Crossing 2000 Miles of Siberia to Reach One of the Most Isolated Cities on Earth

Tech progress in the last two hundred years is nothing short of incredible, plenty of what we see today as normal would have been absolute magic just a few short decades ago.

This hit me hard when driving in Arizona somewhere and having a cell phone conversation with another dutch person who was driving in Canada, both of us on our tri-band cell phones with roaming contracts. Crystal clear, as if we were standing next door to each other and neither of us realized that we were abroad (and on another continent than normally) until halfway into the conversation. That's how normal it has become to be able to talk to everybody all the time.

FWIW, both the film and the book take place north of Vladivostok in the Sikhote-Alin Mountain range and along the coast of the Sea of Japan. It reminded me of the Pacific North West in the USA and Canada, but it was just foreign enough and a little bit different to make it seem incredibly magical. For example, you would have brown bears and eagles, but you might also see Siberian Tigers. You could meet an indigenous hunter, like Derzu Uzala, but you could also meet Russians, Chinese, and Koreans. I second the recommendation for the film, and I'd also highly recommend the book.

[1] https://smile.amazon.com/Dersu-Trapper-Recovered-Classics-Ar...

> The year before, the team spent a significant amount of time traveling east by boat to coastal settlements dotted along the Sea of Okhotsk, dropping off fuel and supplies to support their upcoming journey.

Ostensibly the game is just about driving logs from one place to another, but it's the journey itself that makes the game. The mud physics are quite good,m and you'll certainly end up needing both all-wheel drive, diff locks and a healthy amount of winching to get around. The physics model isn't perfect for on-road driving and the diff locks are not super realistic on hard surfaces, but it's certainly the best off road simulation I've tried.

Taking an old truck on road tires slowly through mud and fording a river with water up to the windshield, while towing a garage trailer to unlock a remote service station is an odd kind of excitement, completely different from the high speed shenanigans in most driving games.

A controller is an absolute must, you have to be surprisingly delicate when feathering the throttle to navigate sticky mud. Full throttle just spins the tires and gets you hopelessly stuck.

I did learn that фен can actually mean other kinds of hair dryer-like heat guns (from https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Фен). I assume that’s what these folks used to heat various components.