Highway star

Ciao a tutti!
Yeah, finally some news from Russia! So, we didn't make it out of Moscow without a scratch after all... Since our last message we drove a long distance but to start by the beginning, here is the bad news. On June 12 (Russia day) we spent a very nice morning visiting Moscow that was getting ready for big parties in the evening; for this all the streets were empty of cars and this gave us the opportunity to see the center with a very particular and quiet atmosphere. Another nice look at all the architecture, a stunning visit of the the nicest metro station then we hit the road again to the east. Finally out of the traffic jam we stopped a few minutes to get some groceries and when we came back to the car we discovered a broken window, door locks forced and our cameras gone... Shit... a D70, a D200 and little Ixus gone. There wont be much bird or animal pictures on this blog unfortunately.
It was a difficult moment but at least we still have our documents, passports with visas for the rest of the trip etc... A very nice woman helped us to call the police and waited with us for a long time before they arrived and escorted us to the police station. They were very nice and despite the « near impossible » chance to find our camera they filled a deposition for us.
That evening I built a new window with trans-lucid plastic, Duct Tape and some wood (camber like for those who know windsurf). It sucks when temperature reach 38°C on the highway but after few modifications we manage to use our car almost normally now. It will be difficult to find another window like this in Russia but we have some hope to find one in Mongolia where Land Cruiser seems to be more common.
This bad experience thought us to keep our vigilance always to the top and after one day of bad mood the taste for the trip and our enthusiasm came back. When we tell all this story to other Russian people, many of them felt very sorry and apologized that this happened in their country. Well; we don't feel anything bad about this country; we love it and every person that we met were usually very nice, helpful, happy and a great company. I guess thieves like to break car windows everywhere in the world... When I think about it I had my entire car stolen in Belgium once so what could I say against Russia? Nothing except that we enjoy it very much!
Alright, enough of this for now and, to explain more of our trip, the next few day were very nice.
Indeed the first gift this trip gave us was to meet another couple traveling just like us in a Toyota Land Cruiser to Mongolia. Math and Elise are from France (living in Tahiti) and friendship grew up rapidly among us. The amount of similarities between the preparation of our respective trip and our lives is incredible and we form a great team to cross Russia and spend part of our time in Mongolia together. Traveling together is great, safer, fun and certainly less monotonous when we have several thousands kilometers to drive from one side to the other of this huge country.

To speak a bit about the life here and the traveling conditions, we have to say that all the stories that we heard or read on other blogs about Russia are most of the time legends or obsolete. In our little book: “Speak Russian in your trip” it was written that traveling by car is strongly not recomended because the roads are in terrible condition, gasoline stations are rare and the only safe place to sleep are in expansive hotels...well, not much of this is true; Russia is not like this anymore. OK, roads are not in a good condition everywhere but Russians are doing a lot of work to fix it and we would say less than 500 km over 5000 km was in poor condition. Gasoline stations are everywhere and most of the time there is a little supermarket and clean toilets beside it. Most of the time we slept in the motels' parking along the road with security staff during the night, good food, clean shower and toilets and few times even a nice sauna. We have absolutely nothing to say about the Russian police: they stopped us only once and asked us something and we answered “Mongolia!”..they started to laugh and let us go...we never knew what they asked us...
Russian people are very nice and curious, they are always ready to ask us who we are and what we are doing and they don't care at all if the conversation is hard and we understand almost nothing. They continue to talk, trying to make their sentences understandable for us. It's really funny sometimes but at the end we usually manage to understand each other and we are learning some words that make conversations easier.

We did not visit so much during our journey through Russia because of our time restriction in this country: only 30 days visa and there were no time to visit 5200 km of land and towns so after Moscow we just stopped in Kazan (where we met Elise and Mathieu) and then we drove directly to Irkutsk.
Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan Republic, a beautiful city where Muslim and Orthodox live together and respect each other. It is a nice example of tolerance. Here we did a little city tour with our new friends and Danyar, a very nice couch surf's guy who welcomed us with great hospitality. Thanks Danyar for everything you shared with us and the very informative talk we had!! After this moment we met someone new almost every day, especially truck drivers on motel's parking lot, besides our car. They are always ready to give us information about the road or about the city we were ready to cross or give us some present to remember then (e.g.for desert, once we received a swan carved in some local vegetable!!). Then we met other travelers and every time is a good exchange of information. We don't feel to be the crazier travelers as there are people that left France to reach Pekin by bicycles!!!
After 12 day on the road stopping just to eat and sleep we reached Irkutsk and finally the “holiday” started. We have few days here where we can relax a little bit, fix the car and make everything ready for the off road rest of our trip and enjoy the people and the landscape. First we will go to Olkhon Island, a little island on the west coast of the Baikal lake.

PS: little contest!
Since we spent long time on the road we kept on listening to this song...Highway Star.
The first person who can tell us the band who sings this song wins MATRYOSHKA #1

Few pictures of our journey through Russia, people we met and our arrival to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal.

Eastern Europe and Moscow

11-06-10

Here we are with some news of our first week! We finally took off even if we already have one month of delay according to our original plans, but we are here, on the road, in the nature. Our visas arrived quite late, but when they were ready..well, we still needed a couple of days to finish a few things on the car and to pack our stuff. So we left the 3rd of June and all our plans changed again. No time for Berlin, we drove directly through Poland. We wanted to visit at least Auschwitz so we put the geographic coordinates on the GPS and we arrived after 2 days (we are not driving like crazy with this Good old Land Cruiser). It is worth to do this visit, it is very moving, it makes you think about a lot of things. Poland is really a nice country and it is a pity that we cannot speak with the people to know them better. The language is really difficult and we had some difficulties just to remember “hallo, good bye and thank you”.

As we rather enjoy our trip rather than rush everywhere, we decided also to skip Saint Petersburg and enter in Russia from Latvia proceeding directly to Moscow. This allowed us to save few days and to use all the visa period to cross Russia. Like this our journey is easier, and we get more time to enjoy our days in Lithuania and Latvia. We stopped for a short visit in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania and both of us found it a really nice, full of young people, very clean and not chaotic. Few hours were enough to have an idea of the city and in the afternoon we took our road again to cross Latvia. Here the landscape is gorgeous, full of little bushes and lakes, with bunches of houses lost in the middle of nothing. We did not not have time to stop anywhere in Latvia, our Russian's visa already started and we did not want to loose more time, but we are curious to visit Riga, the capital of Latvia.

We slept very close to the Russian border, at Zilupe, the last city of Latvia, but the lack of indication of the land border made us loose time to find the international check point and when we finally found it and arrived at the border there where already a long lane of car waiting to pass through. So, we waited. The entire process took around 5 hours and we think it was not such a bad result. But it is crazy to face for the first time with the Russian bureaucracy. We were lucky to find a kind woman that spoke a little bit of English at the “custom gate”. She made us do three times the same custom declaration, but at the third time at least we were sure it was ok. We did it, we entered in Russia, the real trip started!
It's like entering in another dimension...or time. The landscape is pretty similar to Latvia for what we saw so far; only a little bit more rural, green, natural, but the car, the houses, the gas station, everything has a different atmosphere and the gray and rainy sky helped to increase the feeling of poverty and abandon.
Around 500 km separated us to Moscow on this badly shaped, worn, small double lane highway M9. Well, sometime this road can be a nightmare but they are repairing it and probably in 10 years they will finish it! We did not have Rubles at that time so we did not stop to any cafe along the street, but this is the first thing we will do now that we have cash; just to meet more people, discover what there is in all these little road houses.

Finally after a long drive, we arrived in Moscow on the 10th at the perfect rush hour traffic time. We already saw along the M9 that Russian drive like maniacs but here in Moscow's ring we learn their first rule: there is no rules at all. We took around 2 hours to understand where we where and where we had to go...with no accidents! Exhausted from the driving and after hours of learning Cyrillic on a bad map, we finally booked the first hostel we found in the Lonely planet and at 11pm we went outside to look for some food and money. The first approach with the Russian language. Impossible. Fortunately at least we can read now otherwise there is no way to get around here. We assisted also to a good street fight at the exit of the metro about 20 minutes after we left the hostel. Wet from the rain and after this unpleasant sight we decided it was time to go to sleep.

Moscow is huge, everything is heavy, the ring in the city has 16 lanes (and there are 3 rings in total in the city). It is clear that the city is not designed for people but for cars. Russian people love huge car (Hummer, Range Rover, Porsche Cayenne etc...) and they love drive them fast. It is definitely not a city made for pedestrians, distances are huge and to cross streets you have to take the subway stations from one side to the other. The cars do not care about people that walk in the street either and they can park and drive anywhere they want (including the sidewalks)! Not surprising that we did not see any bicycles and also very few motorcycles in this environment. Probably way too dangerous to drive something with only 2 wheels we reckon. Otherwise it is true, Russian women are often beautiful and very fancy with vertiginous heels. Tomorrow is the Russian national day and the Red square is ready for a party. We will surely check that out before hitting the road again to the East.


Réponse à JT: coupe du monde de quoi? oui, je sais que ma femme est championne du monde...

A Chris: Merci pour tes messages et encouragements! Une seule Mustang vue jusqu'à présent (récente) et je fais bien attention au Land Cruiser. On pense bien à vous, bonne continuation dans la restoration du fbk 68 et grand bonjour à la famille.

A Chiara: non ti preoccupare per le zanzare, stiamo studiando tutte le soluzioni possibili per sopravvivere..penso che qst sarà la vera sfida!!!