Murmansk – Kirovsk……

Oki. Here we go again…. 🙂

Monday 21st of July to 24th of july.

Had some lazy days in Murmans after riding the bikes from Stockholm. We needed a little bit of rest. 🙂 Walking around in the city was good fun and we´ve been treated friendly by everyone we´ve met. And we also did something that we´ve NEVER done before! We rented a car! We wanted to go ut to Barents Sea and the only way to do that is to go out to a small village called Teriberka located north east of Murmansk. The the last stretch of road is no good. Sandy gravel….. No favorite for a biker. And Eva had injured her foot when she fell down a some stairs and driving in sand with a bad fot is no fun so ve rented a car. Some pics from Murmansk and the surroundings…..

The car that we rented. A Citroen. French car with russian plates. It had a anti spin system. Ever tried driving in sand with anti spin? It doesn´t work very well. Not much happens when you press the gas pedal…… Don´t ever stop in sand when in a car that has anti spin! 😀

Beautiful ride out to Teriberka through some typical Russian tundra. And lakes as we got closer to the sea.

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Lots of old boats and ship wrecks around Teriberka. And lot´s of worn down and abandoned houses…..

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But it was beautiful in many ways even considering the condition of buildings and boats. I imagine that it must be a harsh environment to live in during the cold season tho.

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We met this couple from the Tjeck republic on a bike when we left Teriberka. They had ridden the bike with two people on it and fully loaded with luggage through the 40 kilometers of gravel and sand on their way to the village but felt that it was too hard to do it on the way back as well. So we loaded their luggage and the girl in our car and the guy took the stripped bike through the hard section until we got out on asphalt again. And he was a EXCELLENT rider indeed! He was much faster than us in the car! 😀 Then, again, anti spin….. Don´t judge me too hard but we could hardly move through the sandy bits. But he was FAST! Excellent rider. And they were both very friendly and kind. Nice to meet some fellow bikers and to be able to help them out.

I started to feel sick on our way back towards Murmansk. Must had ate something bad. Just when we got back into the city I had to stop at a bus stop and I made it out of the car but not much more than that. I threw up all over the street. Massive vomiting. It was ugly. And there where lots of people around that stared at me. Very embarrassing indeed! Felt MUCH better afterwards tho so that was good. We returned the car to the rental company and took a taxi back to the hotel. I took a shower.

The Alyosha statue in Murmansk.

We had dinner at this little greek outdoor barbecue place twice during our stay. Best food we had in Murmansk. A small family owned place. Most often the best!

We left Murmansk and headed south yesterday. GREAT road (not all roads are great in Russia) and nice scenery for most of the time. But we passed a couple of towns that looked like shit. Worn down and heavy industries.

We arrived to Kirovsk yesterday evening. This is a ski resort during winter time so there are beautiful mountains around. Not much tourists during this part of the year tho.

Decent hotel. Not all hotels in Russia are decent. And I suspect that we´ll experience our share of shitty hotels from now on during our ride towards Arkhangelsk. A ride that is around 1.650 kilometers through a part of Russia that mostly have smaller villages. And they don´t have hotels all the time….. We often go online and use hotels.com, trip advisor and some other hotel sites to find hotels. And from now on there are hardly no hotels to find on our route through these sites. We realized that fairly late yesterday evening so we decided to stay another night here in Kirovsk to figure out what to do. So we´ll leave tomorrow instead of today. There has never been a problem finding hotels before during our travels through Russia. On the trip to Mongolia going through Siberia it was fairly easy and there are bigger cities spread out one days riding apart all through Siberia. The same in Kaukasus. But here there are mostly smaller villages. There are most likely lots of hotels but they are not listed on the travel sites. And the few that we´ve actually found has VERY negative reviews. ”Worst hotel I´ve ever stayed at” and that sort of stuff. 😮

The biggest ”problem” when traveling in Russia is the language. And the alphabet. And that most people don´t speak english. Especially in the smaller places. And that we don´t speak russian. We manage to get around anyway and we have a lot of fun trying to communicate. It usually works out just fine after awhile. But finding hotels out in the woods where they necessarily don´t even put up a sign on the building where it says that it´s a hotel makes things complicated every once in awhile. Anyway….. We are now trying to figure out where the hell to go and where the hell to sleep until we reach Arkhangelsk 1.650 kilometers away. Might be that we´ll have to ride some very long distances during these next days. We´ll try to talk to the people down at the reception at the hotel and ask them for advices. Might be that they´ll point out some villages where they know that there are hotels and we just take off tomorrow without making any reservations in advance. One problem is that the people that works in the reception doesn´t speak any english….. And we don´t speak any russian. And can´t read the cyrillic alphabet very well……. Anyway. These next days might get interesting……. 😀 😀

Til next time…..

Cheers//Jan

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