Meet Owen tesch, I have just pulled up to a level crossing to let the tans sibreian train come through and it raining i’ve turned off the engine and i’m listening to some western music and i’m thinking of how far i’ve come and that i havn’t spoken english for nearly a month except to myself and singing out aloud in the car but that doesn’t count if your not interacting.

someone is knocking on my passenger window and is grinning at me,i put the window down and he asks me if i have driven from the UK and i say yes, i am amazed by this and immediately want to speak more to him, i told him my name is tim and said that he was nice to meet me and his name was Owen, i asked if he would like a mug of tea on the other side of the level crossing and he liked the idea so we both got into our vehicles and when the lady asked the traffic to move again we pulled up on the other side.

Owen is possibly more nuts than i am and he has just driven from Luxembourg in a standard renault express van he has come a different route than me coming over Latvia and Lithuania then down from Moscow, i asked him about Moscow and he told me he had spent about 3 hours their and didn’t like it so moved on. I am the same not liking city’s much too.

I was jealous of how simple his van was but I’m not sure how comfortable he has been and he has now fridge, he sleeps on a false wooden floor that he has fitted above a couple of spare wheels and a toolkit spare battery and two fuel cans, he is a true modern hippy and when i asked where he was going he said that the car is going one way to Mongolia and that when he arrives in Mongolia he wanted to exchange the car for a horse and then travel on the horse from their on, i was wondering about what a lovely idea would be to travel around the world on a horse and i wonder if this would be feasible my friend Grant Nicole in Scotland Uk has ridden from John o grotes to lands end so i think the only restriction would be vet controls. Owen he couldn’t believe he had met me in the middle of Russia and asked what i had been doing and he liked the vehicle i was using, with all of this excited chatter he then came out with “you no its my birthday too” wow really, “Yes” he got his passport out and yes it was his birthday, so i got out of my stores draw two miniature bottles of whiskey and we had a mini birthday party at the roadside in Siberia.

Seems like we are going the same way to Irkutsk so we agreed to run with each other till we arrive in Irkutsk which should be tomorrow night.