Svetlaya river, Namama river, 19.07.2012
After the hydrotherapeutic procedures, we started from Sramnaya with an absolutely healthy pilot. Soon afer that, we've seen several pretty interesting lakes which could be a nice place for a camp as well, but it was indeed too late… Generally speaking, pitching a camp at 110 zimnik is not a problem. It is not necessarily a large emerald green glade rolling in grapes full of stacks of firewood looking at a limpid azure mountain lake with taimen fish (or at least grayling) playing and splashing in it, but you can always find a place for camping.
The road until Svetlaya included parts of both real off-road "asphalt" and bogs. The other stories say that there are more boggy parts than "asphalt", but we could not find all of them. Probably the weather was kind to us. I slightly stuck a couple of times, if I'm not mistaken, and we tore off the sling in one of the places. Fortunately the hook has softly landed on my roof rack and did not hurt anything. Somehow I didn't say it to Mikha through the open window that I have been hampered by a large rock and that I can go forward without any problem already, so Gavrilov pulled harder… and the rock appeared to be stronger than the sling that eventually suffered.
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| That's where we wore the sling |
There were some rocky trials as they were at Sramnaya river - apparently they were where other rivers were falling into Svetlaya.
Going down to Svetlaya seemed to be bery long: the river was here, very close to us... but around 70 meters down :).
Shown on the picture below, to my mind, is the most impressive trial at the bank. As far as I can guess, this place (together with many others) is certainly being washed away every spring. I can imagine what it looks like after that. Even after you have passed Sramnaya river, you hardly can say that there is a road along Svetlaya at first glance. But it's there, it's quite possible to drive if you use your head to think - or your navigator's head :)
At the last stage of this trial, we've met a KAMAZ. Do you think there are draw-ins? First we all fell into a muse… Then Mikha guided me to a huge rock above the river, and the huge and high (which only increased its chances to fall) KAMAZ was sneaking the neighboring rocks dangerously careening towards my car. It was horrible, but it turned out well.
A bit further, they have passed Gavrilov in the same way, and our way was free. Besides doing that, the KAMAZ (its driver indeed) said that we should expect three fords, one of which is his wheel high (which in fact meant my windshield high).
After that, we arrived to quite a nice beach where we wanted to spend the rest of the day and the following night. We prepared different salads, chopped yesterday's "wonderful veal" and additionally stewed it with mushrooms that we picked (the veal became quite soft after it), I washed my car trying to remove the debris of the leaking diesel. Mikha was hanging around trying to fish at least a grayling, and Gavrilov drunk some vodka. So, everything was fine except for probably too sloping bank, so we could not do the dishes standing on a bank, but had to enter the river, and our feet got frozen pretty fast.
When Mikha came from fishing for the umpteenth time and I was washing my car for the umpteenth time, Gavrilov claimed he wants to go further without no specific reason. Mikha and Gavrilov got a bit of vodka and agreed on going forward, so we started.
Soon after the beach the road was over. That was the place where we could see all the power of "110 zimnik". Before that, I must say, I considered it to be quite a regular road. But it turned out that there are three layers of huge logs, and the soil lays on it. And there was a stream that flew into Svetlaya here in the spring and has totally disappeared by July. This stream ruined all three layers of the logs having made a waist-deep rain channel, and no one has been driving there since that. There was an old bypass road next to it, it was slightly better, but anyway too much destroyed to pass through. We turned back to look for another road. Gavrilov called us to follow one, we followed another and found an entrance to a ford, but we could not see any exit. Then Gavrilov with Mikha standing on the running board enetered the river and tried to look at the banks "from inside". The river was pretty deep and they could not see any exits. So, we decided going to the river was way too risky and went back to the rain channel to take a better look at the bypass road. All in all, we agreed that we can dig a bit, make the road a bit more flat, and it's going to be OK. Then we checked the road after that place: there were several dozens of meters of the stone trial than no car has passed this year, and then it turned into a normal for "110 zimnik" road. Gavrilov took the shovel and spent some 10 minutes to make the rain channel more flat after which we could pass through it.
So, we crossed the channel, and the men started to "cobble" the road, i.e. to turn the rocks so that the surface is relatively level.
Different people felt the time differently, so they estimated it took us from half an hour up to a couple of hours. My personal opinion is that a couple of hours was way too much. The mosquitoes could bite me much more for a couple of hours than they actually did :)
After a while we finished the road and went to a more or less flat surface (which was still a regular "110 zimnik" with holes, puddles, mud rock sometimes). About a kilometer after the place where we built the road we found the exit from the ford… Well, a kilometer in the high water (the KAMAZ wheel was higher than my hood) – that would have been fun.
We were getting up a slight slope from some bushes and met an oncoming vehicle. It was so surprising that I even got stuck in the deep track in front of it. So we winched to this car. It was a team from Novosibirsk and Buryatia, five LandCruiser 80. We talked a bit to each other, they told us what we should expect (it was certainly very terrible, indeed almost impossible for me). We told them that they don't need to get into the ford, and eventually we continued driving in our directions.
A very beautiful yet very tricky Namama river was expecting us. Despite all his navigator's talents, Mikha could not make my way through the rocks on a hill in the river from the first attempt. We ended up so that the car could move neither forward nor backward, and there was a rock under the front right wheel that we needed to remove. So, the navigator had sdome work again, but eventually we passed this place.
We've seen an old bridge. There are a lot of them in "100 zimnik" and they have different degrees (if you can read the Russian text on the bridge). The road must have been really good some past days.
We camped for a night by the road, as we have always done in this expedition. The cars on one side of the road with the fire and the table on another one. Very romantic… The river here was extremely beautiful, and when we were washing our faces in the morning, Mikha has seen graylings. I was too lazy to climb the rocks to take a look at them, but Irina did.
We've also seen lots of traces of some deers there. Haven't seen any bears.
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