DEALING WITH A DISASTER IN RUSSIA
My previous instalment in this series took readers as far as Moscow. We’d found (just) enough diesel to make it across Uzbekistan’s fascinating ancient desert region, then back into Kazakhstan and again into Russia (for the third time!).
We then spent a very enjoyable four days in Moscow. It’s a wonderful city to explore and we could easily have enjoyed a longer stay here, but we needed to press on. And so, on Friday 13th December 2019, we departed Moscow bound for St Petersburg, feeling fortunate to be among the first motorists to use Russia’s new 130km/h M11 Motorway. This would make reaching St Petersburg the same day relatively easy, or so we thought. We nearly made it, but then ... disaster struck!
SOME BACKGROUND FIRST
I previously indicated that next up (this article) you’d see how we got on handling a disaster that occurred near the end of this trip. Despite the considerable planning and preparation that goes into these foreign overland adventures, I know well to anticipate that not everything will go to plan.
Looking way back on our initially troubled 2014 expedition to Morocco (North Africa), this being at a time when I was a considerably less experienced player at this game, there it wasn’t the Pajero that let us down so much as local mechanics.
I employed one simply to replace a wheel bearing, but his surprisingly poorly equipped team managed to break almost everything around the wheel bearing in the process, thus requiring another mechanic at the next town to attend to the newly acquired damage.
They too performed generally awful work and, for reasons unfathomable, chiselled off the front pair of expensive wheel speed sensors! Those now historic events marked an important
