The trip approached its zenith, and I was offline for a couple of days. The reason is that there's no such thing as the Internet in the south of the Altay mountains. It's hard to share all the impressions in a brief post, but I'll try to capture the major things.
1) Altay is full of contrast. If you are not far away from the main road (which is full of amazing views), you can have a luxury hotel room served with breakfast, wi-fi and all these things. But if you drive further, you'll get into small villages located somewhere in really wild places. Altay itself is a place to move across, not to stay at a single spot.
2) We had a chance to use a tent a couple of times, but the weather here was quite unexpected for us. Nights are cold and we were not prepared for that. And, surprisingly enough, it's impossible to buy sleeping bags and all these touristic things right here. Altay is still quite a wild place, so you need to bring all stuff with you.
A view from Gorno-Altaysk: the only city in the whole republic and the center of civilization there.
That is a cinema building (quite an unusual one)
Just a random view with mountains (not with the highest ones though):
A little bit of offroad classical thing:
The Altyn-Kel lake is best to be approached from the south, but the road there is quite extreme.
A tent here is the only option:
A good option was to cross the lake by ferryboat and get back to the main road this way. It takes more than 5 hours though (still, way faster than moving around by car).
The remaining part of the trip is mostly driving back home. However, we're planning to visit the city of Tomsk which is quite to the north and not really on the way. It's the border between civilization and taiga as far as I can characterize it. Therefore, it feels like a special place.