Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from A Jacket, a Vodka, and an Interrogation: Arriving in Magadan. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

At the town sign the next morning, I climbed onto one of the bronze reindeer for the obligatory photo — antlers and all, dignity optional. Along the wild, craggy coast we got a crash course in foraging, pine nuts especially, which turn out to be miserable to extract by hand. It explains the price tag they carry at home. Anyone out picking berries here is advised to carry a whistle, on the sound theory that bears exist in real numbers and would rather know you’re coming than be surprised.

Magadan turned out to be a quietly remarkable place — beautiful, and entirely without tourists. Our clothes alone gave us away as not belonging, before we’d said a word.

Before we hit the road properly, Greg gave us the pep talk. Lights on, always. Stop for every pedestrian crossing, no exceptions. If a policeman points his red-and-white (pogo) stick at you, stop. Papers stay in the glove box. He wasn’t exaggerating about the pedestrian crossings, either — if we so much as looked like we intended to cross, traffic ground to a halt, and we ended up crossing roads considerably more often than the trip actually required. We climbed into a 100-series Toyota Land Cruiser already carrying over 600,000 kilometres on the clock, and pulled out of Magadan.

The convoy left in weak morning sun, the thermometer sitting at 4°C. Asphalt lasted a little over an hour before it surrendered to gravel, and stayed surrendered. Trucks servicing the mines outnumbered cars on the road by some margin, alongside the occasional crew doing something unspecified to the surface itself.

Oncoming trucks announced themselves as a wall of dust first, engine second, and left me driving blind for what felt like miles after they’d gone past. Overtaking one heading our way was worse — pull out, lose the road entirely, and hope for the best. Greg went first whenever he could, radioing back once he was through so we knew it was safe to follow him straight into the wall.

Mid-morning, Greg dropped the tailgate in the middle of nothing in particular — no village, no landmark, just gravel and larch in every direction — and produced instant coffee and something resembling cake. It turned out to be the first of many. Café or tailgate, morning and afternoon tea became one of the trip’s few reliable fixtures. So did the toilet arrangements: whichever tree looked most promising.

Greg seemed faintly astonished, and more than a little relieved, that this bothered Janine not at all.

By mid-afternoon the larch gave way to a settlement that amounted to a handful of concrete blocks, looking more industrial than residential. Inside one of them sat a local historian. Behind him, shelving ran floor to ceiling — box files, hand-labelled in Cyrillic, one for every mining settlement and camp along this stretch of the Kolyma. Names that meant nothing to us in particular, and everything, given what they represented. On the wall above his desk hung an old military rifle, mounted like a trophy, which did nothing to talk Janine out of her theory.

She decided, quietly and with total confidence, that the man had once worked for the KGB.

Nobody argued the point. It seemed the sort of place where the theory could easily be true, and where asking directly would have been the wrong kind of curious.

We filled up with petrol on the way out of town and pushed on to Susuman as the light began to go. Without Olga in the second Land Cruiser, the hotel would have stayed lost indefinitely — second floor, no signage, one concrete block among a street of identical concrete blocks. She found it without hesitation, the way she seemed to find most things in Russia that defeated me entirely.