:eek: :eek: :eek: We won’t think about that. We are not going to think about that.
Freezing would be bad enough. Can you imagine, you’re pissing and you hear SNAP! SNAP! SNAP! and when you’re done there’s a pile of piss cubes at your feet.
Actually I’m sure that they mean not that you do your business outdoors, but that you have to cross the outdoors to get to the facilities, such as they are. Warmth within the facilities, I suspect, is generated by decomposition of earlier deposits. Which is better than nothing, but not exactly . . . comforting.
My reaction exactly. And now you’ve reminded me about an old Risk-playing buddy of mine who couldn’t say Irkutsk…he called it Irktoosk. The rest of us, being twelve-year-old boys, pointed and laughed. Oh well.
I’m definitely in on the trip. I actually wrote a short article about the community last summer as part of a language arts program for reluctant readers. The editors wouldn’t let me put anything in about bathroom behaviors, however.
I love that the bottom of the page specifies that the price excludes “all expenses due to weather conditions”
So what, in the middle of the trip the water pump freezes up on some shitty Soviet troop transport and we have to pony up $200 each to get it fixed so we can get back, oh and it’ll take 4 days to get the parts so everyone is on the hook for an additional $100 a night for accommodations until we can get the fuck out of the ninth circle of hell?
CBC recently posted some fascinating photos of the place.
In the captions for those photos, it says that cars have to be kept running all the time to prevent them from freezing/breaking down. Also, the town only has one store. And people run from one place to another to minimize their time outside. And there’s a farmer who manages to keep cows there.
A couple of posts up, Cat Whisperer quoted The Holdsworth Effect thusly:
While I have no problem with you wanting to redact THE’s post for the sake of brevity, Cat, I should point out that we guys don’t tend to talk about that part of the body and “snips” in the same sentence.
The airplane (an Ant of some type) used compressed air for starting.
Because, in Siberia, batteries get too cold for the chemical reactions to occur.
Cabin heat was provided by a wood-burning stove in the cabin.
Russia still made rotary aircraft engines into the 90’s, and maybe to this day.
Find out what airplane they use for these “Tourists”.
A trip from Moscow to (wherever) on the Trans-Siberian Railroad might be fun - anything smaller, not so much.
Adding up all the travel distances and using a 40-50 km/hour speed based on their estimate of travel times for day one gives 27.7-34.6 hours in the back of the van. At 16 waking hours and seven days on ground (8 basically a travel day) that’s just over 30% of the time I’m not sleeping. What I did on my winter vacation - ride around in the back of a minivan.
Hopefully, Dopers have taken advantage of the vacation opportunity in Oymyakon (time’s a wastin’, it was -49F in Yakutsk today but winter won’t last forever).
If however this was too long a journey to undertake, there’s a wonderful winter experience awaiting you this weekend in Ohio, with the Sandusky Arctic Ice Festival. The annual event features “ice skating, ice carving, ice harvesting, ice boating, ice fishing (weather permitting), and even ice-diving demos.” And of course, there’s a wintry cook-off. The Sandusky Arctic Ice Festival runs until 4 p.m. today and from 10-4 tomorrow (here’s a map if you’re driving).
If you can’t make it, don’t miss out on Kurentovanje next Saturday in Cleveland, described as “sort of a Slovenian Mardi Gras”, with food, drink, cultural performances and “an appearance by many, many fuzzy Kurents” (enormous mythical Slovenian monsters which scare away winter and welcome spring). The theme for the 2015 Kurentovanje is “LOVE in every sLOVEnian!”
All in all, it is a joyous time in northern Ohio, don’t miss out.
I think I’ll pass this round… I’m currently enjoying a balmy 34ºF here in northern Wisconsin and have opened several windows in my house this afternoon to freshen the air in here. AHHH!
I see that there is a sort of suburb near Yakutsk with the unfortunate name of Alas. No thanks, I would rather visit Irkutsk, to see Lake Baikal – at least the towns in that area have honest names, like Зима.
