February 6th
Midday about 100 km south of Uchugay in the taiga
-35 degrees below zero Celcius

Gee, I am really, really frozen to the backbone! These three days of travel have offered some of the best winter scenery I have ever come across! Lots of deep snow, mountains, valleys and this eternal taiga, with its cold and odd appearance of the sun. The beauty is stunning and it cannot be seen elsewhere. You need this extreme cold to get the alluring foggy misty freeze and extremely clean, high and fresh air!

What a privileged time it has been! It is like traveling in a continuous dream…but, the cold. The cold, is fearsome.  At times I ask myself, is it really worth it and it does not take many seconds until I say loudly yes! The best experience of all are the personalities we come across: everything from wolf hunters to reindeer herders.  I tell you by experience, there are not a lot of these nomadic personalities around today and, as I remember from my Kolyma expedition 2004-05 (which was much harder, since me and Johan didn´t have a wood stove to warm us, just our body heat), they´re all good on camera as well. We have some good film, no doubt, and the photographer Yura Berezhnov is the most hardworking person I have seen. The best of the best and his photography is world class. We both haven´t gone to sleep before midnight yet, since we every night spend 2-3 hours preparing the kit and transferring material to harddiscs. It takes about two hours to warm the kit up for use. Mainly by using body heat to thaw cables, laptops, cameras and harddiscs. Even though we can´t communicate too well, he speaks as little English as I speak Russian, it feels like we have worked together for years.

Even though at this precise moment it is quite bearable out there, around -35 below zero Celsius and the sun is out, we have all taken a good beating after 100 kms of travel, during basically three days. Yesterday we had a much needed day off, filming a permanent reindeer camp and a couple of wolf hunters. We have had a demanding start and this cold eats into your bones.  Since we have a far too small tent for four people, with a fabric which is far too thin for this climate and a Chinese made wood stove which isn´t doing too well, we have had to put in a lot of work just generating heat to survive. The work that it takes makes relations slightly tense at times in the group of non-Evenys. The Eveny friends and members are doing much better. It is a joy to be with them and I am learning a lot about their demanding lives. On Expeditions as demanding as this you also learn a lot about yourself, but, as a whole, so far we are doing very well! I would say that this is all due to the Evenys who have joined us and helped us with the most simple details.

Right now I am sitting with our only female member, Vika, who is preparing bread whilst her husband Slava and Tolya have gone to a permanent reindeer camp about a kilometer from our wild camp to pick up 3 reindeers that they, as the Even custom dictate, where given as gifts yesterday. These three hadn´t been used as pulling reindeers before, so we had to leave them at the permanent camp yesterday. They have gone over there now to pick them up after spending a major part this morning preparing special harnesses, made to make them follow their orders. One of the highlights each day is when it is time to go into Vikas and the Evenys tent to eat and socialize. It is much warmer in their tent. Her food is great and full of variety, everything from home-made bread, to fried fish, to casseroles of pasta and meat (I have eaten so much tough meat that my teeth ache each night).  Yesterday we had straganina, frozen raw fish, which where kind of new to the Eveny as well.

Tolya, Vika, Slava and Yura all come from further south of here, not too far of a settlement in the south, where we are planned to end, Okhotsk. This extreme cold is new to them as well. They all have a cold now and sore throats. So much is new to them as well, but of course, they´re doing fantastically well and without them I fear life would be so much more demanding and hard. They are hard working, kind, friendly, and still a bit shy. It is a real pleasure to see them do their work, from herding their loved reindeer to chopping fire wood and preparing us for the night. They set up camp in no time, while for us others, we are still learning. We have been three in our tent for two nights in a row now, since Yegor has slept in comfort with his friend in the other camp. That has given us others time to improve our skills a bit. Yegor has organized this Expedition selflessly and has made it as good as it can be. I am very happy!

And Bolot? I know Bolot has a lot of readers following him and I have to say I am impressed by Bolot.  He is as far from an outdoor person as one can be, but he has adapted very well and even though I know he looks forward to the end, access to Internet and his family, he seems happier than I have ever seen him and he is great company. It must be harder for him than anyone else and he is doing so well. Impressive!

Our plan now is moving on 15 kms today, then setting up camp and preparing for the hardest part of the trip – passing two mountain passes, where the fear of avalanches is big and 5 days with no humans around until we arrive at Vikas father´s camp. Our speed is about 7-8 kms per hour.

Ooooh, I wonder how we all will look and be in five days. I hope to report soon again though, if we get the generator going. Yes, we are hauling 100 litres of petrol with us and a generator. It would be impossible to do this otherwise, since batteries get drained far too quick.

What an adventure! It is almost unreal!

(I just learned via walkie-talkie that we will be staying another, our third, night out here in the taiga, because the gifts in the shape of the reindeers that Tolja and Slava where given yesterday, don´t want to do as they want. They need the whole day to train them, so we will have to set up camp again, after just having taken it down. These Siberian camps take time to set up since it is based on material found in the taiga. I also did the mistake of calling Pam and the kids in Yakutsk, and that made me miss them more than ever! However, I know my wife would have loved this trip and time in the taiga! But it is still too hard for Eva and Scarlett Sardana)