Tuesday, 1 September 2026

 

Start: Yekaterinburg (RU) 8:15

Arrival: Kurgan (RU) 15:45

 

Total: 391 km

 

 

The good news first: we successfully completed our last fuel hunt in Russia for a while. This morning, when we realized that the line to the gas station near our hotel was 500 metres long (and this is no hyperbole, but the sad truth), we decided that we might as well wait until Kurgan before topping up. If only we'd stuck to that plan! After driving past many empty gas stations, we spotted a Sibneft that advertised 95 petrol. With only 2 cars waiting in line! We made an about-turn and drove up to the pump. The price was a bit stiff (0.97 ruble a litre) for Russia, but still cheap compared to Luxembourg. Definitely worth not waiting in line for an hour!

 

 

The "bad news" (in a manner of speaking) waited for us a few kilometres down the road: 95 petrol for the usual 0.65 ruble or so. And hardly any customers! Ah well, let's not be stingy. But the last 50 kilometers to Kurgan, we saw many more gas stations, and all very cheap! For some reason, this part of Russia experiences less of a petrol shortage than the cities west of the Urals. Could it be the proximity to Kazakhstan? Or simply the fact that megacities have many more cars that potentially drive large distances? Be that as it may, here's to us filling up - quite unnecessarily - at the most expensive gas station south of Yekaterinburg! Bottoms up!

 

Another milestone to celebrate: near the village of Malaya Belonosova, our odometre showed exactly 5000 km! (Well, once I had safely stopped the car at the wayside, it showed 5000.1, but close enough). Of course we took a pic of that memorable event.

 

The highway between Yekaterinburg and Kurgan is mostly well maintained (bar, of course, the occasional chasm-like pothole that suddenly appears in front of you. How does this happen, I wonder). And as in every oblast that we passed through, there were lots of roadworks here too. Judging by all this industrious activity, the Russian road network will be in excellent condition by the 2030s. Looking forward to an epic Moscow-Vladivostok roadtrip on a brand new dual carriageway some day. A girl can dream.

 

 

The forests of the Central Ural region gradually gave way to marshlands and steppe. The wetlands form a large, protected ecologically useful area and, from the safety of your car, are beautiful to behold. Reeds, low shrubs and waterlogged marshes as far as the eye can see. A paradise for birds, moles and waterfowl. Sonia tried to capture the atmosphere in a picture, but it's so much more impressive when you drive through it and the scenery just goes on and on.

 

We had made an early start today in order to arrive in Kurgan well before the two sights we wanted to visit were closing. Unfortunately the journey took quite a bit longer than we had planned. Maybe I was a bit under the weather, in any case I needed a few breaks in between. At one of these, Sonia procured some welcome chocolate, iced coffee and chips from a village "Monetka". This shop was a classic case of "Don't judge a book by its cover". It looked rather questionable from the outside, a bit run-down, gravel parking lot, in the middle of nothing much. But inside, it was well-stocked and the cashier friendly and smiling - more than the chick from the hipster coffee shop had managed yesterday. We're big fans of the minimarket chain Monetka now.

 

 

 

 

Before this trip, the word "kurgan" had meant only one thing to me: a mound covering an ancient Sarmatian or Scythian gravesite, a relic of the mighty nomadic horsemen who roamed these steppes thousands of years ago. Unfortunately, most mounds are eroded nowadays, and the burial chambers have been robbed of their treasures long ago, so there is nothing much left to visit. But the city of Kurgan was built near one such mound, Tsarev Kurgan, from which it took its name, and a museum fortification now celebrates the beginnings of the town. This site, Tsarevo Gorodishe, was where we were headed.

 

 

Unfortunately, the site was not only closed on Mondays (as their website had stated) but also on Tuesdays. But the advantage of a tiny open air museum is that you can easily see everything by walking around the fence. Which is what we did. And the sun was shining too! An excellent way to relax before the crazy traffic of a town centre.

 

Because the second thing I had wanted to see was in the centre of town: a "dom muzey" of the Decabrists, a group of liberal aristocrats who had staged an uprising against the tsar in 1828. They had asked for the abolition of serfdom and, like liberals all over Europe at that time, had wanted a written constitution and a say in the affairs of state. They had failed and had been exiled to a place far east of Moscow and Piter, hence you can now visit one of their homes in Kurgan.

 

We drove round and round, but simply could not find a parking spot. By now my mental reserves were quite depleted and I readily admit I was longing more for some food and drink than for any intellectual stimulation by trudging around a museum, no matter how interesting. So we declared defeat and drove straight to our hotel. Just as the decabrists had failed in their coup, we failed in our quest to park Old Trusty. Their punishment had been harsher than ours, though. Instead of life-long exile, we soon found ourselves in front of a plate of delicious hot food in our excellent hotel Versal. And I even made the acquaintance of a very nice Russian lady and a real-deal New Yorker. So I have to take back what I said about no Western tourists in Russia. You just have to find them, but they're there!