Grey streets impossible, white streets off-road experience, yellow streets you can go at least 50 km/h, and Red you have Asphalt

13th to 14th

After asking 5 people for the way to Juri Panovs, the sculptors, house we finally found it. In front of the house are three or four wooden columns and from each maybe 5 or more faces looking on you. You can see that he mostly used the already natural existent shapes of the tree. But each face has really strong expression and one almost look like a BORG from the spaceship enterprise. The neighbour Алексеи told us that Juri Panov died 8 months ago.. He looked like "Popey", stripped to the waist, with a French cap on his head. "Mr. Popey" asked us to come in his garden where he is building his own wooden ship. The ship looks like the once in the cartoons (You know this East German one, Abrafaxe or how was it written?). The ship is 18 m long and has two mast with the heigth of 8 m. Next year in the winter he is planning to transport it down to the Ангара, first over his potato field, then over the fence (:), and down the village road to the river. It is really impressing what he made by himself the last 6 years. If there is no wind he will use an old tractor engine. He is pensioner and his hobby is Siberian handicraft, like cups made from birch bark, and building his own ship. Kotomi wanted to have the birch cups we bought some and asked him for the way we wanted to go to the island Олхон. He explained us it is a bad road but possible. Nevertheless there is a national park but if you want to drive there just tell them you want to meet my friend Виктор. Well, I thought would be a nice idea and in my map the road was printed grey. In the legend they just say unpaved road. We went to the entry point of the park close to the village черемшанка.

At the ranger house I carefully opened the door to the garden since I am afraid of the dog but nobody is there. But the barking of the dog made them come out. The rangers girlfriend was just making some kind of Piroschki, flour filled with fish and Onion. She was speaking quite good English and invites us to come in to have some. I explain where we want to go but it seems we could go in even without the written permission of the park director (:). But it would not help us since the grey road is impossible at least in this time of the year. It is just a winter road and now we would just stuck in the middle of the mountains somewhere in the mud. Well after chatting and talking we go back to Irkutsk, what I wanted to avoid, and take the yellow road being the last part white until Олхон. Well so far it seems to be a good road no asphalt but good to drive. Along the road we are driving through a shower of white butterflies which decorate now the front of our car. In Мал. Голоустное, the end of the yellow part, we decide to make our camp at a river (N 52.30433°, E 105.35013°). A family is just going home and leaves us some firewood. I ask the guy, who is actually from Bulgaria, for the way to the north. He say it is bad but maybe possible. So I decide to ask next morning at the petrol station we saw some kilometres ago.

The morning is very nice and we almost decide to stay one more day until a lot of horseflies want to eat us, but especially Kotomi. This makes us easy to decide to go on to the north. Before we ask at the petrol station if it is possible, she looks at our car and say yes. First there are just deep tracks of the trucks which transport the wood but since it is dry it is possible. Going on it starting to be holes filled with water but still hard underground. After maybe 20 km it gets more hard to find the way and we often almost stuck in the holes which have a muddy underground now. That is the first time I am really happy that we bougth the Landcruiser that can lock all diffrentials separately. In Japan they told me you will never need. Jup they are rigth but maybe they never wanted to use Russian "roads". Somewhere around here we met 5 pimped up Toyota Landcruisers in the middle of the forrest. The guys in there are all drressed in army clothing and try to look as manslike or scary as possible. I show them a part of my map and point on the way to Куртун and then to Олхон. They say I have to go always straight (:) and not to the rigth. The most angry looking guy looks at our tyres says "плохо", which means I ahve a bad tyres. Well that is true and compared to his pimped up Landcruiser with special Mud tyres I am not sure anymore if we can do. But they look at each other a little bit sceptic and then say it will be ok; maybe it will be ok I can read in their eyes.Thanks to my GPS and wonderful Russian maps which include even the smallest forest way we are slowly approaching a street which would be yellow again. In Куртун we are already happy to have good road again. The village looks nice with special kind of window frames we did not see gefore. But after that we stuck again in some forest way and have to turn. Another time we have to repair something which was a bridge before, or we are sliding through the mud. This all doesn't sound so nice and Kotomi could not believe that we will ever see the road again. But then we are suddenly in a deep valley. In the valley there is a meadow where to left we have some rock formation and to the rigth the forrest and a river. The meadow is full with flowers and not only one kind maybe 5 or more. All the way before, sometimes not faster than walking, was worth to go; just to be able to see this. Well there are other meadows you could say. That is true but most of them are touched by humans or their animals. That means, you may find one or two kinds of flowers but not that much. Around Алагуй we reached the yellow road which was drivable again and in the evening we got the ferry to go to Олхон. On the first glance the island looks like a Ying Yang island. At one side looks like Mongolia; dry meadows and the on other side to the east; mountains with forest. We want to camp at the sand beach a few kilometers after the ferry but we stuck again; this time in the sand. Tired we just stay here (N 53.11448°, E 107.08263°) but having a nice view at the Баикал and some small island.