ice, on some of the well-maintained
roads. The landscape was about as
bleak as you could possibly imagine
one to be. Very flat, very grey and
only broken up by the odd concrete
tower block or dirty plume of smoke
coming from some sort of factory.
We pressed on in these conditions
for a couple of days. It was boring
but it was a doddle. Then around 150
kilometres short of Khabarovsk the
snow came.
We woke to a complete winter
wonderland. The boring grey land-
scape had been transformed in to this
wonderful, frozen picture-postcard of
a place. Everything was bright white
and glistening, including the roads.
We were super excited – this was
going to be a real adventure. We
were filled with nervous anticipation
– what on earth was it going to be
like?
Having never driven our scoot-
er and sidecar in the snow, we had
absolutely no idea if it would move or
how it would handle. Prior to setting
off, we tried for ages to source some
decent winter tyres that would fit the
bike. Anything would have done –
spikes, big knobblies or even a snow
chain but we couldn’t get anything
that would fit. We ended up going
for a set of Michelin City Grip’s which
TRAVERSE 20
are a very good tyre – if you’re on a
tarmac.
Amazingly the sidecar pulled off,
we packed up our four 50L roll bags
full of kit and headed out in to the
snow. We immediately got stuck on
the small incline leading on to the
slip road to the trans-Siberian high-
way. I had to get out and walk on to
the highway while Reece went back
down and floored it out of the carpark
in order to get on to the main road.
I met him there, sweating buckets
having walked 500m in my arctic gear.
We spent the rest of the day trundling
along at around 40 kilometres per
hour, slipping and sliding as we tried