ARCTIC RUSSIA

'ENDS OF THE EARTH'
EXPEDITION

17th - 26th JUNE 2008, 10 DAYS

Firmly establishing our reputation as one of the leading 4x4 based tour companies with the most wide reaching international tours available we will return once again to the Kola Peninsula in Russia's far north for another amazing expedition!

At this time of year the water levels are high in the rivers and bogs, there is snow on the mountains and in the passes….. and the sun never sets. Snowball fights on summer solstice anyone? !!

This is going to be a harder tour than the August one as the water levels are much higher and there are snow drifts to cut through in the high passes of the Khibiny mountains. You don’t necessarily need your own winch as we can just turn the ‘bus’ around and drag everyone through at once, but you do need to understand that there will be deep water crossings, sections that need to be winched, snow banks that need digging out, and tracks over the mountains, which aren’t on maps, that simply must be explored!!



To see some pictures of some of our previous tours, please Click here.



VEHICLE PREPARATION AND EQUIPMENT NEEDED

There is no real minimum requirements for our tours, we just recommend certain measures to make sure that everything runs as smoothly as possible.

Both long-distance driving and off-roading are considered hard driving conditions for your vehicle so we recommend that you give your vehicle a comprehensive service before you leave, as if your vehicle is not in tip top condition 10 days of off-roading is not going to make it any better. You should also consider what spares you’d be happy carrying as parts are certainly not readily available in this part of the world. A basic tool kit is also well recommended.
Road tyres WILL NOT be sufficient for the conditions. You need A/Ts as a minimum. If you want, and if your route permits it you can drive up to the meeting point in Roveneimi, Finland, leave your road tyres there and then swap them back when you pass through here on your way back.
There are lots of rocks and logs lurking in the mud, so consider some sort of steering / diff protection.
You WILL need recovery points, front and rear, and AT LEAST one 20 liter jerrycan, as we sometimes will be 2 days away from a fuel station. We can carry this in the support vehicle if you'd rather not travel with fuel containers in your own car.
We will supply all of your drinking water and food, including lunch and snacks, and it will all be carried in the ‘bus’ so you don't really need to stock up or reserve space for storage.

For driving through Europe you will need a first aid kit, a warning triangle, and a small fire extinguisher.
In the event of a large mechanical failure we will do our best to get you to a garage or can tow you to the border. This is not exactly a service, but of course we’ll try and help as much as possible however we can.

Unfortunately, due to our accommodation providers putting their prices up and yet another change in government policy for tourists we have had to raise the price of the expedition to £850 a person.

This does not effect those who have already paid their deposits. The full price of your tour will still be just £750.

PRICES

£850 per person.

Price includes…

*Fully guided and supported 9 day off-road tour of Arctic Russia.

*Full board!! All accommodation and 3 meals a day, for the 9 days.

*Full time escort, guide and translator all the way from the meeting point in Finland and all through the tour.

*All your paperwork, worth £70 (visa invitation, visa application, visa registration).

*All the help you need getting through borders, police check-points and booking into hotels on route.

*We'll arrange your Russian car insurance for you, for no extra cost.

*All the taxes, charges and permits for travelling through military and controlled zones.

*All the pre-trip advice you need.

*Free greenlaning weekend in Wales.

What is not included: Your fuel, your travel costs to Russia, travel insurance, and your food and accommodation on the way to and from the tour.

To book a place on this tour we require a £170 per person deposit.

 

GET TOGETHER WEEKEND

8th 9th March

We will be holding another get together weekend, based at the stunning Wilderness Farm in North Wales, for anyone booked on an upcoming tour, for those that have been on a previous tour and for all those genuinely interested in joining us off-roading on one of our tours or expeditions.

For more info, please click here.

MORE DETAILS

MEETING POINT

The Meeting Point for the tour is the City Hotel in Roveneimi in northern Finland, right on the Arctic circle. There are several routes here, depending on where you are starting from. You can take a ferry across the North Seas and then drive all the way through Sweden. Alternatively, there’s a route across northern Germany to Rostock where there are a couple of different ferries to Helsinki. It is then 600 miles to Roveniemi and you can decide if you would like to do this in one or two days.

From there you will be escorted to the border and our Russian guide will translate all the paperwork that you need to fill in and interpret the daft questions that the guards might ask you.


If you don't fancy the drive to the Arctic and back you can fly out and have a seat in the 'bus',
an army troop carrier which has absolutely astounding off-road capabilities and is actually really comfotable to travel in!!

What's more, the costs are the same per person as coming in your own vehicle!!

To do this try a Ryanair flight from Liverpool or London to Tampere and then take the train to Roveniemi where will will pick you up from the City Hotel.

For more details, please contact us.

This is not a rough wilderness camping trip, spending every night in a tent in th woods, it is a cultural as well an off-roading tour. We will be staying in a wide variety of accommodation; hotels, one luxury, one a bit of a throwback to Soviet times, log cabins on the White Sea shore, an amazing traditional Sami dome house, a large guesthouse in the forest, a health spa, and one night camping at the foot of those massive cliffs you can see in the photos. But please don’t expect to have 3* luxury every night. Basic, but cosy! Out of the first town there are no houses with drainage, electricity or running water, so you will go a couple of days without a shower, although you can have hot water in the saunas every night.

We’ll have leisurely lunch stops where we’ll build a fire in the woods and will have excursions to things like a traditional native Pomor welcoming ceremony, a Mesolithic stone monument, a Stalinist labour camp, an amethyst mine, off shore shipwreck and the Russian version of the Arctic Circle visitor center…
But there will one day at least where the route is from A to B, 170km off road and the time of our arrival to our dinner, sauna and beds will be determined by how fast we travel, which again depends on the condition of the tracks. Last year it took us 12 hours! Fantasic!!

The off roading will be on the scale like nothing in the UK. We’ll be on the beach, in the sea, crossing rivers where the bridges have been swept away, a 100km road through the forest, through huge troughs of water where the bogs have over flowed, over rickety old bridges and then we’ll dig and winch our way across the snowbound passes in the ancient, brooding Khibiny mountains. We’ll even do the River Road, which is exactly what it’s name suggests!

Your body clock will struggle to cope with the 24 daylight as the sun never sets and your sense of place and direction will be completely distorted after spending 10 hours driving through unbroken forest. If we can make it through the drifts we’ll climb to the surreal landscape at the tops of the mountains, where after a couple of hours rock crawling, we’ll come to the edge of the cliffs, where a rock thrown over the side takes 11 seconds to echo back!!

One thing we would ask you to understand is that this is Russia, and the level of bureaucracy just to get into the country is incredible. The requirements for entry have changed about 7 times since we started running tours here, so now, rather than coming back to you, asking you for more information, we will get all of your personal details like passport numbers, place of work and all of your vehicles’ details and hold them on file. We get your visa invitations, your vehicle insurance and also your permits to enter the restricted zones as part of the service, which is why we need all of this info.

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For any further information or to contact us, please phone us on 07514 919291 or email info@world4x4.co.uk