Today we began our journey to the second field station we are visiting – Nymto Park. Nymto is 63 °N, while at Mukhrino and Shapsha we are 61 °N. We started our journey at mid-day and headed east towards the city of Surgut, on the way there we stopped at a Russian roadside diner – this had some pretty tasty food. Once we were about 10km from Surgut we turned north and headed for Nymto.
The first stage of our journey was to stop at a rather new town called Surgutneftegas, literally, Surgut oil and gas, which is a centre for workers in the oil and gas industry in the area. It was built only 25 years ago. On the way there I was quite surprised by the scale of the oil and gas developments in the area.
We had to stop at Surgutneftegas because in order to proceed north into Nymto Park, we needed a special permit to pass through the checkpoints set up by the oil and gas industry. We arrived in Surgutneftegas at 6:02pm, however the office issuing the permits closed at 6pm. Yaroslav who was our guide for the trip, said this was ok, we would just stay the night in this town!
Surgutneftegas, with our hotel for the night in the background
Surgutneftegas
We first all went for dinner in a special restaurant for the oil workers where everything was subsidised and then checked into our hotel! Roxane and I did a bit of exploring around Surgutneftegas and found a few shops, including a hardware one. That evening I watched some Russian TV in the hotel room – some kind of drama series with Mafia type characters, it went on for about 3 hours and I then went to sleep before the end!
Arctic Research 