Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from First Snow, an Empty Tank, and a Police Escort: Deeper into the Kolyma. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

We started early — it was going to be a long day, with two ferry crossings standing between us and Yakutsk, and Greg wasn’t in the mood to leave any margin for delay. Four days on the dirt, he’d told us the night before, and not one of them short.

The morning was crisp and cold while we waited for the ferry across the Aldan. There’s no dock here, and no schedule to speak of. The ferry simply pulls up alongside the road, you drive on at one end, and when it reaches the far bank, you drive straight off the other — the whole operation running on nothing more formal than everyone agreeing it works, and it always, somehow, does.

Breakfast was on the far side — caviar on bread and coffee, poured out of the back of the Land Cruisers rather than any café. It felt like the more honest way to eat it, standing on the riverbank with the engines still ticking as they cooled and the mist coming up off the water.

The road out was dusty and rutted, and Yakutia doesn’t bother much with fences. Cattle and horses wander onto the road whenever the mood takes them, and nobody seems to mind, least of all the cattle. Along the way we passed a black knight on horseback holding a metal flag — a monument to the Yakut folk hero Nyurgun Bootur — and, further on, a squat white bunker half-buried into a hillside, built for shelter from the snow. Not needed today, though it wasn’t hard to picture the day it would be.

Before lunch we passed through the village of Cherkekh, past a monument of a Yakut man riding a Yakut bull, inscribed with a line that Olga translated roughly as “have a happy journey.” Lunch was the same arrangement as breakfast, this time set up in a paddock stacked with haystacks the size of small houses, the kind of scale that makes you recalibrate what a haystack is meant to be.

The Lena River is where the day properly slowed down. The queue for the Yakutsk ferry ran back along the road for what looked like most of the morning, and after some trouble with people pushing in, a police officer had been posted at the turn-off to keep everyone honest. We waited four hours, watching the queue barely move and the light shift over the water. When we finally got on, we were the last car aboard, wedged in tight, the crew clearly not treating this as their first packed crossing.

Yakutsk itself turned out to be a four-star hotel next to the Treasury of the Republic of Sakha — proper rooms, hot water on demand, a lobby that didn’t double as anything else.

After Ust-Nera, it may as well have been the Ritz. Four days on the dirt, two ferries, one long queue, and a bed that stayed a bed all night. We’d take it.