May 28 - Wednesday Ulan-Ude.
After breakfast we started the same trip back to Ulan-Ude. Today was a better day.
Quoting Voltaire, said 'Everything happens for a reason'. It was sunny but still cold. Road was better and clear. We hit small traffic jam at detour. In Russia detour means you are driving on someone's farm's dirt road. The track was so deep that I had to put Suzi on top of dirt pile rather than inside the track due to low ground clearance on a car. One of the truck got stuck. Everybody pushed it out and off we went. People were driving all over the farms to get out of the line. It took us good 9 hours to get to Ulan-Ude. Our second police check point. Two huge Mongolian policemen stopped us to see the papers and asked where we were from we lied and told them India. They smiled and let us go. We arrived in town and headed for center of the town looking for the hotel. Found a rather huge tall building in center of the town. A big hotel about 20 stories high with good parking. We checked in there and it was rather cheap hotel mere 1500 rubles. Elevator was scary as if it was going to drop. Turned out to be old soviet era building. The room was not so good. Beds were like in Joe Arpio's tent city jail. No hot water. But it was cheap. Went out to look for internet and food.
Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryatia, is located in the middle of vast Siberian steppes, on the 5640th kilometer of the Trans-Siberian railway. It is a very unusual and charming city.
The first striking impression is an unusually calm and mellow way of life, distinct features of people (more than 50% of people in Ulan-Ude are native Buryats with canny almond eyes), and a slightly chaotic look of the city. This peculiar mix made me feel that after I made 3000 kilometers through the Asian part of Russia, finally I'm in Asia.
However, in some parts of Ulan Ude the "Russian part" comes into play: a huge head of Lenin on the central square, Soviet style hotel buildings, some remains of the typical 19th century architecture, traditional wooden houses along the streets. And at the same time little Korean passenger minibuses are rushing back and forth, like rickshaws, an old Buryat woman is selling hot juicy Pozas (traditional meat dish) on the street, the sun is unbelievably bright and hot, and you see the tips of the mountains surrounding the city.
According to local guy almost 90% of people are Buddhist. Kinda high for Russian town. In fact there was beautiful temple in our hotel complex. So peaceful people come and just seat on bench and star at Budha. As soon as we enter in town we hit some bad pot hole ridden roads and Suzi hits some of them. Now car is makeing noise from front drive side wheel. Kind of creeking noise. Made us nervous. So we two problems. Check engine light and now creaking problem. Engine light turns out to be for that octane 80 gas I used on that road to hell. We were now worried . as we went for fast food place, we saw some young girls having dinner and few laughs. Ami approached them and asked if any of them spoke Angleski. We went for fast food joint hoping that we may meet some young people who speak english.
There was small beautiful girl named Irina volunteered. We explained her problem and asked her if she knew of any Suzuki dealer in town. As we expected there is none so she thought we should go to Toyota center. She strated drawing the route for us then all of sudden she sasy follow me. Ami went with her and I followed her. We went few miles to this closed service shop as it was 9PM. So we agreed to meet Irina next morning at the hotel. At 9Am I called her and she arrived right away. We picked her brother named Stish who happens to be thai boxer. He jumped in my car and we went to his buddy's garage. It took them a while to duplicate the problem as the noise only comes when you break and pull the car from stop. After few reverse and forward they agreed that there is a issue. On the ramp she went and 4 guys checked the whole car. Shocks, shaking, moving wheels and all sorts. Finally one guy found some loose stabilizer which he tightened up. We are paying the price for that road to Chita now. They also put a diagnostic computer to see the issue with engine light. It was an oxymoron to see that diagnostic equipment was in English and I had to translate that in to broken Russian. It said there was small leak in evap. System. We couldn't do anything about it. But somehow the light is gone now. I think it was just coincident that earlier I added Octane Booster in fuel and finally it went through the fuel system and cleared the light. All these put us back mere 200 rubles. Irina and her brother brought us back to hotel and i abysmally made an effort to pay some money to Stis and Irana and both declined respectfully and wished us best of luck. Again here we are in strange country and finding the nicest and kindest people. Both took the time off their work and came with us and made sure that we are alright. Two more people on my list. If this trip has to offer a single best thing this will be it.
It was 11Am so we thought to hang out in town and check emails. We changed the hotel to more expensive one and now seating in cafe typing this report. Tomorrow we go to Mongolia to see the head office of Genghis Khan empire. Later we invited Irina and her brother for dinner. We ended up in Mongolian bar and had a dinner. Both were born in Uzbekistan to Korean father and Russian mother. Irina has a small 2 year old daughter. Dinner was good. Mongolian soup and dumplings.
Hopefully border crossing will be Ok tomorrow. This border crossing makes me nervous now.
Will see.....
That's all folks for today.