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I survived Ghengis’s farewell present !

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Let’s go back a bit for 6 days. To  the town of Ölgii in the furtherest  corner of Outer, Outer, Outer Mongolia. It is 6pm!  I have no idea what I am ordering for dinner. When it arrives I bite into a grey, boiled, lukewarm meat pattie of something or other !  Thus I believe it was there I received a farewell present from the great Ghengis  himself that surely more than rivalled anything that the great Montezuma could have given me as a farewell present or the city of Dehli could have given me. 

I have been a sick, sick puppy! Fortunately the worst hit just after we arrived in the city of Barnaul where very fortunately we had booked a roomy suite in a comfortable hotel

To make my misery  worse (on a lighter note - now!)  I remember that “cheerful” notice in the foyer of the hotel in the upper Altai warning of the bubonic plague in the area with horrible descriptions of the symptoms and an even worse prognosis for non revcovery ! Was that a marmot pattie I ate in Olgii ? 




Charlie and Janet Russel of the North Shore did this trip some two years ago and we are sort of following their route. In their blog they say they stopped in Barnaul for three days for administrative reasons. Let us just say that I have also just spent three days in Barnaul for “ administrative reasons”. They said in their blog that it is a nice city.  I am sure it is. The only bit I saw was tram cars(light rail) out of the window. 



The architecture looked nice - again from a hotel window! 



Inside the hotel - well some interior design ideas for our house in Queenstown! 




Day 4 dawns. I’m better !  So it is a pack up of the bike and we are off. The GPS refuses to show me a route out of town. Never mind! The front mudguard almost falls off. Never mind ! The tyres pressure warning comes on and flashes  urgent red “ A faulty sensor I think. Never mind! We are on the way again 

Roadside repairs in the rain. God bless cable ties ! 



I now have about 10 cable ties holding a number of pieces to the bike where bolts have fallen out or bits fallen off. 

The road is nice and smooth and we are still in big sky country 




And thus we end up 300 km from Barnaul in the town of Rubtsovsk, about 30 km from the Kazakhstan border. . Tomorrow it is farewell to the Motherland  of Russia. And I am alive! 





Comments

The travelling Tappers said…
Glad to hear you are recovered now Dick. I had a similar problem in Africa then later in Serbia which were truly memorable for all the wrong reasons! All the best as you continue. We are just back from our long sojourn in AUH, Morocco, Norway and special parts of Europe with a stopover on Gilli Trawangon just to break the long haul home. Wonderful trip and now home to a very mild winter. Jules and Jenny
9 July 2019 at 17:06
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