Murmansk Winter Expedition: Day #12 – around Murmansk

Daily distance: 395 km (driving in the area)
Distance from home: 3322 km

We would not be ourselves if we were able to sit still. Knowing that there are many interesting places to visit in the area, we planned:

• The Port of Murmansk, with the nuclear icebreaker Lenin
• further exploration of the Kolski Peninsula, this time more towards the border with Norway and there:
• further exploration of the Kolski Peninsula, this time more towards the border with Norway and there:
  • the town of Sputnik
  • a wooden monastery in the middle of nothing
  • City of Nikel
  • the deepest hole in the world SG-3
• after returning to Murmansk two monuments: the Siemion cat and the monument to soldiers and sailors who died at sea in peacetime.
  

We started as planned.

As planned, we went deep into the Kolski peninsula. Learning from the experience of the day before, we checked where the ZATO Zones are and decided not to go there.

We went towards Norway.

We saw blocks of flats in the middle of nothing, military units, monuments to the fallen heroes.

We drove along the usual inter-city road number 105, and anyway we met a nice soldier guarding the barrier.

Documents, where, how, for what, he speaks Russian, we speak English, a day like every day 🙂

A little farther, in the middle of nothing we found a mysterious wooden monastery.

In the Search for the Great Deep Hole

Then, according to the plan, we went towards the Great Deep Hole. We almost succeeded. Unfortunately, access to the Great Hole was defended by another gate with a guardhouse. In this way we confirmed our supposition that the SG-3 can be seen only illegally and unofficially.

Not discouraged by this failure, we decided to check where nickel comes from. From Nikel!

It’s odd, we were near Finland, where it’s beautiful, clean and natural, and here we found tanks, steelworks and opencast mines. Unbelievable (and sad) how civilization can develop in different ways.

Exploration of the area looked like this:

Kursk monument

We returned to Murmansk.

We went to see the monument to the victims of the sea. The base of the monument is a superstructure from the submarine Kursk, which was submerged in 2000. Interestingly, it is squeezed into the square between the blocks of flats, in a place completely incompatible with the seriousness of all the situations it commemorates.

The Russians are nice and caring!

At the end we met something surprising and nice at the same time. We parked near the monument, on a housing estate road. When we got into the car, we realized that the driver’s seat started to swing. We took out the tools and started to tinker with the car. That’s it! There were 3 sturdy Russians (whose breath did not let us forget that today is still January 1), who decided that if the car is Russian, we are in Russia, they are Russians, and we are not, their national pride will not allow us to repair the car ourselves.

The whole action lasted about half an hour, the seat was efficiently dismantled, untwisted, twisted, we showed the lack of one key spring, so it was again untwisted, twisted and mounted. At the end we got a business card of the Commander-in-Chief of the action, wishes of a happy new year, were hugs, kisses and assurance that until we move, they will stand and look, because they want to be sure that everything is OK.

In this way, we have experienced the legendary Russian thoughtfulness.

And the statue of Siemion’s cat was unfortunately hidden behind a wavy sheet metal fence, because the park in which it is located was undergoing reconstruction. So we have a very good reason to go back to Murmansk – to see the cat monument.