Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from The Ferry Ran, the Trucks Didn’t: South Out of Yakutsk. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

A short drive to Skovorodino was on the plan, though we started late. Tynda calls itself the capital of the BAM, the Baikal-Amur Mainline — reportedly the largest and most expensive infrastructure project in Soviet history — and we couldn’t leave without a tour of the station that proves it, all marble and scale and Soviet ambition dressed up as a train stop.

I’m not, as a rule, a big fan of trains. I made an exception.

The drive down to Never was uneventful, which after the last few days felt like its own small luxury — no dust, no snow, nothing to keep half an eye on beyond the road itself. At Never, the Lena Highway ended, and we joined the Trans-Siberian proper. From there it was on to Skovorodino for the night.

I walked the length of the village. There wasn’t much to it beyond a striking memorial to the Great Patriotic War. Dinner was Chinese, and Greg made the announcement: no more gravel roads.

No sooner had we started the next morning than Greg took a left turn off the Trans-Siberian and back onto gravel — the original highway, running alongside the train line. We followed it for a while before rejoining the new road, gravel evidently still owed us one last say in the matter.

Cresting a rise, we passed the old man with the GAZ-69 we’d met back on the Road of Bones. His bonnet was up, and he was staring into the engine. I did a U-turn to see what was going on. He shouted across the road in Russian and waved his water pump fan at me. I radioed Greg, who came back to help. The GAZ-69 wasn’t going anywhere on its own, so Greg towed him to the next village. Entering the village, Greg got the red-and-white-stick treatment while I drove straight through to the garage workshop and café. Over coffee, the old man told us the locals couldn’t quite believe foreigners would actually stop.

After lunch we pulled in at the Chapel of St. Nicholas on the Yuri Ten Pass, where we met a young man on a motorbike heading for Magadan — the direction we’d come from, going the way we were headed. We swapped stories, each of us mildly disbelieving of the other’s route.

The chapel had a bell.

I rang it. Nobody stopped me, which felt like tacit approval, or at least an absence of objection, which out here amounted to much the same thing.

Chernyshevsk was a small town built to serve the railway — a war memorial, an onion-domed church, and a scattering of odd little animal statues, including a concrete one that looked distinctly like a dog assembled from spare parts. We didn’t stay long. After the day we’d had, a bed was doing most of the talking.