Milestones

A day of milestones. After six days on the train, we found around breakfast time that we were now the same distance from Moscow as Cairns is from Melbourne. Then just after morning tea we finally left Siberia and moved into the Urals, and around afternoon tea time we passed the obelisk that marks the boundary between Asia and Europe, while somewhere back home Brendan was celebrating a birthday.

Still snow and birch trees - you get the idea - but fields are now starting to appear through the snow, and in some places it's now quite patchy.

Saw a military tank assembly and storage facility - there were paddocks of them, and no attempt to hide them, so I suppose the Cold War is well and truly over.

Stopped for afternoon tea at Yekaterinburg - famous for where the last Tsar was exiled and then executed. Its also where Gary Powers was shot down in his U2 spy plane at the height of the Cold War, and Boris Yeltsin's home town. Sunny and quite warm on the platform - didn't need coats for the first time since arriving in Russia.