Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from Lake Baikal, Twice: Ulan-Ude to Irkutsk. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

I started the day topping up my phone data at the machine in the Irkutsk Hotel lobby. Greg then took us to a car parts shopping mall — aisles sorted by continent, Europe, Japan, Korea, everything anyone could possibly want for a car, arranged like a library.

Janine bought nothing. A first for the trip.

Once on the road we stopped for morning tea at a café, where we discovered we’d left the travel bag — power cords and all — back at the hotel. Olga called. They’d found it, sitting exactly where I’d been topping up my phone that morning. Too late to go back for it by then. Greg was heading that way again soon and offered to collect it for us.

Late afternoon we reached Tulun, a small village with mud roads. It did have a beautiful church, red and white with gold onion domes, and out front, a mother bear and cub shaped from bright green turf. We stayed in a traditional two-storey guesthouse.

Janine and Olga weren’t feeling well and skipped dinner. Greg and I ate in the guesthouse’s basement bar, where the barman didn’t want to serve us at first, seemingly embarrassed that all he had was Zhigulevskoye — the beer that was basically the only beer in the Soviet Union for sixty years.

Nothing wrong with it, as it turned out.

I got takeaway ice cream for Janine on the way back up.

We started the 660-kilometre drive to Krasnoyarsk the next morning with Janine down with a sore throat and a head cold. The drive itself was uneventful — flat steppe the whole way — though we shared the road with more traffic than we’d seen the previous few days.

There were roadworks everywhere, part of a push, we were told, to grade-separate every crossing over the Trans-Siberian line. Traffic lights controlled a single lane through the works. We stopped like everyone else. A few cars didn’t, and when our green finally came, a car coming the other way met us head-on in the same lane. Both drivers simply pulled onto the verge and squeezed past each other.

No horn. No anger. Just people getting on with it.

Arriving in Krasnoyarsk, we drove past Reshetnev Siberian State University and a monument to a Soviet Kosmos-3M carrier rocket, standing upright as though still waiting for the countdown.

In Krasnoyarsk I left Janine at the hotel and went shopping — a phone charger first, then a pharmacy for something to fix her throat. The woman behind the counter had no English. I spotted a Strepsils logo on a packet and pointed. She touched her own throat, and I knew I’d found the right thing.

I said spasibo on my way out. She replied in Russian, which I didn’t understand, and I decided to take it as good news.

Afterward I dropped the Strepsils back to Janine and went for a walk along the river. Hare Krishnas, singing outside the hotel, caught me off guard. The riverside had its own collection of statues — bronze women in flowing dresses, mid-stride down a flight of fountain steps.

Showery weather suited the mood exactly. Wet, with rainbows.