Route
To drive up from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia towards The Road Of Bones in Siberia and later on all the way back to Switzerland we plan on visiting following 25 countries.
Plan of 2010
Malaysia
Thailand
Cambodia
Laos
China
Mongolia
Russia
Kazakhstan
Kyrgyzstan
Tajikistan
Uzbekistan
Turkmenistan
Iran
Pakistan
Turkey
Greece
Albania
Serbia-Montenegro
Croatia
Slovenia
Austria
Germany
Belgium
France
Switzerland
The attentive reader will of course notice that we are not choosing for the shortest and most easy way to drive back home. Of course we don’t. If we wanted to be home as quick and easy as possible we would not be here anyway isn’t it? The road is the goal and not the destination!
The Road of Bones
The Road Of Bones is also known as the Kolymsky Trakt or Kolyma Highway.
This defying 1825 km long dirt road connects Yakutsk with Magadan and is the most eastern road possible to drive in Russia.
The road is almost only used by heavy soviet trucks who transport gold and uranium from the infamous gold mines in Kolyma River valley and surrounding mountains to Magadan city on the Sea of Okhotsk.
Two towns by the road, Tomtor and Oymyakon claim to be the coldest inhabited place on earth outside of Antarctica. In the surrounding area temperatures can fluctuate between 42C (108F) in summer and a -70C (-94F) in winter. This part of Northeastern Siberia is one of the less-known and less-visited places in Asia.
The road was constructed in the Stalin era of the USSR by the inmates of gulag camps from 1932 until 1953. It is treated as a memorial, because the bones of hundreds or thousands of the people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road.
The road was in a state of disrepair and is not traversable by standard road vehicles because of washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams. During winter,
frozen water actually helps river crossings.
The main mode of freight transport into Magadan has always been and still is shipping.
The main mode of passenger transport is air travel.