20 – Eastern Russia April to May 2008

Russia’s national anthem, inherited from the USSR after it collapsed but with new lyrics, has to be my favourite of any country. Although I quite like the French and German ones too. Click the sound icon at the top left hand corner of the slideshow if you don’t want the music.

Russia’s a surprisingly nice place, but there’s an awful lot of it! I drove from Vladivostok through khabarovsk, Chita, Ulan-ude, Baikal, Krasnoyarsk and then crossed into Kazakhstan via Omsk.

On the night of 22 April I swapped rice for potato and cabbage, beer for vodka, Nissans for Moskvitches and sweating like a pig for well….not exactly shivering at this time of year but certainly a more comfortable climate. I flew from BKK to Vladivostok on Vladivostok Air. Who are they, I wondered when I first looked on the internet – well, they’ve been going for a number of years with only 1 crash and there wasn’t any other airline apart from Korean Airlines flying from BKK to Vladivostok – unless I wanted to detour via Moscow on Aeroflot! Still – on the Bangkok-Vladivostok route Vladivostok Air uses Airbuses and not Ladas-with-wings, so marshall’ah I got there in 1 piece. Curiously, the flight even left early (or rather put out a final call and closed its doors early, then pushed back and sat motionless on the tarmac for 20 minutes).

Sat next to Igor Gorbachev, a fisherman from about 100 kms north of Vlad, on the plane. Having been at sea for something like 9 months, he was on his way back home for the summer. He made various phone calls for me to hotels to check if they had rooms for me – one of the first Russians I met. Thanks, Igor – and what a cool surname!

The first night in Vlad I had to stay in a hotel – Russian law dictates that foreigners must ‘register’ their visas after arrival in Russia which effectively means that they must spend their first night in Russia in a hotel authorised to do this for them. My version of this was paying GBP 35 to stay in a revolting place clearly built in the Soviet era (and not updated since). But for the rest of my time in Vlad, Alexei, Fridrih and Grandy – bikers, who I met by posting a question about Vladivostok customs clearance on the HUBB – were kind enough to put me up for 2 weeks while I waited first for my car to arrive and then for it to get through bloody customs.

Alexei works in IT and is married to Christina, who works in publishing. Grandy breeds pugs and works for a radio station, while Fridrih was working landscaping gardens while I knew him but think that was an in-between job. I stayed with Fridrih for the latter part of my time in Vlad – he had German ancestry, collected Nazi memorabilia, loved Monty Python and owned his own flat, bought cheap during the chaotic years of the early 1990s. One of the reasons I had decided to drive across Russia was the rumours I’d read about what would happen to the car if it was carried on a train. Sure enough one of the jobs Fridrih had done, to earn lots of cash in a short time to buy his flat, was literally riding shotgun on one of the car transporter trains. People in remote parts of Siberia would try and jump on the train when it was moving slowly so they could break into the cars and strip them of bits…..Fridrih would take a pop at them with ‘bullets’ that hurt but shattered harmlessly on skin contact.

Alexei and his friends play in a band. Here’s footage of it in a park.

….and some dancing!

So far I have been impressed with the people I’ve met, touch wood. I was expecting Soviet-style rudeness in every business transaction but so far the people I’ve dealt with have been conspicuous only for the opposite of that. Except, that is, for one of the flight attendants on Vladivostok Air. While the plane was sitting on the tarmac at BKK, a group of Korean women decided to start playing musical chairs, bobbing up and down and giggling like children, which even I began to find irritating. Russian flight attendant, with face fit for chopping wood on, kept ordering them to fasten their seatbelts in fits of glacial calm.

Also, for the first time in over a year I am having redirect my impulse to do a double-take every time I see white people to feeling the urge to do one every time I see dark-skinned or oriental people.

Temperature-wise I had a decidedly mixed time in Vlad. The bracing 12 degree heat was a welcome change after sweating like a pig continuously in SE Asia since February and in my shorts and T-shirt I have been getting strange looks from the jacketed Russians, but clearly my body requires a very specific temperature range, for in the bus from the airport to the town and then in the hotel room I was still sweating! But the shorts and T-shirt were close to the only clothes I had, for everything else was in the car…..which I hadn’t bargained on not being able to get hold of for 2 weeks!

But in truth I did myself out of an authentic Russian experience by travelling through it at the time of year I did, for it was never colder than about 10 degrees, even at night, and especially in Kazakhstan or the last couple of weeks I was there in July, it was in the mid to high 20s. Yet I have always associated Russia with extreme cold and travelling through it at the time I did meant it felt disappointingly like everywhere else!

I was wrong with what I wrote about the cars, too – that was written before I got to Russia. 99% of cars in Vlad are Japanese, and indeed at least 10% of the population in Vlad makes a living out of the car import business. The Japan government props up the Jap car industry by making the MOT cost-prohibitive, meaning that most Jap cars get sold overseas when they’re just a couple of years old and Vlad is where Russia’s Jap cars come in. Used Japanese cars are sold around the world in this way, and indeed my own Landcruiser was a Japanese import; I was surprised that it had come to the UK when it was 10 years old. The Russian government also tries to do the same for the Russian car industry, leading to stories like this one which hit the news some time after I’d left Vlad:- http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7794560.stm

The square where this is being filmed is the main one, which I passed through a number of times.

Unbelievable what happened with the shipping. I was told at the outset that it would be 22 days from BKK to VVO, with a transshipment in Busan in South Korea. I was then told shortly before loading the car that the shipping route had changed and that there was no longer any transshipment, so that the shipping time was reduced to 16 days. Based on this I paid to change the date of my visa (and probably paid more for my air ticket as well, as it was bought for a week earlier so was bought with shorter notice). My flight and visa start date were specifically picked to coincide with the date of the car’s arrival. Then, after I arrived, I found out that there WAS a transshipment in Busan after all so that the car ended up not reaching Vlad until 30 April. Consequently the expected 3 or 4 days in Vlad became (at this point) a week.

Thanks to my enforced stay in Vlad, I was at least able to get a little bit more up to date with my website, and in truth Vlad, like Calcutta, wasn’t such a bad place to be stuck for longer than expected. But like Calcutta, being stuck there unexpectedly for an open-ended period didn’t improve the perception of the place at the time. There was the S-56 WW2 submarine, Sportivnaya Bay, the Fortress Museum, Russky Island, various pleasant walks around the streets, the Funicular Railway. Vladivostok, especially when viewed from the sea, is a little like San Francisco minus the Golden Gate Bridge, with handsome turn-of-the-century European architecture contrasting sharply with the concrete, glass, plastic and steel I had left behind in BKK. New businesses would move into existing buildings in Vlad, rather than new buildings being built to take new businesses as in Thailand.

Sportivnaya Bay has various bars, where I spent a bit of time. There was Meliq, the bar owner from Armenia who was studying to be a doctor. And Alla, from Uzbekistan, who’d been born in Afghanistan as her father had been in the Red Army when it had invaded in 1979. Imagine my surprise too when a US Navy ship put in for a couple of days. As can be seen, I got talking to a couple of them, who said – “I never thought I’d see the day when a US Navy ship would be making a stop for us to drink beer in Russia.” I was wrong too about the vodka remark in the first para. Although it’s definitely a drinking culture (women as well as men sit around everywhere with bottles) it’s beer more than vodka, which is only drank at mealtimes these days. Always remember the drill – toast (saying “Nazdarovia” or “Zazdarovia”) then 2 mouthfuls, then another toast, then 2 more mouthfuls and repeat. I gather that beer is a recent addition to the Russian drinking scene – it’s easier to get fired for drunkenness these days than it was in Soviet times.

Various little things in Russia are different to other places. Light switches are set to opposite to western ones ie you flick them down not up to turn the lights off. Nobody holds doors open for people following them (yes, really!) Internet cafes charge not purely by the minute, but also by the amount of data. Most Russians seem to live in Khruschev-era prefab concrete tower blocks rather than houses…the results of a sort of homes-for-heroes building programme after WW2. Am surprised they needed to build vertically with all the land in Russia, but it was done for economy. These dreary concrete tower blocks have uniformly grotty communal areas, with much nicer flats behind their heavy metal doors. And inside every flat I ever visited, there was the same glass-fronted wooden display cabinet. Also Russian heating – in every town in Russia can be seen massive pipes snaking along, over and through the streets. These are for hot water, provided by the Combined Heat and Power stations which, as the name suggests, generate electricity and harness the heat produced as a by-product to make hot water which is then piped around the town as communal hot water for bathing and heating. This is such an excellent system.

WW2 clearly had a massive impact on the USSR and Russia, as evidenced by all the memorials in every town and city. I also had the pleasure of seeing the Vladivostok May Day parade, which is to celebrate the end of WW2. The CO inspecting the troops was quite funny, trundling up and down standing in the back of a UAZ jeep. At one point, thunderflashes were going off, which kept setting off the alarms of all the cars in the adjacent carpark!

Pics of Vladivostok to Khabarovsk, the first stop after Vladivostok.

Eastern Russia – Vladivostok to Khabaraovsk

Simultaneously I was having a nightmare getting the car into Russia. The expected 1 week stop in Vladivostok ended up being 2 weeks – as the car arrived a week late, it arrived just as Russia was shutting down for the May Day celebrations – a big event in Russia – so the expected 2 or so days to clear customs became a further week. So that was 2 weeks gone from my visa which the immigration people refused to extend – welcome to Russia. What happened with my shipping experience in Calcutta had prompted me to plan the whole thing a lot better the next time, and it was irritating in the extreme that it still went pear-shaped even when I did so.

I had to pay over 800 USD local charges when bringing the car into Russia, although 300 USD of this was partly the fault of Customs and partly that of Seaswift, the shipping company in Bangkok. To begin with, Seaswift omitted to list the engine or chassis numbers, or the contents of the car, on the Bill of Lading. The consequence of this was that Customs charged USD200 to ‘inspect’ the car to check the engine and chassis numbers corresponded to those on my registration documents. A further insult (this may not be totally the fault of Seaswift) came when I was charged USD 100 customs duty for the contents of the car because I’d failed to declare them on arrival at Vladivostok airport. I am reliably informed that no other foreign overland travellers have had this problem, so suspect this issue may be Vladivostok Customs making the rules up as they go along. An indication of the calibre of these people came when one of them looked at my immigration card and thought I was using the wrong type because it said ‘Belarus’ at the top! Russia and Belarus use the same immigration cards, and the names Russia and Belarus appear side by side at the top of the cards.

It would also have helped if the local agents had been better at managing expectations where money was concerned – the 800 USD was what the cost gradually mounted up to, rather than what I’d been advised at the outset.

I had only a month on my visa, and 2 weeks of this was lost while stuck in Vladivostok. The route I was due to do was the M60 north from Vladivostok, then west from Khabarovsk on the Amur (aka Zilov Gap), which became the M55 then M53 then M51. I didn’t go north onto the M56 which becomes the Kolyma (which is the Road Of Bones).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Kolyma_karte_RF.jpg

9th of May 2008

Vladivostok to Khabarovsk – 800 kilometers in one day. Stopped first by the police after 5 kms for the first of hundreds of “Dokumenty Inspekty” stops. But these ones just cursorily examined my documents. 20 kms later – same thing, but this time a 10-minute wait while they ordered me into an office and checked details on computer. Next stop – irony – I was speeding but I didn’t get busted! Just wanted to give me words of advice about speed limits and they drew a diagram for me – kind.

Pantomime in Khabarovsk – I thought I was staying with Eugene, a contact of Alexei’s from the Vlad Motorbike club, but he had a baby which apparently meant I couldn’t stay at his. He tried to find me a hotel and there we were driving around during the middle of the night. I got refused three times because apparently my visa hadn’t been registered properly in Vlad. F**king Russian bureaucracy – I had asked the hotel I had stayed in for the first night in Vlad to register my visa and they had taken my passport away, before returning it the next morning. Crucially, there was no stamp on my immigration card (and I didn’t know one was needed) – I had asked it to be registered and assumed it had taken place. Ended up leaving town, but found a cheap motel not far outside it that didn’t bother asking to see my passport.

10th of May 2008

Called the British Embassy in Moscow and they explained about the registration system, also advising me to start keeping receipts. The police/PVU aren’t used to people sleeping in their own vehicles rather than staying in hotels, so they can take a bit of convincing. In practice this means keeping receipts from all shops, filling stations etc to prove that you haven’t stopped anywhere long enough to need your visa registered. They also told me to expect trouble when I left Russia as I hadn’t registered my visa properly in Vladivostok.

I felt that the way I’d parted from Eugene the night before had been a little unfortunate. I’d been extremely tired, having been driving all day and, by the end of the odyssey around all the hotels, was actually quite annoyed at being turned away, especially for something that wasn’t my fault. Although I had just about been civil when parting from them, it would have been very clear I wasn’t in a good mood, so I thought I would give them a call and I’m very glad I did because Eugene and his daughter were lovely people, who showed me around Khabarovsk.

As it turned out, Eugene had a house not an apartment, so maybe I could have asked to camp outside his house in his driveway all along and we wouldn’t have had those hotel problems. Eugene had done his national service as a Zil truck driver from 1991 to 1993 in Kamchatka Peninsula – they had got very low on food.

When we stopped to look at the Khabarovsk war memorial, Eugene showed me the name of his grandfather who had been killed in Leningrad. Look at the painful marching at the memorial. Marching in this sort of style is clearly not easy to do, but by not doing it properly (and giggling) these army cadets made a mockery of the whole thing. Kremlin guards they aint.

Whilst strolling around Khabarovsk, we happened across this open-air music recital. See the lady dancing – isn’t she sweet!
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Near the open-air music recital was the Khabarovsk Church of the Transfiguration. Hear the Bells

And here’s some singing inside this church

Left town at about 7:30. Passing over the 3 kilometre long Amur Bridge, I was now officially on ‘The Road. My plan was to stay in Birobidzhan 200 kilometers west of Khabarovsk, but when I got there, I couldn’t find a hotel. Three sets of lovely people – a man and his son who said “come and see us for a drink when you’ve checked in”, a boy and a girl who didn’t speak English but drew me a map to try and find this hotel and a group of girls – all three groups of people directed me to the same place, but either the hotel was shut or its neon sign was off. So sadly, I left Birobidzhan and carried on into the night.

But after about 20 kilometers I found a roadside café/truck stop. Had what was to be the first of many experiences of the restrictive diet I was due to enjoy for the next 2 ½ months in the former USSR ie Borsch (soup), Salat (salad), Khlep (bread) or pointing followed by a gesture to the effect of ‘I’ll have what he’s having’.

Met 3 lovely truck drivers (Oleg even had an ex-UK Volvo truck from Birmingham!) He’d been trucking to China since the 1980s. Vladimir was an ELO fan, and gave me 2 Moby CDs. Such a contrast with the people from the night before.

11th of May

Learned my lesson about paying for parking (styanka) when stopping overnight at these roadside truck stops. Generally, you have to pay if you go into an enclosed area but not if you stop just in the car park at the front.

Big sky country. 600kms. First 200kms or so were OK – only about 30kms unsealed. Hadn’t seen any other foreign overlanders since entering Russia, and had stopped for a rest and cup of coffee, using the Kelly Kettle for the first time in ages – such a good invention. Great to have fresh brewed coffee on the go. I’d had a set of flag stickers to put on the car for all the countries I’d visited made up in Bangkok but hadn’t got around to putting them on it until today. Purely on impulse, and out of a sense of ‘let’s do something useful while I’m sitting around’ I put the stickers on the car. Imagine my surprise when an Aussie couple came sailing past in their Ford F350 with a camper body on its back and stopped to say hello, the husband saying “do you know – we haven’t seen any overlanders recently but I said to my wife this morning I had a funny feeling we’d meet one today!” Their rig cost US$ 220K!

Next 400kms – the roads deteriorated. Wanted to stop for the night at about 500 kms, but couldn’t find anywhere. Another 100 kms later, after f**ing corrugations for the last 50, finally found a petrol station to sleep at. Nothing to stop me just pulling off the road into the forest at random, but don’t feel comfortable doing that. To say nothing about the mossies.

12th of May

About 380kms. Most of the traffic on this road is westbound and is the late-model Japanese cars being taken from Vladivostok to the rest of Russia. These delivery drivers cover the cars with tape and sheets of cardboard and lino, fasten extension boards to the mud-flaps to stop stone damage and drive amazingly slowly on rough road. There has apparently been a huge improvement with how the cars were treated – when this ‘industry’ started, the cars were being driven at insane speeds, being involved in many, often fatal, accidents and arriving in Moscow ready for sale as complete wrecks. The solution was easy. The dealers who employ the drivers to pick up the cars for the 2-week trip across Russia now take ALL damage out of the driver’s $500 wage. If the damage exceeds his wage the driver must pay the difference to the dealer out of his own pocket. No wonder they now drive them like their own car!

2000 kms of THIS between Khabarovsk and Chita. Bliss!

Conscious that there aren’t many – in fact any at all – towns along the way. Every 50 or 100 kms, there is a turnoff to a nearby settlement of some sort, obviously bypassed by the new road, and I have the impulse to try one at random. But what would I see, and who would I talk to? And there is the time factor as well – having to get to Omsk to apply for a Kazakh visa and get out of Russia by 23 May thanks to my cruelly-foreshortened time in Eastern Russia.

The road has clearly had a lot of effort put in, with embankments and cuttings built and even Armco barriers at appropriate places – all that’s missing is the tarmac. Obviously the last thing they’ll be doing. Amazingly there was not officially or practically a road across Russia until 1994. Prior to that only four wheel drives could make the crossing and then only during very short weather periods of the year. Of course there were the gallant few who had taken every description of vehicle and motorcycle through but many finished up being towed to the nearest Trans-Siberian Railway stop and placed on a train (that is if the vehicle was not just abandoned).

President Putin declared the road open in 2004 when the last section was opened, then hopped on his helicopter and flew home. The road could not be considered ‘open’ even 4 years later. It is just under 2,400km from Khabarovsk to Chita where the main sealed road all the way to Moscow really begins. Of this distance, around 1,800 km is still gravel and dirt.

Suspect the rear shocks are on the way out – probably that fine talc-like dust that gets in everywhere, for the fronts are fine. At the point when the front wheels pass over the ground the dust is nowhere near high enough to reach into the front shocks, but the front wheels throw up dust which gets high enough to be picked up by the rear shocks a split second later. And just check out the before-and-after pics of my tyre treads after this 200k kms of gravel. Obviously the front wheels also have the effect of making the individual bits of gravel bounce up as they pass over them, meaning that when the rear tyres go over them a split second later they are still standing up – and spiking the tread.

I think I drive too fast, but it is hard to avoid doing so because of the dust clouds. If I follow a Japanese delivery car closely enough to be able to slow down when it does at the bad sections, that would mean I couldn’t see it in the first place because of all the dust. Results – I have to either crawl along at 30 or 40km/h, or overtake the Japanese cars (which I have been doing) to avoid following their dust clouds and then hit bumpy bits too fast! About the best technique I have developified so far is to drive behind the Japanese cars at the same speed but to the side of them so I can see when they slow down but not follow in their dust clouds, but this only works when the road is wide enough and when there’s nothing coming the other way. At one point I nearly crashed – a big rut with a lorry stopped just beyond. I suspect that was the reason why the lorry was there, but because of the dust did not see the undulation – probably just as the truck driver had done. Nevertheless, it was so big that when I hit it, the engine cut out! I was to find out later that somebody else doing this highway in the opposite direction had actually managed to break the front axle on his Landcruiser doing something like this. I can certainly see how easily this could have been done – there but for the grace of God go I. Driving towards the sun and stepping down a time zone for the first time.

Fires were a common occurrence in the 2000kms of taiga between Khabarovsk and Chita

When I stopped for the night, found I had a puncture – only my second in 46,000kms. Funny repair, but it has held ever since. Very, very hospitable people in the overnight truck stop I stopped at. They even tried to treat me on the food although I insisted on paying for it because I didn’t think they needed to go that far – their pleasantness was enough.

13th of May

443kms. Worst day for road conditions. Unsure about the shocks – the car doesn’t bounce when I go over a single bump, only with multiple bumps. The 1596 km marker denotes the worst conditions – the speed has to reduce to 15/20km/h. It stayed like this for about 50kms, then improved. Then it deteriorated again after the 1,770km marker and stayed like this until the 1,819km marker when it abruptly became a pristine-surfaced harbinger of the Trans-Siberian highway to come. Here is where I encountered the UAZ jeep that had become a Russian Big Foot

Went back to unsurfaced at 1,888km. 3 attempts to find a place to sleep outside Chita – the 1st was ideal but I’d knocked a bit of their wall down! The 2nd was open but nobody else was there – the instincts kicked in. The 3rd – I couldn’t make visual contact with the woman behind the counter to ask about sleeping when I went to fill up with diesel because of the stupid one-way mirror glass. One thing I really dislike about the way filling stations work in Russia is that you have an anonymous person hiding behind a window and you cannot make eye contact with them. Maybe it’s a throwback to Soviet times but I found it incredibly difficult to deal with. Even if I could have made eye contact with the person then obviously I couldn’t have spoken the language, but at least I could have made the ‘can I sleep here?’ gesture which I’ve now taken to doing ie putting my 2 hands together and then putting them against one side of my face and putting my head on one side as if to signify laying a head on a pillow. That works absolutely fine with places where you can make eye contact but not in this case. Chita now only 250 kilometers away.

14th of May

1,917 to 2,027kms have a bad surface. Have lost one front auxiliary light from the car – it was a rubbish light, but it looked good! As I was driving along, I heard a clanking and scraping noise from what I suspected was the left hand front suspension – thank God it was only the front light! From the 2,027kms marker to Chita there is tarmac. An abrupt change in the terrain – fewer trees and opened out with more rolling landscape into the distance. Nothing of note until Chita.

In Chita, the first hotel I reached was the Dauria. It was perfectly OK but it was full. The reception woman was incredibly helpful in checking around for me but various shenanigans ensued. 1 hotel said it would not take me at all because I was a foreigner; another one would only take me if I paid for the other bed so I could be alone in the room “in case of conflicts”. The rest were way OTT – 2000 roubles up. What’s the justification for that in a provincial town? So I decided to look around Chita then head to a roadside café to spend the night just outside the town. While trying to use the internet, I met Juan Carlos, a Spanish traveler who’d stopped off the Trans Siberian railway for a day or 2. He could speak a bit of English as well as Russian. For the sake of spending a bit of time with a fellow English speaker, I eventually caved in and agreed to pay twice the price of a single bed in the cheapest hotel. However, this all fell apart when I was led to this hotel and discovered that not only was it far too far outside town, but the Chinese people who ran it had lied about the room having an ensuite bathroom. I really couldn’t be doing with that, so I texted Juan to explain and said goodbye to Chita – or at least, tried. I got lost on the way out of town and met Katya and Mikhail, a teenage couple, who I asked for directions and Katya called her mother Irina who is an English teacher! I got my directions and then headed towards Ulan-Ude.

Stills from Khabarovsk to Chita

Eastern Russia – Khabarovsk to Chita

Thankfully, the roads were tarmacked after Chita. Pictures of Chita to Ulan-Ude

Eastern Russia – Chita to Ulan-Ude

15th of May

Reached Ulan-Ude and met the very helpful Dasha next to the world’s largest sculpture of Lenin’s head. Dasha had arranged a flat share for me through her travel agency when I spoke to her on the phone prior to getting to Ulan-Ude. Dasha was a Landrover enthusiast, telling me how she’d been a guide for a group of Italians traveling through Russia and then Mongolia in one.

The flat share was with a French lecturer called Olga who spoke no English, so our lingua franca WAS French – was quite funny to communicate with her. Nice meal and drinks with Dasha and Eugeny. Snapshot of life in Russia – Dasha was 23 and had been going out with Eugeny for 3 weeks. He’d asked her to move in with him. Me – “isn’t that a bit soon?” Dasha – “I know, but in Russia you’re on the shelf if you don’t get married by my age”. It seems to be far easier to get married and then divorced in Russia, while living together unmarried is not so approved of.

16th of May

Singing in the Trinity Church in Ulan-Ude

Bit of sightseeing around Ulan-Ude and an oil change for Landy, then on to Baikal. Dasha had arranged on the phone that I could camp in the car park of a hotel in a place named Kultushnaya, on the southern shore of Baikal. Bit of confusion when I turned up – had to use Dasha to translate on the phone when got there, but when I started to set my tent up in the car park the hotel owners, Vladimir and his wife Oksana, invited me in. It transpires that the hotel was closed for renovation, so they ended giving me a room for free. Not only that, I spent the entire evening with them drinking and eating – how hospitable is that?

17th of May

Baikal to 70 kilometers beyond Irkutsk. Also stopped at Babushkin and Baikalsk, where I was fortunate enough to happen across some old steam trains. It is true about the Baikal water being drinkably pure, at least where I collected some. Could drink it no problem at all. Absolutely delicious smoked Omul fish and Omul (I think) caviar sold by the Babushkas in the little villages along the shore. Goes down wonderfully with some bread and vodka.

Panoramic (or should that read panning) shot of the shore of Lake Baikal

18th of May

Very upset in the morning when I saw a sign saying Krasnoyarsk 962kms! 690kms today – slowed down by some of the worst stretches of road encountered so far, although thankfully not long ones otherwise I’d never have achieved this many kms.

Got diesel all over me and the Landy. Had stopped at a filling station and, as you have to do in Russia, had paid for the diesel in advance and then switched on the pump only to find the diesel sprayed out like a geyser. This was because the truck that had filled up before me had put the ratchet on the handle, as is common when trucks fill up because it takes such a long time to fill the big tank, and then didn’t release it afterwards. Suggestion – next time you fill up at a truck station in Russia, make sure this ratchet is off before switching on the pump. Met Carmen and Loris, the Italian couple. God, the mosquitos!

19th of May

I’d been trying for some time to speak to the Kazakhstan consulate in Omsk about the visa requirements and hadn’t had any joy from either the internet or from (trying to) talk to them, thanks to the language barrier. But I finally found out this morning thanks to Dasha, who had enquired on my behalf, that it would take 3 working days to get the visa issued. As I had to get this done by 23 May, I ended up driving 1,800kms in 27 hours to get there by Tuesday 20 May. Dangerous, uncomfortable and missed any sightseeing. Not only that, the car started playing up – suspect just dirt in the fuel line, but it started losing power and missing and wouldn’t go above 70 km/h. In desperation, I called the British Embassy in Moscow thinking I might have to get them to make representation to the Kazakhs on my behalf. The prospect was fast-looming of me not getting to Omsk in time to get my Kazakh visa in time to get out of Russia before the Russian visa (and customs clearance) expired. The idea of the car getting confiscated by customs, as I had already been warned might happen by the British Embassy, was no joke.

20th of May

I did actually stop for a couple of hours doze at a truck stop, then carried on – as can be seen from the misty early-morning shots. But I made it to Omsk about 10AM. A sympathetic taxi driver led me to the consulate but had wanted just to give me directions rather than charge me, but of course I could not understand his directions and didn’t want to risk getting lost on the way to the consulate. Thus I had to basically brandish money at him and gesticulate to the effect of ‘thank you for wanting to give me directions – I know you’re trying to save me money but I cannot understand and I need to get there fast so please can I just follow you and I’ll happily pay for it!’

Having got the visa application in, I couldn’t find a decently-priced hotel in Omsk, but then serendipity reared its pretty head again – Denis. Had gone into an internet café to check my email, one of those grungy places that you have to go down below street level to get into. It looked very much like a bar in Shoreditch in east London, with an authentically funky air about it. I overheard the proprietor saying something in English to another customer, so said to him “you sound like a man who can speak English”

He could. We got talking and I asked if he knew of any homestay-type accommodation. Denis ended up arranging for me to stay at his mother’s place. He turned out to have worked in France before. He’d got on very well in the job, he and his employer were very happy with each other and they wanted to get a work visa for him to stay in France. But, try as they might, the bureaucracy was just too hard and the plan had to be abandoned – poor Denis!

21st of May

Slept till 1:30 and rode a minibus from Kosmos, the bus stop near Denis’ home, into town. Every Russian town has a bus stop named Kosmos, as well as a street named after Gagarin and, of course, Lenin. When Denis was at school, he and all the other kids wanted to be cosmonauts.

Lunch at a shashlik restaurant near Denis’ café. The first privately-owned business in Omsk, with the same owner for the last 22 years ever since it opened shortly after the USSR started to allow private enterprises – as long as they were partnerships or cooperatives.

Didn’t do very much till the evening – Denis and I saw U2 in 3D at the cinema, then the Chelsea/Manchester football match on TV in Denis’ café, which morphs into a bar in the evenings. On the way back to the cafe, we saw the aftermath of a fatal road accident at a junction near Denis’ cafe. The bodies had been taken away, but it didn’t sound like anyone on the scene had done much in terms of first aid. Must do a first aid course when I get back to the UK.

This was the first football match I had ever watched on TV and to be honest I quite enjoyed the atmosphere. We got quite drunk that night watching it and when we got home, Denis’s mother reproached him – “What have you been doing with poor Mark?” I had to point out that I didn’t need any help from Denis or anyone else to get drunk!

22nd of May

Galina, Denis’ mother, gave me some absolutely delicious home-made jam for breakfast from her friend’s Dacha. This was to prompt me to ask to see a dacha later in the trip, when I stopped with Vera and her people in Nizhny Novgorod (see Western Russia). Another excellent Russian custom. Amazing what you can do with a bit of space.

My mobile phone had decided to give up the ghost the day before. The screen would light up but it would go blank. I didn’t know this before, but mobile phones have software, and on mine it had become corrupted. Denis’ friend, who has a mobile phone business, had to do a factory reset. Result? Phone is fine, but I’ve lost all the contacts not on the SIM card. Great.

Got some new Toyota Genuine rear shock absorbers. They were only about £30 or £40, but don’t look up to the job considering they’re heavy-duty.

Went for coffee – check out the translation on the coffee shop menu! Also went go-karting with Denis….he told me afterwards the chap had gestured towards me and said “he’s good – where did he learn to drive like that?”

Bit of sightseeing. Denis’ wife Olga joined us for a boat ride along the Irtysh River. She is a buyer / manager for Prada and regularly goes to Italy on business. Also met the 3 Antons – 3 friends of Denis who all worked in IT. Very nice guys, in a geeky sort of way!

Outside the bar with the 3 Antons, came across a convoy of Russian chavs driving around the streets in a convoy of Ladas, with horns blaring and hazard lights flashing – how corny is that?

23rd of May

Busy day.

The Kazakh consulate put the fear of god up me when I got Denis to enquire on my behalf about progress in the morning. They said they weren’t obliged to give me one before the Monday because it was 4 working days, but that they were doing their best. This was not what Dasha was told by them – they said it would take 3 before. Bastards. I was annoyed about this – far too much last minute running around and nail biting for my liking when I had done exactly what I had been told to do, had complied with all time limits I had been advised of and indeed had even bent over backwards to do so – 1800 kms in 27 hours! The British Embassy also tried calling them from Moscow, but we got no further forward. But later in the day, Denis finally found out I’d got the visa. But it was only a single entry one ‘the simplified procedure for people from the UK and similar countries doesn’t allow double entry’ – but no one told me this until Denis spoke to the consulate.

Sweet 21 year-old Russian Kazakh I met at the consulate named Tatanya kindly showed me the way to Omsk bank to pay the visa fee. She was studying road engineering in Omsk and didn’t want to live in Kazakhstan any more because of how the people were changing. I’d read elsewhere about rising Kazakh nationalism making life harder for ethnic Russians, and although Kaz used to be 50% ethnic Russian in Soviet times, this has now fallen to around 35%.

Suddenly found out I will be flying blind once I enter Kaz. I thought Silkroad’s guidebook covers the place but discovered it doesn’t when I looked in it, and I couldn’t find an English language Kazakh guidebook anywhere in Omsk, just a map in Russian. I also looked up Kazakhstan in Denis’ internet café – didn’t know how to save stuff or print, so I only got as far as looking at Kazakh stuff – also not helped by my sudden departure when I found out Denis was waiting for me.

Visited the visa office in Omsk in an attempt to sort out the visa registration issue that had been lingering from Vladivostok, so as to avoid hassle at the border. I also realised that I needed to register in Omsk because I had been there for more than three working days. This resulted in the ridiculous situation whereby they said they could not register me as I did not have the registration stamp from Vladivostok, but also ‘couldn’t’ check on the immigration database whether I’d been registered properly electronically in Vladivostok because it wasn’t linked – before telling me they could register me anyway – if I paid a 2000 rouble fine!

The British Embassy in Moscow had told me to expect to have to pay baksheesh of about US$50 or 60 at the border to sort this out, so maybe that was cheaper. Then the manager said we could register at the post office if the right form was filled out. Off we went and got the form – they needed a copy of every page in the passport – even the blank ones – plus a copy of Denis’s passport. This meant we arrived at the post office at 7:20 and Denis got told they needed one hour minimum to register me (they closed at 8:00 PM). Furious shouting match ensued with Denis arguing with the (for once) Soviet – style obstructiveness. At least, it seemed that way from the woman’s body language but I was quite surprised when Denis told me afterwards that she had actually called around a couple of other post offices to see if they could do it. Even an offer of US$20 didn’t help. Oh dear – what am I going to face at the border without any evidence of having registered my visa?

A frenzied session of packing followed by hasty goodbyes, but I still got fed with delicious pork, potato and cheese with mildly pickled veg by Galina. Then drove to the border. Very surprised to hear that Denis had a brother – who was summoned to guide us to the road out of town. Such a shame I hadn’t met him before, especially as he had his Kazakh best friend with him.

After all the anticipated hassle, this border crossing was quite possibly the most pleasant of the entire trip. Or maybe my expectations were extra low and therefore more easily exceeded after what I’d been expecting. At the pre-border checkpoint, alcohol-smelling soldiers gave me a little spravka (receipt). At the border, apparently-sober soldiers gave the car a very thorough inspection, but were very pleasant throughout and interested in the row of flags on the side of the car. One of them led me to Customs, who processed all the paperwork toute suite with no hiccups…..it was as if he had become my facilitator. After clearing customs, offered me a cigarette then on to immigration. My new friend spoke to the immigration officer behind the two-way mirror. I don’t know what was said – all along I was thinking variously “now the fun begins” and “he’s been really nice up until now, but what will he be like when he finds out there’s a problem?” – but it never came. After about 2 minutes, he poked his head back around the door, said in Russian what I subsequently found out meant “just 1 more minute – it’s being taken care” of and bid me a fond farewell. While I stood before the mirror, glancing cursorily at the notices in Russian and wondering what was happening, I could hear the click-click of the stamps. My hopes began to rise and sure enough my passport was thrust back at me in the little silver tray. I was so surprised I even bent down and flipped up a little flap to make eye contact and gesture, “Is it all okay?” The immigration officer gestured yes. Denis will either be glad when he reads this – or annoyed about the wasted effort!

Pics of Baikal after Ulan-Ude, then all the way to the Kazakh border via Omsk

Eastern Russia – Ulan-Ude to Omsk and Kaz Border