A long, lonely road

Going through my archives, I came across this roadsign, since replaced, in the depths of eastern Russia. It says enough about the vastness of that country. I shall translate the writing, which is in cyrillic script. We're 1174 km or 730 miles west of the port of Khabarovsk on the Pacific Ocean. This is where the M56 highway branches off the Trans-Siberian Highway. The two towns mentioned are Yakutsk (a trifling 1,056 km / 656 miles distant) and Magadan (3,177 km / 1,974 miles) away. The road is known as the Road of Bones, built by prisoners held in Stalin's gulags, who would often succumb to the extreme conditions. In winter, the thermometer is known to plummet to below -70C in some locations. The Road of Bones is not the nice, pristine highway you see veering off at this junction. In places, it is only passable in winter. Magadan is not the furthest point east in Russia. The country carries on another 2,000 km or 1200 miles before finding its end at Lavrentia. A mere 45 miles further east across the Bering Strait lies Alaska. 

Although we all revile Putin, do not forget that he is only one man in a vast country... Much can happen yet.