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Diary w/e 10 September
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4th SeptemberGroundhog day. We set off from the hotel with great hopes for getting our car back up to 100%. I called TNT's local office here in Ekaterinburg this morning to check our parts had arrived. They hadn't. What is more, they couldn't tell me where they were. When the UK woke up, I called Liveridge for the TNT reference number, but this didn't help. The local TNT office tell me that they are stuck in Moscow, possibly due to Customs clearance problems. But they are unable to help me further and simply give me the number of someone to call at TNT's Moscow office. TNT Moscow are a bit surprised when I call them - "Where did you get this number?" But they tell me first of all that the delay is down to Aeroflot, who seem to have a problem in getting the package onto a plane to Ekaterinburg from Moscow. Customs clearance, they say, will only happen when the package reaches Ekaterinburg. I am asked to ring them back when they have investigated some more. I call them later, to get a totally different story. The package is stuck in Customs in Moscow because of its high declared value - around £200. And what is more, their system shows that the package is supposed to be going to their Kazan depot, for collection by me there. They seem as confused as me by this, and they say they will call me back again when they have investigated some more. I tell them that I am driving back to the UK from Ekaterinburg, and I would be very happy to pick the package up at their office in Kazan, which lies exactly on our route home, a couple of days' drive away. I tell him that I need to know whether I should stay in Ekaterinburg (at great expense) and wait to collect the package here, or whether I can leave here and drive to Kazan to pick it up there (which I would prefer). I wait until well after the time set for the promised call, but I hear nothing more from them. So I call them again (still office hours in Moscow) and the phone simply rings out. So we have wasted a whole day while they try to decide where our package is and where it is going. We did manage to have a nice lunch with Kevin Lynch (many thanks again for your help, Kevin) but apart from that we have basically hung around all day waiting for news. It has been a really hot and sunny day today, and in between calls there has not been a lot to do but pound the pavements. We did most of the sights last time we were here, so Rich has mainly stayed sitting in the car and I have wandered around looking at the general cityscape, people-watching in the craft market and having a nose around places like the main university here, the Ural Polytechnic Institute (which has apparently launched quite a few political careers, including Boris Yeltsin's). Apparently the locals are bowled over by this wonderful weather, which is a little unseasonal - in a rather British way, they are apparently expecting it all to turn to snow by this time tomorrow. So at the end of the day, we could not really afford to risk heading off, just in case tomorrow brings the news that our parts are on their way here. So we have very little choice but to check in for another night at the Atrium Palace Hotel, which is blowing rather a hole in my accommodation budget! We draw the line at dining three times in a row at Il Patio, so instead we have a bowl of pasta brought up to the room while we watch BBC World again. The depressing thing is that there is no indication that TNT will be any more organised and helpful tomorrow. So tonight we are mostly beating back our frustration in the same hotel (indeed, the same room) as last night. Oh, the ups and downs of travelling - or not travelling. 5th SeptemberSome joker in the hotel was playing loud music late into the night. When I called reception to ask if there was some function on and whether they could do anything about it, nothing happened. When I called again and asked to speak to the night manager at 3.30, finally someone came up and it transpired that the noise was coming from next door, where some vodka-soaked Russian had gone to sleep with music playing at top volume. So a very late night - it worked out at about £20 per hour of sleep. So we nearly (but not quite!) missed breakfast. A bowl of freshly made wheat porridge started to sooth me a little, and after my third cappuccino I felt human again. When I spoke to Julia at TNT, the news was hopeful - our package was indeed with the Customs people in Moscow and if I could come to their local office I could sign some papers which would enable them to get it cleared - then after I had paid the duty, they could forward the package on to Kazan for us to collect there. This was all good news, and we checked out from the hotel with a spring in our step. It was another boiling hot sunny day as we drove down to the TNT office (which we knew well from our extended stay there two months ago). It then took from 1 pm until 5 pm to complete the formalities - we signed the papers quickly enough but then the Moscow office had to get the Customs clerk to assess the duty so we could pay it and get the parcel cleared. We had to wait around for several hours while this happened - though luckily there was a really good car tools shop in the same building, so we were able to pass the time by adding to our toolkit with some essentials like the right socket to check our gearbox oil, a replacement for one of the tools that had been boshed during the wheel bearing change, a really cheap radio aerial to replace our broken one (mistake - it was rubbish) and a new horn to replace the one that had been drowned to death in Mongolia - oh, and a proper torque wrench so we can tighten our nuts and bolts accurately rather than by feel (that was my little non-essential treat - about half the price they are in the UK). The horn we bought (French made) actually came as a pair of two horns with different tones. One called 'high' and one called 'grave'. I have currently installed the 'grave' horn, but there are plans to wire in 'high' to get the full multi tonal (and double volume) effect. The set also came with a relay, I think this is for creating the 'neenawneenawneenawneenaw' effect with the two horns, but that would be just plain distasteful. It's bad enough that we have put French parts in a Land Rover, but to chav it up as well would be too much. The aerial is already being held on with electrical tape, but then it was £2. Misha, Tanya and the boss really looked after us well and were amazed to see our website showing where we had been. At one point, when we were asking about a tool they didn't have, the boss took us on a personal tour round all the other hardware shops in the building, explaining to the bemused assistants who we were and what we needed. He was very disappointed when we were unable to find it anywhere. I wandered up the road and looked in some of the other spares shops - every conceivable spare part for your Kamas truck, Zil car or UAZ jeep in one of them - big piles of interesting looking lumps of heavy metal all over the place. And Rich fitted our new horn and aerial, as well as finally replacing our "temporary" cooling system plug from the Gobi desert with the proper part. Then the call finally came through from Moscow just as I was starting to worry about the Ekat office closing and us getting stuck there for another day. I was amazed that the duty totals about £120 - more than half of the cost of the parts! But I was so pleased to get it sorted that I simply swallowed hard and paid up. Now we have instructions on how to find the TNT office in Kazan on Thursday (it's near the Macdonalds, apparently!) So nothing can go wrong, can it??? We will soon have our braking back up to full strength, in time for the more crowded roads as we head west (mind you, the roads around Ekat have been pretty darned crowded, and we are pleased to be away). We left the TNT office shortly after 5 pm and drove down the Chelyabinsk road, stopping to entertain the ladies at a truckstop with my chicken impressions.. It was getting late already, and there is no point getting to Kazan before Thursday as our parts won't be there until then. So after we had eaten, we drove just past Chelyabinsk and then pulled off the road to find another campsite behind the trees. Again, not a bad one - we are getting much better at this, and much more relaxed about the whole thing. When we stopped, we spent some time trying to sort out a defective indicator (unfortunately it's not just a blown bulb, there is something more major wrong with the wiring, which runs right inside the chassis, so we will have to buy some more wire tomorrow and cobble together a temporary circuit to get it working for the rest of the journey). Then up to the roof tent, with all the flaps open to let the breeze through - though there are quite a few mozzies so we are keeping the mesh closed. So tonight we are mostly thankful to have finally escaped from Ekaterinburg and got moving again (though only 125 miles or so), at GPS ref 55º 15' 19.83" N, 61º 07' 19.62" E, altitude 242 metres (amongst the lakes in the southern Urals, I believe). From here, it's pretty much west all the way,,, 6th SeptemberSleeping sickness is catching. Rich is a carrier and I'm going down with it. We didn't emerge blinking in the sunlight at our nice campsite until nearly 10, and we didn't get on the road until 11. This has got to improve! A lot of driving today, with not much to alleviate the boredom. We found the road from Chelyabinsk to Ufa was quite pretty - through the rolling foothills of the Ural Mountains. Really heavy traffic, though (mainly trucks) so the going was a bit slow. We stopped for lunch and to buy some electric wire so we could mend our indicator. While Rich was cutting holes in the existing wiring up the front of the car to connect into, I was checking the connections at the back and I found the problem, so we could fix it without major surgery. So now we have 20 metres of spare wire, just in case! Lots of extreme overtaking manoeuvres, mostly not by us. We still turn heads because on our reduced braking power, we give out a big shriek and usually skid a bit every time we stop from more than 30 mph. That means we are a bit chary about getting into situations where we might need to brake suddenly - e.g. extreme overtaking. So that hits our average speed a bit as we crawl along behind trucks that are just not quite slow enough for us to overtake. We had to get through the town of Ufa (I'd never heard of it either, but several million people live there, and we must have seen most of them as we cast about looking for the Kazan road out)..It's a strange town - built up the side of a steepish hill above a big river, it is obviously having a bit of a boom, with loads of construction everywhere (including a new inner ring road). The only problem is, all the time we were driving around, we didn't see a single road sign (apart from street names). So it took us over an hour to get across it and find the right road out. We got a call from TNT in Moscow to confirm that our parts will be in Kazan from 11 tomorrow morning. Hope we can find the office! We want to be held up as little as possible (we are already getting a bit tight on time) so we pulled to a stop as the sun went down (we are getting quite brazen now, we are about 20 yards off the road and about 200 metres from a cafe). We will set the alarm and aim to be up and running by 7, away by 8 in the morning. We are still about three hours drive short of Kazan, so hopefully we will get there about the same time as our parts. When we stopped, it was windy (though not cold) and threatening to rain - we feel as if we have crossed the Urals from a Siberian summer to a European autumn, all in one day. I fiddled about with pointless things like cooking, while Rich used the last 20 minutes of daylight to carry out the all-important task of wiring in our two-tone french horn. Now they can really hear us coming! So tonight we are in devil may care mood, just off the main Ufa to Kazan road, at GPS ref 55º 25' 44.16" N, 54º 48' 00.84" E, altitude 138 metres, and 350 miles on from last night. Another milestone - our latitude is now greater than our longitude (i.e. we are further north of the equator than we are east of Greenwich) and we are more than half way home from the furthest point of our trip. Wow! 7th SeptemberSo we duly got up and on the road by 8 am. Kazan was of course much more than three hours away - in this part of Russia the roads are choked with long distance truck traffic and they are quite windy anyway, so progress is slow. But we made Kazan by about 12.30, so our game of "hunt the calliper" began. We had a street address and the direction "near Macdonalds". In a city of 2 million people, that's not very helpful. The only street map we had of Kazan was one of the city centre maps in our Russian road atlas - and no sign of the street we were looking for on it. So we drove towards the centre, stopped in a big square (parking illegally in a bus stop) and I walked back to the corner of the square to ask a couple of Russian traffic cops for directions. They chatted to each other and reached a consensus that I needed to be off the top of my map somewhere, but with lots of extra explanation which I didn't understand. The first step was to perform an illegal u-turn right in front of them and head back the way we had come. We then took a fairly random left turn in roughly the direction they had indicated and rapidly found ourselves heading down to the side of the river Volga. We ran out of road pretty quickly and no sign of a nice riverside development with a Macdonalds. So we headed back up another street and decided to ask the first convenient person for some more directions. A moment later we pulled up behind a little delivery van and the driver got out. I jumped out, grabbed him, gave the street name, said "Macdonalds", raised my eyebrows and looked quizzical. There followed a torrent of Russian and lots of arm waving. Pretty soon the guy could see he wasn't getting through, so he pointed to himself, to his van, made beckoning and steering gestures and he seemed to be saying he was going that way and would show us. There then followed a fairly hairy drive across Kazan for about 15 minutes. I hung onto his rear bumper for dear life as he swerved in front of trams, did fast u-turns across lines of oncoming traffic, jumped lights and eventually drove up onto a huge bridge across the river. We were beginning to wonder whether he had actually been saying "leave me alone, you crazy foreigners" and trying to shake us off in the traffic. And we were now heading into a totally different area of the city, across the river. Then we suddenly saw that there was a big yellow reinforcing structure above the bridge in the shape of a big "M", and we feared he might have been leading us to the feature which the locals called "the Macdonalds Bridge". So we were just wondering how long to follow him for, when he pulled over and jumped out a couple of minutes later. To our relief, he was explaining that the street we were looking for crossed this road at the next lights, and Macdonalds (a real one!) was just after that. So we thanked him profusely and then turned right at the lights. We drove up and down that street about three times but couldn't see anything that looked like an office building. So we parked in the entrance to a building site and rang Julia at the TNT office in Ekaterinburg. She called the local office then rang us back to say that we had apparently been spotted (the joys of having a distinctive car!) so they would bring our package to us if we stayed put. So we stayed put. 45 minutes passed and I called again. I was told it was best to stay put - they would come to us. After another half hour I got frustrated and left Rich with the car while I went on a walkabout to find the office. I walked up and down, I found the Macdonalds, but still no sign of the office. It was a busy residential area with loads of huge apartment blocks (soviet style, rather ghastly), some new construction, a few shops and a busy road. I called Julia again and explained I was standing outside the Macdonalds, and she said she would call them and tell them to find me there. But before they could, I got a call from Rich to say they had finally found him, and he had the package. So we decided to have a late lunch in Macdonalds (at least we would be assured of no dill on our food) and then buy our last lot of food shopping in the supermarket next door. Rich was very happy because they sold Blue cheese and Bombadier beer, I was happy because this load of shopping should see us all the way home (and we had found some fresh milk, which is very rare in Russia). So we shook the dust of Kazan off our heels well after 4 pm, and clearly weren't going to get as far as we had hoped before the end of the day. We drove on for another couple of hours, then pulled over into a big gravel area next to the road to see if we could fit our new calliper before catching a night's sleep at the roadside. The calliper gave us some problems. The main difficulty was to disconnect the brake pipe from the old one - the connection was completely corroded in. It defied all our efforts with ordinary spanners and the nut started to burr over. We rang Liveridge for ideas and they said this was usually a problem. They gave a couple of suggestions on what to try, and said that if all else failed, we could cut the pipe and get a new one fitted - the connections are universal so it should be easy to source a new pipe locally. None of their suggestions worked, so I was all for calling it a day and leaving the old calliper on until we could find a Russian garage where we could get a new pipe fitted. But Rich accused me of being a pussy and said he wanted to try something else. So he grabbed our vice and managed to get it into position and gripped onto the offending nut. After a couple of hard pulls on it from both of us at once, we felt the nut suddenly start to move. Rich went off around the car park doing his "I am so great" dance/song while I was left holding the vice. When he came back, it was the work of a few minutes to get the old calliper off, fit the new one and bleed the brakes. We had been thinking about camping there, but when we looked around, there was rather too much disgusting mess there for us. It was now very late (we had spent nearly four hours on the brakes), so as we were feeling good, we decided to see if we could manage another long driving session in the dark to make up some lost time. So off we went, driving into the night... 8th September... and into the morning again. We drove past Nizhny Novgorod (where Andrei Sakharov was banished to in the 1980's) and on towards Moscow. These long night drives are always rather weird. The traffic slowly peters out until the road is pretty quiet so the driving gets easier (mind you, the main motorway into Moscow never sleeps, any more than the M1 into London). But you are in a strange little bubble of your own - one drives while the other tries to sleep, and the hours and kilometres slowly roll past. We stopped for a coffee at one driver change, and there was a map on the wall with little flags which had obviously been put in to show where their customers had come from. It covered all of Russia, but unfortunately not the UK or Mongolia, so we had to miss out the pleasure of planting our little flag on the map. We hit the outer ring road around 6 am (the traffic on the main road into Moscow was pretty manic, but the Russians don't seem to like the ring road, so it was pretty quiet, unlike the M25). We had a pretty uneventful drive around it for nearly four hours (it goes a long way out!) before we hit the main road out to the border. We stopped briefly in Klin to buy some souvenirs (we suddenly realised we would probably not go through any more towns in Russia) and then we just kept going. We were about 100 miles out from Moscow and making good progress when we stopped to help a guy who was waving madly at the roadside. It turned out he had taken his car off the road and down into a field whilst on a hunting trip (Russians are very big in hunting) and got it stuck in the mud. When we got down to it, it was comprehensively bogged down and resting comfortably on its chassis as the front wheels spun in a nice pit of mud - yes, it was two wheel drive! Rich proceeded to get us stuck as well so that we had to extract ourselves with spade and sand ladders before we then towed the happy Russki out. He was very grateful ("Spaseeba bolshoi") and said he had been standing there waving for two hours as Russians drove merrily past, so we had obviously done a lot for east-west relations. He had obviously had a bad day - he hadn't even caught anything while hunting, and the front number plate of his car got a bit bent by the pulling out process. A couple of hours later, there was another rescue. It was just starting to rain heavily when we were again flagged down, this time by a gaggle of people standing around a stricken van. When we turned around and went back, it turned out they had a flat tyre and, in the absence of a jack (!) they were having some trouble changing it. This was an easy one, and within 20 minutes we got them on the road again, using our heavy duty jack. We were absolutely soaked in the process, but maybe that will have done something to improve our cleanliness and odour. Our final rescue was about an hour later. Another flagging down, this time a car which had obviously run out of fuel. We explain we are diesel, but the guy plaintively holds out a plastic container and we agree to drive up the road to the next petrol station and bring him back a couple of litres of petrol in it. Luckily, it is only 3 kilometres to the first fuel stop, but extraordinarily it only sells diesel! This is the only time in 3 months that we have been looking for petrol, and for the very first time we have come across a garage that sells only diesel! So we drive on, and luckily after another 3 kilometres we find an ordinary petrol station. We fill up with diesel ourselves, and try to get the petrol. But they refuse, saying they cannot sell petrol in anything which is not a metal container. This is getting ridiculous!! We go into the spares shop to see if they have a small metal fuel can, but they only have full sized jerry cans. So we decide it's easier to get our empty diesel jerry can off the roof and put the petrol in that. Hopefully the cross-contamination won't be a problem. When we get back to the car, the guy is very grateful. It seems he doesn't have the money to pay for the petrol (so how he was planning to get to Riga, goodness only knows) but he takes my phone number and name - presumably so he can ring me up to say thank you again after he has sobered up. The other three guys in the car all seem to be unconscious. Guess why? We drive off quickly and hope we don't meet up with them again. So we seem to have become an overseas branch of the RAC for the day - and we leave lots of very grateful Russians behind us. It was lucky we weren't in a hurry to get somewhere! Finally we get to within an hour's drive of the border and pull off into a wood to park up and camp. We are absolutely bushed, but pleased with ourselves - in 36 hours we have driven 1,150 miles, found our brake calliper in a strange city, changed it at the roadside and rescued three stricken Russians. And tomorrow we will hit the border early and refreshed, and hope it takes less than the 7+ hours it took to cross when we were coming the other way. With any luck, we might even get to Poland tomorrow! So tonight we are absolutely spark out at GPS ref 56º 20' 05.37" N, 29º 35' 39.80" E, altitude 181 metres. A few Russians have driven past us in the woods - it looks like this is either the track to a village or they are all out picking mushrooms in the woods - but as long as they don't want rescuing as well, we're not bothered. 9th SeptemberWe woke up earlyish - for us. There was a real feel of autumn in the air. We were parked in a large wood, and all around the silver birches were gently shedding their leaves. That damp musky autumnal smell was everywhere. We waved to a few more locals who drove past as we were having breakfast. Nobody waved back. There were a couple out wandering in the forest - picking mushrooms, I presume. Nobody bothered us or showed any interest. So we headed off to the border. There was quite a long queue of trucks at the border post, but hardly any cars. It took us precisely one hour to get through both the Russian exit formalities and the Latvian entry ones (including having to put our tent up for a curious customs officer who thought it might be a big box of drugs). The queue of trucks the other way was just as horrendous as before, though - about five miles of trucks, pretty much nose to tail. It is quite possible that a truck which joined the back of the queue when we went into Russia in June only got through the border as we were coming back. Things have improved over the last three months, though - the Latvians have installed portaloos and bins all along the road so the ditch at the side is no longer an open toilet/rubbish bin. And they obviously know something we don't, as these facilities extend seven miles back from the border post! So by 12.30 we were out of Russia and back in the EU (even if they do still speak Russian) - now only two hours ahead of the UK. We raced across Latvia, stopping only for a rather good lunch in a roadside restaurant (total price 15 Euros - that was the currency we ended up paying in). Most of the menu (which had English translations) seemed to consist of pork - though we have not seen a pig anywhere. Most odd. Then into Lithuania (border formalities consisted of a wave of the passports), where our only stop was for fuel. Then we got to the Polish border, where there was another long queue of trucks but only about half a dozen cars in front of us. We were through in 15 minutes. Then we decided to head towards Germany via Warsaw as our Polish friends had told us this would be a much quicker route than our route out through the Polish lake district. The road does seem a lot faster, but the earlier sunsets meant we had to call it a day and pull off the road about half way to Warsaw, where we dived off the road in our usual way and parked in a small clearing in a wood. The difference here is that everywhere is very much inhabited, so we had to keep our heads down while a tractor which had been ploughing in the neighbouring field drove back up our track and past our little clearing about 20 minutes after we arrived - he didn't see us. We both ate well at lunch time, and we couldn't really be bothered to cook in the dark when there are clearly people about, so we headed straight up into the tent for a good early night at 9.30. With a flying start tomorrow, we might make it into Germany by tomorrow night, which puts us well on track for home by next weekend. So tonight we are hunkering down for another night on the road - we have not seen the inside of a hotel since Ekaterinburg, over 2000 miles ago. So we are not very nice to know (maybe that explains the quick exit at the border?) So avoid, if you can, GPS ref 53º 26' 22.78" N, 22º 10' 42.36" E, altitude 207 metres - we have gone up in the world! And we have gone 425 miles. Not bad for one day. 10th SeptemberUp early to make sure we didn't meet up with a stroppy ploughman on the farm track back up to the road. No problems, so we were away by 9 am again. We followed the signs to Warsaw and stopped on the outskirts for brunch - once Rich had seen the Macdonalds sign, there was no stopping him. Loads of crazy Poles (the craziest ones drive Audis) overtook us - and everything else in sight. Because it was Sunday, though, the truck traffic was fairly light and the drive on the EU-funded upgraded single carriageway was fairly painless. Once again, though, we saw the after effects of Polish style overtaking manoeuvres - just as spectacular as the crash we had seen on the Moscow ring road a couple of days before. In this case, one of the drivers (obviously a lucky one) was sitting in the middle of the road just holding his head. I suspect the others were in a much worse state. When we drove through, the mangled remains of a big black Audi were just being hoisted onto the back of a recovery truck. Don't know how they were proposing to get the two overturned trucks out of the way, though. We got just the teentsiest bit lost in the middle of Warsaw, as a result of which we ended up on the old road out to the west. This meant we went past what is probably Poland's only garage selling Land Rovers (unfortunately closed, so we didn't get the chance to crawl over the couple of expedition-prepared Land Rovers they had standing in the forecourt). It also meant we missed out on the first 50 miles of motorway heading west. Never mind, we picked it up soon enough and had a fairly uneventful drive past Poznan towards the border. We wondered whether the motorway had been finished any further west than when we came through in June, but alas no - we had the last 70 miles or so to the border on the scary single carriageway road. But since June that had been largely resurfaced and the trucks were all on their day off so it was a much less terrifying experience than previously. Frustratingly, though, we were diverted off the closed-off road just before reaching the border (presumably another big smash) so we had an unexpected extra half hour in Poland. It took us about fifteen minutes to get through the border - the queue of trucks was several hours long, but the cars went through quickly and the formalities consisted of the customs officer saying "Hi" with a big smile as we showed him our passports, followed by an immediate "Bye - off you go" - all in a strong German accent. It was only another hour and a half to the campsite near Berlin, where we were given a much warmer welcome than previously. Our main preoccupation was to put a couple of loads through their washing machines and ourselves through the showers. Once we had done this, we threw together a pasta evening meal with Russian bread and cheese. We then sat and chatted with Mike (a Kiwi) and Becks (an Ozzie) who were parked up in a van next to us. They are "doing" Europe in a four month trip and we swapped travellers' tales whilst drinking our Bombardier beers (and a couple of their Polish lagers). Nice couple. Then it was off to bed in a tent which smelt clean rather than nasty for the first time in a while. So tonight we are mostly enjoying feeling clean for the first time in 2,000 miles (500 of them today), and revelling in infrastructure that works. All at GPS ref 52º 21' 40.96" N, 13º 00' 23.75" E, altitude 10.6 metres - if we're not careful, we'll be getting our feet wet soon... |
