Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from Blue Booties and a Rococo Mirror: Nerchinsk to Chita. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

The final stop in Chita was the War Museum — interactive, and exactly my kind of place. I climbed on the T-34 tanks with real enthusiasm, and there was a Katyusha rocket launcher and even a MiG-21 to look over. The museum also had a scattering of statues through the grounds, and I couldn’t resist interacting with them, the way I had with my friend Larisa at the Rodin Museum a few years back. First I sat on a bench and struck up a conversation with a human-sized bronze cat. Then, taking a small risk, I knelt down and copied Lenin’s pose, mildly concerned I might offend someone in the process. Olga saw what I was doing and burst out laughing. Janine got the photo.

A few days earlier, the Chita Toyota Land Cruiser Club had contacted us — we’re still not entirely sure how they knew we existed — and invited us to dinner. Only four couples came. The rest, we were told, were military or FSB, and not permitted to interact with foreigners. The ones who did come let us know they’d seen our file, and that it was a large one.

A couple of them spoke good English, and it made for a genuinely great evening — a proper conversation, away from anything touristy. They were just like us underneath it: interested in life, in travel, in the same small talk anyone makes over dinner. Janine was shocked to learn how the local kids got to school at minus twenty. They walked. Even the five-year-olds.

They showed us a video from one of their club runs. Serious off-roading, the kind that made our Kolyma gravel look like a driveway.

The Transbaikal forest-steppe opened up the next day as the taiga thinned into wide open country. The larch had turned for autumn, and for hours I drove through nothing but gold.

Halfway to Ulan-Ude we stopped in Petrovsk-Zabaykalsky for yet another Decembrist museum — a two-storey log building with a stone family group standing out front, a wife and child beside a husband still in his chains. Olga read the poem inscribed on a plaque in the wall and pronounced it lovely.

Down the road stood the old power station, brick with one tall chimney, looking like it had been condemned decades ago.

Apparently it still works.

We swapped the highway for a gravel back road into Ulan-Ude, past log houses with tin roofs and the odd window painted a defiant sky blue. Then a tyre went. I changed it using the spare — the one the mechanic in Ust-Nera hadn’t wanted to touch, muttering about a hole too big to trust, until we’d talked him into it anyway.

It held. Mostly.

Past 100 km/h it developed a shimmy that suggested he might have had a point.

We hit Ulan-Ude at dusk, straight into rush hour. One intersection had apparently agreed among itself that the rules didn’t apply, and I forced my way through on confidence alone.

In the evening we walked to the main square. Lenin was waiting — or at least his head was: 7.7 metres of bronze, 42 tonnes, officially the largest Lenin head in the world.

Just a head.

Nearby, a fountain ran through a light show timed to classical music, and I stood with a handful of locals and listened for a while, nobody in any hurry to be anywhere else.