My first car

Never thought I would be buying my first car in Russia of all places, or that it would be a van. Nevetheless, I am now the proud owner of a Toyota Town Ace 1990! I still cannot post photos for some reason, but it looks very similiar to this: http://www.jdmparts.ca/images/tamn.jpg, complete with the racy red stripe.

We have been in Vladivostok for the last 10 days, arranging the purchase of a vehicle that would take us the rest of the way through Russia. Our reasons, as we've had to explain to everyone here who heard our plan, are as follows:

1. We want to see Russia not just from a train window
2. Many places are remote and inaccessible unless you have your own vehicle (eg the Altai Mountains)
3. It would be an adventure
4. It's much cheaper than hop-on-hop-off the train and staying at hotels

We have been unpleasantly suprised by the prices here, on par with Australia or in some cases even more due to lack of options. We plan to sleep in the car and cook for ourselves as much as we can. It saved us a lot of money in Australia, and we liked it, so we thought "why not do it again".

Vladivostok is actually a really nice city, and not a bad place to spend 10 days. The central part of town was build mid-last century, and is very scenic. It's hot during the day (about 30C), and warm at night, which is somewhat a suprise. We've been looking forward to some cooler weather after China, but that hasn't happened yet.

For me, it's nice to be able to communicate again for the first time since we left Australia, and so it feels very comfortable here. Lots of people swim in the port, but it looks very polluted to us so we haven't tried it. It seems all the self-respecting girls got ready for summer by tanning themselves in solariums, and are darker then the average Australian :)

The big industry in town is importing used japanese cars and transporting them across Russia, but that's now in jeopardy as Federal Government raised import duties last year. Enterprising Russians however have a solution - go over to Japan, pull the car apart, import it as "spare parts" and put it back together here. This is called a "constuctor", for which you separately have to buy documents for to prove its existence. If anyone is planning to buy a car in Vladivostok, let me know, because I am now an expert on all the required procedures and paperwork, and on all the dodgy things you can do to get around the rules (not that we are planning to do anything like that). It seems like everyone in Vladivostok owns a used Japanese car, even though the wheel is on the wrong side. But as a local explained to me: "once you know what quality is, you cannot go back to a Russian-built vehicle; you are used to better things".

In 99% of cases, people have been nice, friendly and extremely helpful to us. Ofcourse there are still people, mainly in supermarket-type jobs, whose faces haven't cracked a smile in the last decade. But they are firmly in the minority. As "naive foreigners with a crazy plan", we have gotten an enormous amount of help here from locals. Everyone we meet warns us about people out there who are going to cheat us / rob us / hurt us. But it seems to be just a general level of suspicion and paranoia towards others. So far our experience in Russia has been exactly the opposite.