wars, the invention of the airplane to jet flights being commonplace, men going to the moon, from early automobiles to fast race cars, from classical music to disco (oh, wait...)
- jacquesm 6y agoMy grandmother lived roughly during the same era. This led to some funny things, she would answer the telephone in her bedroom but refused to have a TV there because 'If I can see them, who is to guarantee they can't see me?'. Tech progress in the last two hundred years is nothing short of incredible, plenty of what we see today as normal would have been absolute magic just a few short decades ago. This hit me hard when driving in Arizona somewhere and having a cell phone conversation with another dutch person who was driving in Canada, both of us on our tri-band cell phones with roaming contracts. Crystal clear, as if we were standing next door to each other and neither of us realized that we were abroad (and on another continent than normally) until halfway into the conversation. That's how normal it has become to be able to talk to everybody all the time.
- toper-centage 6y agoLittle did she know that they couldn't see her... Yet. And today tracking and surveillance is so common place that people became complacent.
- totablebanjo 6y agoI recommend a novel called Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips that is set on Kamchatka and a good amount in Petropavlovsk. It is very much not a wilderness survival book, but more of a mystery and social commentary book.
- chihuahua 6y agoPretty amazing. It's one thing to cobble together some 6-wheeled vehicle and then drive it around the block once, it's a completely different story to build that vehicle and depend on it with your life for 2000 miles where there's no one and nothing around.
- bamboleo 6y agoThat makes me think: How did they cover 2000 miles without anyone around? Did they carry enough gas for the whole trip or there actually is something along the way?
- riscy 6y agoArticle says, > The year before, the team spent a significant amount of time traveling east by boat to coastal settlements dotted along the Sea of Okhotsk, dropping off fuel and supplies to support their upcoming journey.
- Tempest1981 6y agoI recommend "Long Way Round" on AppleTV. Ewan McGregor and his friend Charlie ride motorcycles from London to Magadan. Episodes 7-8 are on the Road of Bones -- it's insanely difficult, even for military trucks.
- Tempest1981 6y agoHere is the 6-wheeled Kamaz 4310, which gets windshield-deep in water trying to cross a raging river: http://bestride.com/news/the-kamaz-that-saved-ewan-mcgregor-and-charlie-boorman-the-long-way-round-has-been-abandoned http://bestride.com/news/the-kamaz-that-saved-ewan-mcgregor-...
- KozmoNau7 6y agoIf you want a small virtual taste of what it's like taking trucks like the Kamaz 4310 through mud, swamps and flooded areas, the game Mudrunner is on Steam and features plenty of sticky off-roading and old Soviet iron. Ostensibly the game is just about driving logs from one place to another, but it's the journey itself that makes the game. The mud physics are quite good,m and you'll certainly end up needing both all-wheel drive, diff locks and a healthy amount of winching to get around. The physics model isn't perfect for on-road driving and the diff locks are not super realistic on hard surfaces, but it's certainly the best off road simulation I've tried. Taking an old truck on road tires slowly through mud and fording a river with water up to the windshield, while towing a garage trailer to unlock a remote service station is an odd kind of excitement, completely different from the high speed shenanigans in most driving games. A controller is an absolute must, you have to be surprisingly delicate when feathering the throttle to navigate sticky mud. Full throttle just spins the tires and gets you hopelessly stuck.
- tiku 6y agoFirst thing I thought of was Jeremy Clarkson and the red truck they used for some arctic trip. They also had snapped stuff on the truck but they had a complete film crew off screen to help out.. but stil.
- monkeypizza 6y agoReally nice page design. Pictures load instantly with preloading, keyboard shortcuts (forward/back/esc). (Story is great too.)
- NightMKoder 6y agoA 2kW hair dryer seems a bit out of place - the Russian for hairdryer (фен) happens to also mean a regular fan. I can’t fathom what you would do with a huge diesel-powered fan either, but at least it might make a bit more sense than a hairdryer? On a complete side note - people can sometimes have some luck reading Cyrillic if they pretend it’s Greek. In the case above - phi, eta, nu - is roughly how you pronounce it - fen.
- Klaster_1 6y agoThe "hairdrier" was probably a joke or slang, as in a "heatgun is a big hairdrier". "Фен" doesn't mean "regular fan", it's "hairdrier", despite sounding very similar.
- NightMKoder 6y agoAs several folks pointed out, I was wrong with the translation. Evidently my family who are proper Russians have been humoring my half-correctness. Sorry for the incorrect info above everyone! I did learn that фен can actually mean other kinds of hair dryer-like heat guns (from https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Фен https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Фен). I assume that’s what these folks used to heat various components.
- na85 6y agoA 2kw hair dryer might be good for warming engine blocks and other frozen components.
- PeterisP 6y agoWhy does a 2kw hair dryer seem out of place? For a hair dryer you'd strongly prefer more power now to get it done quickly, so all the cheap best selling hair dryer models are 2kw (e.g. as amazon shows at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=hair+dryer https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=hair+dryer), it's pretty much the default power level for a hair dryer, and many hair dryers (intended for hair, not for warming up engine blocks) have more than 2kw. I'd interpret the "diesel-powered" as they likely have a diesel generator for electricity. In USA the default seems to be 1.85kw (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hair+dryer https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hair+dryer) possibly because 2kw appliances are trickier for the 110v wiring. P.S. I'm also surprised by the assertion that "the Russian for hairdryer (фен) happens to also mean a regular fan", as IMHO it does not, a regular fan would usually be called вентилятор, not фен. Фен means either a hair dryer or (as строительный фен) a heat gun for construction work.
- arendtio 6y agoSounds like the computer game mud runners was inspired by a similar story.
- jhoechtl 6y ago> 2,000-watt diesel-powered hair dryer lol for sure that's a Diesel heater and not a hair dryer!
- midasuni 6y agoWell 2,000W is reasonable for a hair dryer
- SigmundA 6y agoBeing into motorhomes I always have this dream of a future where there is a bridge across the Bering Strait and one can drive from the US to Europe through a friendly and welcoming Russia on a well maintained highway system. This would of course be in some sort of electric motorhome with amazing range and good charging infrastructure along with high speed cellular or satellite internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing
- droro 6y agoI remember seeing a documentary a long time ago called Overland to America that documents similar travails, including a failed attempt at driving across the Bering Strait in one of these things: https://www.arktoscraft.com/ https://www.arktoscraft.com/
- maribozu 6y agoA comment from Russia here: I just wish they would have chosen a more interesting destination to reach by car - it's fairly simple to get to Petropavlovsk by plane. There are many other smaller hidden gems across the country where you can only get using a prepped car, thus for me the trip to Petropavlovsk looks a bit like an overkill.
- segmondy 6y agoAmazing read, lots of hacks involved. Taking lots of different car parts, engines, transmissions, drive shafts, etc and constructing a unique car and then being able to have the tools and skills to repair them in the most remote and toughest place in the world. Very nice, hacker news indeed.
- amai 6y agoIt is better to drive in Siberia through the wilderness, because the roads in Siberia are cursed: „The road is treated as a memorial, as the bones of the estimated 250,000 - 1,000,000 people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road.“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway https://youtu.be/oo1WouI38rQ https://youtu.be/oo1WouI38rQ
- LockAndLol 6y agoDoes anybody know what the difficulties are of building a road in the tundra? Will concrete just break due to the seasonal changes in temperature? Is it that it's possible but the amount of building material would enormous? I kind of expected Russians and Canadians to be the experts of building roads or train tracks in those conditions.