Today we had an early start to the day and were off for fieldwork at 8am! Roxane, Mark and I were all working together so we got through a lot of work quickly. Roxane did vegetation surveys, while Mark and I collected and filtered water samples and made the other measures like pH, temperatures. At each site, we finished with Roxane collecting peat samples for a global microbial project. By lunchtime we had almost completed three sites and walked between them too! We had lunch and then decided that we could begin our journey back today, rather than spend another night in the oil accommodation, where there wasn’t too much to do!
After lunch we went with the car to the third and fourth fieldwork sites, and finished all our work. We then packed our bags and left the accommodation at 4pm for a very long drive back. When we left it was still 19 °C and was very bright and sunny which made for a beautiful drive back. After about 4 hours we were very close to running out of fuel: we made it to a petrol station with little to spare… After that we continued on towards Surgut and then turned off for Khanty-Mansiysk. About 10pm we stopped for dinner at the same diner we ate at on the way to Nymto. This time the food was even better. Yaroslav got us some beers for the rest of journey back, which was about another 2 hours… I fell asleep though! We arrived back at Shapsha field station near 1am. It felt so homely coming back to here again now and the bed was very welcome after our travels!
