mylovelyhorse
Registered user
A bit more of a write-up
This summer there was a total eclipse of the sun. Getting to see it wasn’t that easy as the track of the eclipse was down across Siberia and into China. The Chinese wanted foreigners to be in Beijing for the Olympics. Russia it had to be then.
So Jeremy and I got on our bikes and rode across Europe, over the Ural mountains and into Asia to see the eclipse in Siberia. On the way we saw nuclear missile silos, wooden houses, statues of various characters from communist times, T-34 tanks, Russian policemen, more mosquitoes and other unpleasant flying things than I can bear to think about and an awful lot of knackered old Russian lorries.
Five weeks, 11,000 miles and one RTA later, we got back.
Here’s an interesting thing: Calais to near the Polish border is a one day ride if you concentrate and remember that at 90 mph you are one of the slower users of the autobahns. It’s tiring, mind you, and not made better by a German camp site owner who directs you to put your tent up in a specific spot. When he then waits until you are eating a well deserved evening meal to decide that he must have you move it immediately, right then, right away, in ten minutes will not do, it is somewhat infuriating. Thank goodness we hit Poland in the morning!
Everything you may have heard about Polish driving is true. Utterly bonkers, they scare the pants out of me – and I’ve been here a number of times before. Overtaking three abreast, overtaking into blind corners, driving a yard from the vehicle in front, you name it. Fortunately, if you avoid Warsaw, the roads are not that busy compared to some. Road signs are a bit of a nightmare though. Poland is a very attractive country – lots of low rolling hills. Unfortunately, one of the first things that pops into the mind is “good tank country” – make of that what you will…
Lithuania is a very lovely country. Somehow the hills were prettier and slightly more, er, hilly than the Polish ones. We stayed over night near a place called Grutas Park, which is in the SW near the border with Belarus. Well, I say stayed, we just rode off the road into a bit of forest and put our tents up. A very comfortable and quiet night’s sleep followed
Grutas Park was set up by a business man who had a soft spot for old Soviet statues. As they were removed from buildings and towns all across the country he collected them and put them in this park. It’s a truly fascinating place, full of eerily malevolent portraits of a lot more than the likes of Stalin and Lenin.
A day’s ride away, we camped by the side of a beautiful lake so the following morning we could visit a Soviet Army SS-4 missile silo that has been turned into a museum. Very chilling.
I have to confess that we crossed Latvia in a morning and we very nearly did Estonia in the same day. Er, but if you plan to go there I strongly advise not speeding. 1,200 Kroons is about 100 quid.
Crossing the border into the Russian Federation is best done on a Sunday afternoon in the pouring rain. There are no queues worth mentioning as commercial traffic is forbidden and the weather is miserable enough to make the border guards want to help you get through and off as soon as possible. Bonus!
And so we rode our bikes into Russia. Russia! I have to confess to getting very excited as I did something my Father’s generation couldn’t even consider. Now this is Proper Foreign!
So what’s Russia like? Russia is very big. Really big. In fact, to paraphrase Douglas Adams for a moment, you just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Russia.
St. Petersburg is quite nice, in a 18th Century European city sort of way. Peculiarly, it really didn’t feel very foreign. It felt pretty miserable though as we rode out and off towards Moscow in yet another day of rain. Now the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow is a very main road. Pity it’s absolutely knackered then. The surface is slippery when wet, the pot holes couldn’t swallow elephants but they’d certainly have a good chunk out of your front wheel and, worst of all, the road is rippled by all the lorries thundering along it. This turns out to be a pretty well constant feature of Russian (and Ukrainian) roads. It makes riding quite uncomfortable until you get used to it. The bike seems to roll and pitch in a way designed to make you feel seasick. Very uncomfortable.
Moscow is the most expensive city in the world. We couldn’t afford that so turned left onto the A-107, which is a sort of outer Moscow ring road. Unlike the M25, it’s about the size of an English rural A-road and with about the same amount of traffic. Also unlike the M25, you can turn off onto a side road and pitch a tent 100 yards from another Cold War relic: an SS-20 missile launch site.
Going east from Moscow towards Perm and Yekaterinburg took us along the M-7 to Nizhniy Novgorod. This is a main artery but not a main road by any Western European standard. It is choked with lorries for a start. These juggernauts creep along at 45-50 mph, belching out huge quantities of sooty-black diesel smoke. By the end of each day our faces are grimy and eyes sore from the filth they put into the air.
Fortunately the road signs are still printed in both Anglic and Cyrillic script, meaning we have a good idea where we’re going. This isn’t the case for anything else, mind. Menus in cafes, for example, are utterly impenetrable to us. We end up miming and pointing and if all else fails, I say “borscht?” is a hopeful way. Borscht is a delicious Ukrainian beetroot and cabbage soup. In Russia it seems more to be flavourless cabbage soup. Still, it’s better than nothing.
Buying petrol in Russia is curiously similar to much of the USA. You roll up to the pump, dismount, open the tank & put the appropriate nozzle into the tank. You then estimate how much fuel you want, go over to the cashier, sitting behind armoured glass and show them a bit of paper with the octane level (generally 95, 92 or 80) and the number of litres. They tell you how many Roubles and you pay (petrol varied from 21 to 28 Roubles a litre & there were about 44 Roubles to the Pound). The pump then dispenses the amount of fuel you have purchased. Accuracy is very desirable…
The road to Perm is a bit, er, patchy. In an attempt to save days and 1,000 kms or so on the M-7, we branch off onto a ‘P’ road. This takes us to a point where the road is paved with large chunky gravel instead of tarmac. A local says “the road is very bad” and we agree. What we don’t realise is he’s talking about another bit of road ahead where for 22kms the gravel gives way to deep and heavily rutted sand. 22 kms of it. This takes 2 hours at 10mph with our feet down. It’s very hot and the alleged ‘road’ runs through a thick forest full of horrible bitey things that want to tear our flesh. The bikes overheat twice and we have to stop, helmets closed, jackets done up, in 30+oC to allow them to cool down. In a moment of over-confidence I fall off and lightly break an indicator stalk. Good old GS – tough as can be. When we finally get back onto tarmac, we see an abandoned Police checkpoint nearby and stop for a breakfast of vegetable curry, instant coffee and vast amounts of bottled water.
Yekaterinburg is, erm, not lovely. The hotel is expensive and terrible but it does have a laundry service and somewhere secure to park the bikes. After we book in and pay, we are told that the laundry doesn’t work at the weekend. It’s Saturday. Bugger. And so we end up standing on our clothes in the shower and trampling them ‘clean’. Improvised washing lines criss-cross the room.
Perm-36, near the village of Kutchino, was once upon a time a gulag. It is now a museum. When we arrive, expecting isolation and a few sombre visitors, we are surprised by the two stages, a large number of tents and loads of people wandering around. It turns out we have arrived just in time for a semi-political music festival aimed at remembering the camp’s past as well as seeking to avoid more of the same in the future. As I was told by a very friendly English speaking chap we bumped into shortly after arriving. It’s very odd to wander through crowds of yoof looking at horribly sombre buildings and dodging irritable television crews.
Tyumen leads to Omsk, where we run into a couple from Oxfordshire who are driving a Range Rover to Mongolia. And they think we’re a bit mad! They reckon the Police bribes they’ve paid have amounted to around $50 / day so far.
Ah yes, the Russian Police. Their income comes from ‘fines’ collected at the side of the road for infringements such as illegal overtaking and speeding. Those roads that are heavy with lorries also have plenty of Police vehicles parked up on the side of the road. Very few of them have speed guns but that doesn’t seem to stop them for pulling vehicles over with a languid wave of their baton. The speed limits are mainly 70 kph in town and 90 kph out of town. The lorries usually seem to sit at 80 kph, which means most car drivers are constantly trying to overtake them. Overtaking = speed = a likely stop. There are also long stretches of no overtaking zones, sometimes marked with signs, sometimes marked with double white lines, sometimes hardly marked at all. Overtaking there is a guaranteed stop. We got stopped for a few papers checks but only once for a traffic rule infringement. I put on a daft face and looked blank and eventually they went away without lightening our wallets.
And so we arrived at Novosibirsk, Siberia. That’s Asia. We’ve ridden out of Europe and into another continent. How cool is that?
We’re riding on the leading edge of a heavy duty thunderstorm that has lurked about all afternoon. To avoid a drenching (minimum) we stop for the night at a motel and have enough time to park the bikes up and get our luggage into our room before a torrential rainstorm arrives. The lorries all stop, cars pull off the road and people run for cover as lightning spears the heavens every few seconds for three quarters of an hour. Just as suddenly as it arrives, it’s gone and we marvel at the beautiful sunset!
We watch the eclipse from a spot as exactly on the centre line of the path of totality as GPS can get us to. It’s a petrol station next to an abandoned oil refinery just outside Novosibirsk. After an hour of wondering when the eclipse will start we realise we’ve forgotten to alter our clocks for yet another time zone. D’oh!
If you haven’t seen a total eclipse of the sun, I simply cannot adequately describe the wonder or the beauty of this extraordinary event. The world goes quiet; the sun disappears as though it were being eaten. It is no wonder people used to think the world was ending.
And so we turn round and start the trip home. Back across Siberia to Omsk and then down to cross the Urals back into Europe. The Ural mountains aren’t really terribly mountainous - they’re too old. The Northern Urals are little more than hills, the Southern ones we cross now are like mid-Wales. Pretty, but right now damnably wet. Almost all of the road is marked with double white lines and the lorries are heavily overloaded. A very miserable day is spent following 20mph lorries along A-roads in heavy rain, with unhappy looking Policemen stopping every car and lorry that they can. An equally miserable night is spent in a very poor quality motel worrying about bed bugs and broken springs in an unheated room.
Passing Ufa and Samara we head for Voronezh and then the Ukrainian border. Sounds easy but that’s three day’s travel and on one of those days my right pannier, containing some money & part of my camping equipment (the cooker, coffee, mugs and food) jettisons itself from the bike to be completely lost. I still have my tent and sleeping bag, thank goodness. Passing a sign saying ‘Moscow – 1,680 km’ does nothing for morale at this point.
The Ukraine is a very pleasant surprise. It’s sort of ‘Russia-lite’. All the Soviet past but with a more modern outlook (well, some of the time anyhow). In one petrol station we stop for ages looking at an industrial building until one of us says “oh, it’s a pit!”. It has been a long time since we’ve seen a working one…
Returning to the EU with it’s comfortable hotels, expensive petrol, good road surfaces and full supermarkets is both a delight and a bit of a luxury. We spend a good hour or two in the first supermarket we stop near in Slovakia just looking at the full shelves and the huge variety of produce. Incredible.
Slovakia is utterly beautiful but despite stopping to see friends it does not take long to cross it. Hungary is also despatched in a day. Great progress but it takes us back into the rain and we more or less stay with that all the way across Northern Italy and France.
11,000 miles. Five weeks. Two continents. One total eclipse of the sun. I’ve had worse holidays
This summer there was a total eclipse of the sun. Getting to see it wasn’t that easy as the track of the eclipse was down across Siberia and into China. The Chinese wanted foreigners to be in Beijing for the Olympics. Russia it had to be then.
So Jeremy and I got on our bikes and rode across Europe, over the Ural mountains and into Asia to see the eclipse in Siberia. On the way we saw nuclear missile silos, wooden houses, statues of various characters from communist times, T-34 tanks, Russian policemen, more mosquitoes and other unpleasant flying things than I can bear to think about and an awful lot of knackered old Russian lorries.
Five weeks, 11,000 miles and one RTA later, we got back.
Here’s an interesting thing: Calais to near the Polish border is a one day ride if you concentrate and remember that at 90 mph you are one of the slower users of the autobahns. It’s tiring, mind you, and not made better by a German camp site owner who directs you to put your tent up in a specific spot. When he then waits until you are eating a well deserved evening meal to decide that he must have you move it immediately, right then, right away, in ten minutes will not do, it is somewhat infuriating. Thank goodness we hit Poland in the morning!
Everything you may have heard about Polish driving is true. Utterly bonkers, they scare the pants out of me – and I’ve been here a number of times before. Overtaking three abreast, overtaking into blind corners, driving a yard from the vehicle in front, you name it. Fortunately, if you avoid Warsaw, the roads are not that busy compared to some. Road signs are a bit of a nightmare though. Poland is a very attractive country – lots of low rolling hills. Unfortunately, one of the first things that pops into the mind is “good tank country” – make of that what you will…
Lithuania is a very lovely country. Somehow the hills were prettier and slightly more, er, hilly than the Polish ones. We stayed over night near a place called Grutas Park, which is in the SW near the border with Belarus. Well, I say stayed, we just rode off the road into a bit of forest and put our tents up. A very comfortable and quiet night’s sleep followed
Grutas Park was set up by a business man who had a soft spot for old Soviet statues. As they were removed from buildings and towns all across the country he collected them and put them in this park. It’s a truly fascinating place, full of eerily malevolent portraits of a lot more than the likes of Stalin and Lenin.
A day’s ride away, we camped by the side of a beautiful lake so the following morning we could visit a Soviet Army SS-4 missile silo that has been turned into a museum. Very chilling.
I have to confess that we crossed Latvia in a morning and we very nearly did Estonia in the same day. Er, but if you plan to go there I strongly advise not speeding. 1,200 Kroons is about 100 quid.
Crossing the border into the Russian Federation is best done on a Sunday afternoon in the pouring rain. There are no queues worth mentioning as commercial traffic is forbidden and the weather is miserable enough to make the border guards want to help you get through and off as soon as possible. Bonus!
And so we rode our bikes into Russia. Russia! I have to confess to getting very excited as I did something my Father’s generation couldn’t even consider. Now this is Proper Foreign!
So what’s Russia like? Russia is very big. Really big. In fact, to paraphrase Douglas Adams for a moment, you just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to Russia.
St. Petersburg is quite nice, in a 18th Century European city sort of way. Peculiarly, it really didn’t feel very foreign. It felt pretty miserable though as we rode out and off towards Moscow in yet another day of rain. Now the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow is a very main road. Pity it’s absolutely knackered then. The surface is slippery when wet, the pot holes couldn’t swallow elephants but they’d certainly have a good chunk out of your front wheel and, worst of all, the road is rippled by all the lorries thundering along it. This turns out to be a pretty well constant feature of Russian (and Ukrainian) roads. It makes riding quite uncomfortable until you get used to it. The bike seems to roll and pitch in a way designed to make you feel seasick. Very uncomfortable.
Moscow is the most expensive city in the world. We couldn’t afford that so turned left onto the A-107, which is a sort of outer Moscow ring road. Unlike the M25, it’s about the size of an English rural A-road and with about the same amount of traffic. Also unlike the M25, you can turn off onto a side road and pitch a tent 100 yards from another Cold War relic: an SS-20 missile launch site.
Going east from Moscow towards Perm and Yekaterinburg took us along the M-7 to Nizhniy Novgorod. This is a main artery but not a main road by any Western European standard. It is choked with lorries for a start. These juggernauts creep along at 45-50 mph, belching out huge quantities of sooty-black diesel smoke. By the end of each day our faces are grimy and eyes sore from the filth they put into the air.
Fortunately the road signs are still printed in both Anglic and Cyrillic script, meaning we have a good idea where we’re going. This isn’t the case for anything else, mind. Menus in cafes, for example, are utterly impenetrable to us. We end up miming and pointing and if all else fails, I say “borscht?” is a hopeful way. Borscht is a delicious Ukrainian beetroot and cabbage soup. In Russia it seems more to be flavourless cabbage soup. Still, it’s better than nothing.
Buying petrol in Russia is curiously similar to much of the USA. You roll up to the pump, dismount, open the tank & put the appropriate nozzle into the tank. You then estimate how much fuel you want, go over to the cashier, sitting behind armoured glass and show them a bit of paper with the octane level (generally 95, 92 or 80) and the number of litres. They tell you how many Roubles and you pay (petrol varied from 21 to 28 Roubles a litre & there were about 44 Roubles to the Pound). The pump then dispenses the amount of fuel you have purchased. Accuracy is very desirable…
The road to Perm is a bit, er, patchy. In an attempt to save days and 1,000 kms or so on the M-7, we branch off onto a ‘P’ road. This takes us to a point where the road is paved with large chunky gravel instead of tarmac. A local says “the road is very bad” and we agree. What we don’t realise is he’s talking about another bit of road ahead where for 22kms the gravel gives way to deep and heavily rutted sand. 22 kms of it. This takes 2 hours at 10mph with our feet down. It’s very hot and the alleged ‘road’ runs through a thick forest full of horrible bitey things that want to tear our flesh. The bikes overheat twice and we have to stop, helmets closed, jackets done up, in 30+oC to allow them to cool down. In a moment of over-confidence I fall off and lightly break an indicator stalk. Good old GS – tough as can be. When we finally get back onto tarmac, we see an abandoned Police checkpoint nearby and stop for a breakfast of vegetable curry, instant coffee and vast amounts of bottled water.
Yekaterinburg is, erm, not lovely. The hotel is expensive and terrible but it does have a laundry service and somewhere secure to park the bikes. After we book in and pay, we are told that the laundry doesn’t work at the weekend. It’s Saturday. Bugger. And so we end up standing on our clothes in the shower and trampling them ‘clean’. Improvised washing lines criss-cross the room.
Perm-36, near the village of Kutchino, was once upon a time a gulag. It is now a museum. When we arrive, expecting isolation and a few sombre visitors, we are surprised by the two stages, a large number of tents and loads of people wandering around. It turns out we have arrived just in time for a semi-political music festival aimed at remembering the camp’s past as well as seeking to avoid more of the same in the future. As I was told by a very friendly English speaking chap we bumped into shortly after arriving. It’s very odd to wander through crowds of yoof looking at horribly sombre buildings and dodging irritable television crews.
Tyumen leads to Omsk, where we run into a couple from Oxfordshire who are driving a Range Rover to Mongolia. And they think we’re a bit mad! They reckon the Police bribes they’ve paid have amounted to around $50 / day so far.
Ah yes, the Russian Police. Their income comes from ‘fines’ collected at the side of the road for infringements such as illegal overtaking and speeding. Those roads that are heavy with lorries also have plenty of Police vehicles parked up on the side of the road. Very few of them have speed guns but that doesn’t seem to stop them for pulling vehicles over with a languid wave of their baton. The speed limits are mainly 70 kph in town and 90 kph out of town. The lorries usually seem to sit at 80 kph, which means most car drivers are constantly trying to overtake them. Overtaking = speed = a likely stop. There are also long stretches of no overtaking zones, sometimes marked with signs, sometimes marked with double white lines, sometimes hardly marked at all. Overtaking there is a guaranteed stop. We got stopped for a few papers checks but only once for a traffic rule infringement. I put on a daft face and looked blank and eventually they went away without lightening our wallets.
And so we arrived at Novosibirsk, Siberia. That’s Asia. We’ve ridden out of Europe and into another continent. How cool is that?
We’re riding on the leading edge of a heavy duty thunderstorm that has lurked about all afternoon. To avoid a drenching (minimum) we stop for the night at a motel and have enough time to park the bikes up and get our luggage into our room before a torrential rainstorm arrives. The lorries all stop, cars pull off the road and people run for cover as lightning spears the heavens every few seconds for three quarters of an hour. Just as suddenly as it arrives, it’s gone and we marvel at the beautiful sunset!
We watch the eclipse from a spot as exactly on the centre line of the path of totality as GPS can get us to. It’s a petrol station next to an abandoned oil refinery just outside Novosibirsk. After an hour of wondering when the eclipse will start we realise we’ve forgotten to alter our clocks for yet another time zone. D’oh!
If you haven’t seen a total eclipse of the sun, I simply cannot adequately describe the wonder or the beauty of this extraordinary event. The world goes quiet; the sun disappears as though it were being eaten. It is no wonder people used to think the world was ending.
And so we turn round and start the trip home. Back across Siberia to Omsk and then down to cross the Urals back into Europe. The Ural mountains aren’t really terribly mountainous - they’re too old. The Northern Urals are little more than hills, the Southern ones we cross now are like mid-Wales. Pretty, but right now damnably wet. Almost all of the road is marked with double white lines and the lorries are heavily overloaded. A very miserable day is spent following 20mph lorries along A-roads in heavy rain, with unhappy looking Policemen stopping every car and lorry that they can. An equally miserable night is spent in a very poor quality motel worrying about bed bugs and broken springs in an unheated room.
Passing Ufa and Samara we head for Voronezh and then the Ukrainian border. Sounds easy but that’s three day’s travel and on one of those days my right pannier, containing some money & part of my camping equipment (the cooker, coffee, mugs and food) jettisons itself from the bike to be completely lost. I still have my tent and sleeping bag, thank goodness. Passing a sign saying ‘Moscow – 1,680 km’ does nothing for morale at this point.
The Ukraine is a very pleasant surprise. It’s sort of ‘Russia-lite’. All the Soviet past but with a more modern outlook (well, some of the time anyhow). In one petrol station we stop for ages looking at an industrial building until one of us says “oh, it’s a pit!”. It has been a long time since we’ve seen a working one…
Returning to the EU with it’s comfortable hotels, expensive petrol, good road surfaces and full supermarkets is both a delight and a bit of a luxury. We spend a good hour or two in the first supermarket we stop near in Slovakia just looking at the full shelves and the huge variety of produce. Incredible.
Slovakia is utterly beautiful but despite stopping to see friends it does not take long to cross it. Hungary is also despatched in a day. Great progress but it takes us back into the rain and we more or less stay with that all the way across Northern Italy and France.
11,000 miles. Five weeks. Two continents. One total eclipse of the sun. I’ve had worse holidays
