Travel

 

So I think we have established by now that we live in a pretty remote and interesting part of the world. One of the interesting things we get to experience is a different kind of travel from anything we have really done before. By comparison to the US, it is never boring. It is sometimes dangerous, often tedious, but never boring. Take this last trip for example.

For work I (Matt for those keeping track) got to go at the end of the week on a trip to a remote valley high up in the mountains here. It’s about an eight hour drive, there and back, under normal conditions. Ok, so maybe not under normal conditions, but under good conditions. This is not the time of year one can expect good conditions, but hope springs eternal so we hoped to go up and do our work, turn around and come back in the same day.

About 40km out of town, not a quarter of the drive yet, that plan was revealed to be slightly flawed. There was an avalanche that was causing us a delay. Now, we had already passed more avalanches on the road than I could count (you really stop trying after the first couple dozen) but most were small (only a few yards wide and maybe 10 feet of snow or less) and were pretty easily cleared. Bulldozers work up and down the road all winter cutting through them, so you just zoom on by. This one was different. About half a mile of the road was covered, enough to take a lot of work to clear, and some rather large trucks had tried to cross too early and got stuck. The bulldozer (left behind with the fall of the Soviet Union, I kid you not) was clearing snow and pushing the trucks out from behind. After two trucks got pushed out we were able to work our way through without getting stuck and stopped on the other side of the avalanche.

The reason we stopped on the other side is that another couple kilometers up the road a rock slide blocked any further progress. This wasn’t a couple basketball sized boulders in the middle of the road, this was pickup sized boulders in a really big pile where the road used to be. This turned out to be more of a challenge. Luckily the local government/army official riding with us had dynamite (a fact I was blissfully unaware of until that moment. How was I supposed to know that the guy in the back seat with a bundle wrapped up in newspaper was carrying high and unstable explosives? I guess that’s way the other cars didn’t want to take him) so they set a couple of charges and cracked some of the bigger boulders. Now I don’t know much about dynamite (I do know how it smells after it blows now though) but it seems to me that setting it off in an area already prone to rock slides and avalanches is maybe not the safest undertaking, but you do what you have to do. They only had enough for two explosions, so again we turned to a Soviet-era bulldozer.

In she comes and starts pushing rocks up to the edge of the cliff (did I mention all of this was taking place on the edge of a rather steep cliff that ended in a rather cold and fast river?) and then moving back to push more over. Very slowly we watched it move rocks around while a large crew of road workers and well wishers stood right around the bulldozer giving advice and directions. This is one major difference in road repair here. There weren’t any hard hats, orange cones, or people keeping you away. We just stood around (on the very rocks they were trying to move) and jumped in when we wanted to help. It was very much a different experience from the US where they won’t let you within a mile of explosives or bulldozers in rock slide areas.

Nine hours later, we were through both the avalanche and the rock slide. We did get delayed one more time that evening with an avalanche that a bulldozer was working on, but this one was just about 15 minutes of sitting. We did the work we needed to do up the valley and came back the next day. This time we hoped the road would be clear. No, this time we came upon a new avalanche with a new complication. A bulldozer was at work here too, but the transmission went out as it was in the middle of the road. So, now we can’t get around the bulldozer or over the pile of snow until we fix the transmission and move the bulldozer and try to get over the pile of snow, in the dark, on an avalanche. Sure enough, the resourceful and talented people on the road fixed the bulldozer in the dark (I don’t even know where to find the transmission on a bulldozer, I wasn’t even sure they had one) and shovel enough snow out that the cars could pass. Our wonderful Russian van jumped right over the pile and got out of the snow with no problem and only a couple hour delay. About 45 minutes from the end of our journey, wouldn’t you know it, a flat tire. We didn’t just get a hole, we busted the tire on a rock or something and then had to repair the fan in the engine. We got home around 11 at night, making the day long trip into a full two-day journey.

It’s rather interesting to travel here. Most of the road is always in imminent danger of rock slides and avalanches at any given moment, and seeing big rocks just sitting in the middle of the road is common. At any given time one could hit your car and there really isn’t any way to deal with that danger. I was talking to our driver looking at a major avalanche across the river and said it’s dangerous here, you have to be careful. He answered, no you don’t. Being careful doesn’t help. You just pray. Yes, yes we do. 

With our internet speed I won't try for pictures, check back in a week for pictures of road work you can't get in the US.