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This reminds me of Bertha Benz who made the first long-distance automobile trip in 1888. Bertha wanted to convince her husband Karl that his invention had great potential and should be marketed. So, early one morning, without telling anyone, she loaded up her two teenaged sons and set off over 65 miles of wagon tracks between Mannheim and Pforzheim. Through ingenuity and determination, she overcame numerous obstacles to complete the illegal trip. Fascinating woman.
Wow. Some of their kids lived until the early 1970s. The things they lived to see from the late 1880s to the early 1979s include so many things like 2 world wars, the invention of the airplane to jet flights being commonplace, men going to the moon, from early automobiles to fast race cars, from classical music to disco (oh, wait...)
My grandmother lived roughly during the same era. This led to some funny things, she would answer the telephone in her bedroom but refused to have a TV there because 'If I can see them, who is to guarantee they can't see me?'.
Tech progress in the last two hundred years is nothing short of incredible, plenty of what we see today as normal would have been absolute magic just a few short decades ago.
This hit me hard when driving in Arizona somewhere and having a cell phone conversation with another dutch person who was driving in Canada, both of us on our tri-band cell phones with roaming contracts. Crystal clear, as if we were standing next door to each other and neither of us realized that we were abroad (and on another continent than normally) until halfway into the conversation. That's how normal it has become to be able to talk to everybody all the time.
After the "Ghost Road" story on HN a few days ago [1], out of boredom and curiosity, I did a little browsing around online maps in Russia and noticed there really aren't any major roads at all connecting northern/eastern Siberia to the rest of Russia--unless Google Maps and Openstreetmap are woefully incomplete, which is possible. It seems so alien to my pampered US sensibilities, all spoiled by our glorious interstate highway system and regional State highways. How can the vast majority of a country's small towns and land area be not even remotely accessible by so much as a dirt road?? I get that few people live there, but the ones that do, how do they go anywhere else in Russia?
In the US, most of the country is at most 5-6 miles from some kind of road. Maybe there are spots in Yellowstone that are 20 miles from a road, but thats orders of magnitude less remote than what Maps depicts about Siberia!
Perhaps a better comparison to Russia would be Canada rather than the United States? Similarly much of the north isn't accessible by roads year round or at all. It either doesn't make sense based on the population of the towns or is very impractical over the hash terrain.
> I get that few people live there, but the ones that do, how do they go anywhere else in Russia?
They do not; and this surprised me a lot when I found out. There still today is a very large number of people who have not travelled outside 50 km/30 miles radius from their home during their entire life.
Don’t forget Alaska. There are roads connecting the Yukon to Fairbanks and Anchorage, and the unpaved Dalton Highway connecting Fairbanks to the North Slope, but there are no roads connecting Fairbanks to the western part of the state at all. Most of the state and its towns and villages are accessible only via aircraft. There are no roads to Juneau, the state capital, for instance. Hawaii has an interstate on the island of Oahu, but Alaska has no interstate highways to speak of. It is a VERY undeveloped state.
People don't travel much in those places. During the summer a lot of them are almost completely cut off, though there's often small aviation flights from some of them, so people can get out in emegencies. The situation is a lot better during the winter with https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B8%D0%BC%D0%BD%D0%B8... (ice roads), that's how and when most travel/supply trips happen.
I live in Canada and our northern regions are mostly unconnected by roads. A lot of that terrain is muskeg and swamp, or else it's Canadian Shield. I was once quoted a figure for roadbuilding up there at upwards of $1 million per km, so for you I guess that'd be $1.3M per mile.
Fun Fact, in the lower 48 it's impossible to get more than 115 miles from a McDonalds!
Yep, anywhere! http://www.datapointed.net/2010/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...
For a historical example of US "rugged individualism", see the lengths Huey P. Long went to just to convince the people of Louisiana that paving roads at public expense wasn't some kind of socialist waste of money.
(Long was clearly a demagogue, but on this particular point I have to agree with him that a reasonable road network is a public good)
There is a major road gap between North America and South America as well: the Darien Gap.
Last I heard there was no plans afoot to build a road across it.
Yah, well. Try parts of Alaska? Same terrain & climate.
There are places in Alaska only accessible by bush plane too.
They're building a new highway from Magadan to Chukotka, which will be 1800 km through some of the most fearsome territory known to man. It will only cover a small portion of the route to Petropavlovsk though.
On a similar note, and for a great read, I highly recommend Ian Frazier's "Travels in Siberia." I found out about it because The New Yorker had published some excerpts from it, and I was instantly hooked. Frazier's writing is both engaging and laugh-out-loud hilarious. It was written several years ago, so things are probably a lot different in Siberia now.
https://smile.amazon.com/Travels-Siberia-Ian-Frazier/dp/0312...
Travels in Siberia is a terrific book, as is Midnight in Siberia by David Greene. Both of those books inspired my own trip through Siberia: https://www.gregkogan.com/journal/russia-trans-siberian-rail...
I'll have to find the title, but long ago I recall my parents listening to an audiobook of a polish emigrant (to Switzerland) deciding to go around the northern hemisphere on car. Asia was crossed by driving through Siberia, though I'm not sure if he followed the same land route to Kamchatka as described in the article. This was in the early 1990s, I think it might have been just after dissolution of USSR, and more than once it was his quick talking that helped.
Ultimately, the road trip ended in USA, where highway patrol took offence to his heavily-modified Land Rover or something like that.
I would also suggest a movie called Derzu Uzala, directed by no other than Akira Kurosawa himself. It's about surveyor and a local hunter. Taking place somewhere in Easter Siberia.
Pretty amazing. It's one thing to cobble together some 6-wheeled vehicle and then drive it around the block once, it's a completely different story to build that vehicle and depend on it with your life for 2000 miles where there's no one and nothing around.
That makes me think: How did they cover 2000 miles without anyone around? Did they carry enough gas for the whole trip or there actually is something along the way?
I recommend "Long Way Round" on AppleTV. Ewan McGregor and his friend Charlie ride motorcycles from London to Magadan. Episodes 7-8 are on the Road of Bones -- it's insanely difficult, even for military trucks.
Here is the 6-wheeled Kamaz 4310, which gets windshield-deep in water trying to cross a raging river: http://bestride.com/news/the-kamaz-that-saved-ewan-mcgregor-...
A 2kW hair dryer seems a bit out of place - the Russian for hairdryer (фен) happens to also mean a regular fan. I can’t fathom what you would do with a huge diesel-powered fan either, but at least it might make a bit more sense than a hairdryer?
On a complete side note - people can sometimes have some luck reading Cyrillic if they pretend it’s Greek. In the case above - phi, eta, nu - is roughly how you pronounce it - fen.
The "hairdrier" was probably a joke or slang, as in a "heatgun is a big hairdrier". "Фен" doesn't mean "regular fan", it's "hairdrier", despite sounding very similar.
Why does a 2kw hair dryer seem out of place? For a hair dryer you'd strongly prefer more power now to get it done quickly, so all the cheap best selling hair dryer models are 2kw (e.g. as amazon shows at https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=hair+dryer), it's pretty much the default power level for a hair dryer, and many hair dryers (intended for hair, not for warming up engine blocks) have more than 2kw. I'd interpret the "diesel-powered" as they likely have a diesel generator for electricity.
In USA the default seems to be 1.85kw (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=hair+dryer) possibly because 2kw appliances are trickier for the 110v wiring.
P.S. I'm also surprised by the assertion that "the Russian for hairdryer (фен) happens to also mean a regular fan", as IMHO it does not, a regular fan would usually be called вентилятор, not фен. Фен means either a hair dryer or (as строительный фен) a heat gun for construction work.
A 2kw hair dryer might be good for warming engine blocks and other frozen components.
Cyrillic is at least partly derived from the Greek alphabet, yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script
> Cyrillic is derived from the Greek uncial script, augmented by letters from the older Glagolitic alphabet, including some ligatures.
It’s probably a joke about a diesel fan heater, blows hot air and sounds a bit like a hair dryer. Common in yachts and bigger camper vans.
Ah, this was a delightful escape. I've scarcely left the city limits since March of last year, and this is food for the soul right now; thanks for sharing.
I recently drove right around Africa - 54,000 miles through 35 countries, basically around the entire coastline. I have a bunch of videos from the trip [1] and I've just published a book about it too [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waQGUz0Z97Y&list=PLNiCe5roBX...
You might like "the long way down" or "the long way round". Sounds like this expedition would have been cool as a mini series too.
There are many excellent youtube videos of people doing long solo hikes through beautiful lands. Those can also be a nice escape, especially while having a lunch break "at work" (at home).
"welding using daisy-chained car batteries" this is hardcore
It's really not.
Using car batteries for various types of welding is common hobby practice
First thing I thought of was Jeremy Clarkson and the red truck they used for some arctic trip. They also had snapped stuff on the truck but they had a complete film crew off screen to help out.. but stil.
Being into motorhomes I always have this dream of a future where there is a bridge across the Bering Strait and one can drive from the US to Europe through a friendly and welcoming Russia on a well maintained highway system.
This would of course be in some sort of electric motorhome with amazing range and good charging infrastructure along with high speed cellular or satellite internet.
> 2,000-watt diesel-powered hair dryer
lol for sure that's a Diesel heater and not a hair dryer!
Well 2,000W is reasonable for a hair dryer
Does anybody know what the difficulties are of building a road in the tundra? Will concrete just break due to the seasonal changes in temperature? Is it that it's possible but the amount of building material would enormous?
I kind of expected Russians and Canadians to be the experts of building roads or train tracks in those conditions.
It is better to drive in Siberia through the wilderness, because the roads in Siberia are cursed:
„The road is treated as a memorial, as the bones of the estimated 250,000 - 1,000,000 people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R504_Kolyma_Highway https://youtu.be/oo1WouI38rQ
Great book by Louis L'amour, "Last of the Breed". Escaping and walking across Siberia to North America. One of L'Amour's better books.
A comment from Russia here: I just wish they would have chosen a more interesting destination to reach by car - it's fairly simple to get to Petropavlovsk by plane. There are many other smaller hidden gems across the country where you can only get using a prepped car, thus for me the trip to Petropavlovsk looks a bit like an overkill.
I remember seeing a documentary a long time ago called Overland to America that documents similar travails, including a failed attempt at driving across the Bering Strait in one of these things: https://www.arktoscraft.com/
Amazing read, lots of hacks involved. Taking lots of different car parts, engines, transmissions, drive shafts, etc and constructing a unique car and then being able to have the tools and skills to repair them in the most remote and toughest place in the world. Very nice, hacker news indeed.
I recommend a novel called Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips that is set on Kamchatka and a good amount in Petropavlovsk. It is very much not a wilderness survival book, but more of a mystery and social commentary book.
Really nice page design. Pictures load instantly with preloading, keyboard shortcuts (forward/back/esc). (Story is great too.)
Sounds like the computer game mud runners was inspired by a similar story.