Our Russian Adventure, as I am sure you know, is immense. We travel for days along old tracks that cross what is called the Taiga or Boreal Forest, depending upon which part of the world that you are actually in. This forest is mind blowing; it is a coniferous forest consisting of pines, spruces and larches that circumnavigates the world in the north. At every turn of our adventure it teams with wildlife, Whooper Swans, Cranes, Bluethroats the list would fill pages!!. Most of the birds are thinking of leaving when we travel through it in August as the first frosts of winter are already turning the forest white.

The tracks that we drive sometimes disappear into impassable bogs and this picture shows us taking an alternative route around such an obstacle. The way round is “across” a lake, I am bending the truth a bit when I say “across a lake” as we actually drive, sometimes close to bonnet height, around the edge of the lake. We are very careful not to stray beyond twenty feet or so from its edge and I remember some years ago that a car went too far into the lake and we almost lost it as the bottom here does not shelf, it plummets!!