With the ferry passage from Vladivostok to Donghae, we did not cover a major distance, but we reached a new world: different writing, different language, different food, people everywhere, streets, bridges, apartment blocks, cafés, snack bars, toilets, neon signs, sights, music… The fingerprint device at the immigration, the checkout at the supermarket, the ATM, the traffic lights, the toilet door, the petrol station and security cameras… everything talked to us… totally crazy😊!
Information: The original language of this blog is German. Any other language is translated using DEEPL's machine translation (www.deepl.com), without proofreading.
Russia Part 4 – To Vladivostok
With rested legs, we calmly faced the last stage to Vladivostok. We had enough time and no hurry. The density of restaurants and stores was much greater on this stretch, which we were very happy about😊. But there were no attractions even on these 800km.
Russia Part 3 – The Hump
The next 2000km went along the Amur Highway around the hump of the Outer Manchuria of China. By the way, “Amur” does not come from French, but from the huge river Amur, which we never saw until before Khabarovsk. The route was not really our true love, because there was nothing to see… If we had closed our eyes after Chita and opened them again 20 days later before Khabarovsk, no big change would have been visible😉.
Russia Part 2 – Baikal
In the last report about Russia, we were still amused about the fact that we had to answer the same questions to the employees of the border authority and the FSB when entering the country. And that our answers were each entered into a Word file. We assumed that the information we gave would be lost somewhere in the flood of data and would never reappear.
Like the nomads with a tent through Mongolia
Together with a Spanish motorcyclist we were the first people to be conducted through the exit procedure at the Russian border in Tashanta. After half an hour we had the exit stamp in our passports and started the 25km ride through the no man’s land between Russia and Mongolia. When we reached the Mongolian border post, one and a half hours later, the car queue was already several 100m long. Thanks to the cyclist bonus, we were waved past all motorized vehicles directly to the passport control. There we queued as the only disciplined and were thereby diligently overtaken😉. At the chaotic border post, no one was interested in our bikes or bags, so we suddenly had Mongolian soil under our feet.