Siberia. Magadan to Novosibirsk via the Road of Bones. Picking up from The Market That Had Everything: Onward to Krasnoyarsk. The series starts here: We Needed an Expedition, Not a Holiday.

Today was the big day — 823 kilometres. We started early and had two hours on the road before breakfast.

Not far out of Krasnoyarsk, a signpost put Novosibirsk at 810 kilometres away, under a hilltop cross we didn’t stop to read.

At the café we pulled into, breakfast was the traditional eggs and pancakes. A couple of local night-shift workers were in for the same thing.

Theirs came with a bottle of vodka.

The steppe ran an even mix of grass and trees, and didn’t let up for hours. Concrete ramps appeared roadside every so often, just tall enough to drive up onto and duck underneath for repairs. Every railway crossing meant a wait, and unlike New Zealand’s empty tracks, the Trans-Siberian always had something moving on it — oil, coal, or people. One crossing backed a line of trucks up nose to tail and cost us over thirty minutes.

No wonder people are hanging out for the overbridges.

As we got close to Novosibirsk the weather turned. Black clouds brought snow, right as the road tightened up a hill.

The tyre was still shimmying above 100 — the same wobble since Petrovsk-Zabaykalsky, still uncorrected however many thousand kilometres later. One more day of it, we told ourselves. Novosibirsk would sort it out.

It was dark by the time we arrived. 823 kilometres beat the old record — the USA trip’s 750 — by 73. A very different kind of long day than an American interstate.

We woke on the top floor of the hotel, looking straight down on Novosibirsk Glavny — the station’s grand turquoise facade, tracks fanning out on every side. Novosibirsk calls itself the capital of Siberia, and this is the busiest hub on the whole Trans-Siberian line, which after two and a half weeks of following it, felt like it had earned the title.

After breakfast we took a taxi to the zoo, an interesting ride given stop signs and traffic lights seemed to be treated as suggestions. I got out and left my beanie in the car. It was only 3°C, but the damp in the air made it feel considerably colder.

Janine’s mink hat, bought back in Chita, finally earned its keep.

Being a Monday, we had the zoo almost to ourselves. The beluga whales were closed for cleaning, which ruled that out. The polar bear was the star of the show, sprawled across a fake iceberg and looking thoroughly unimpressed with the whole arrangement. The lion looked the saddest of the lot, perched on a narrow wooden platform in a cage that felt too small for him.

A special exhibit of animatronic dinosaurs was tucked into the trees — Janine’s mink hat looking distinctly prehistoric next to a T-Rex mid-roar.

There were no taxis for the trip back, so we walked. On the way we passed pigeons sitting on manhole covers, working the venting steam to stay warm — Novosibirsk’s own version of a heated footpath, strictly pigeons only. Nobody moved them on. They’d clearly worked out the good spots long before we arrived, and had no intention of giving them up for two cold tourists and a mink hat.