Siberia: a consolation?

Awesome ride report! Your photographs are beautiful and very interesting. If I squint a little, some of the scenery looks like it could be in my own backyard. Best of luck in your travels.

P.S. -An adult male elk is called a "bull".

Your ride report is one of very few real adventures I have read. Great work, a great ride. Thank you.

why I seem so excited about barren landscape and snow-capped mountains is that it's something I'm not used to seeing every day.

And thanks for your kind comments. I didn' know what a challenge it is to write a report while travelling. Next time I'll be happy to update my facebook or tweet the highlights of the day

Really nice pictures and funny ass comments on an area of the World I would love to ride one day. Thanks for sharing this

Just before Tyumen, at the town of Yalutorovsk, I thought I'd seen something special. It was so special that I had to stop and take a picture some kilometres later when leaving the town: they'd written the name both Cyrillic and Latin characters. That did not happen again before the city itself but maybe it was a sign I'm approaching Europe.



As I'm now in the 'drive-through-penalty' stage, the important question in the morning is how far today? Am I becoming schizophrenic or what but I don't seem to get into an agreement with myself. I always hope that the question will get an answer before evening and so far it has. I turned west and enjoyed the morning. The air was good to breath, nice and moist but a pain to drive: the rain at night had left the road wet and there was spray that reduced visibility. My next helmet will have visor wipers, I promise!





Before Yekaterinburg the air cleared and riding was a pleasure again. There was a stop at a railroad crossing that took a half an hour, maybe the train was behid schedule. Normally the highways go around villages but here the road went straight through with 20 kms of 40 km/h speed limits that the Kamaz trucks obediently followed. - In their position I'd have done the same: an infraction is either expensive or then they lose points and enough points lost means suspended driver's license. Driving through or was it around around Yekaterinburg (I never found out) was a confusing business. I tried to keep track of where I was going and stuck to the 80 kmph speed limit. All the cars were swooshing past me left and right. If I'd been run over at least I had not been in an infraction. Some consolation :huh .

Apparently Europe starts somewhere west of the city but I never noticed the sign so the offical proof is missing. Eventually I reached the town of Kungur, some 100 kms southeast of Perm. I thought was to visit 'ice caves', a series of caves of a total of 5 kms of lengts but then I calculated how far away is Kazan and decided to leave early in the morning. -The caves won't go anywhere, I have now a good reason to come again. I didn't mange to leave as early as I'd wished: the breakfast started at 07:20, not at seven as I had imagined so the road was rather full that closer to Perm. Some thirty kilometres before the traffic slowed to a complete stop. I advanced on the hard shoulder some kilometres until cars started to follow my example but at at a speed which I felt very uncomfortable with. The truck drivers didn't like it either, it only slowed them down so they blocked the shoulder. The reason was a crash – or a series of them – and the drivers were busy sorting the things out with a half a dozen cars blocking completely the lane leading to the city. As there was no police to control the situation, the outbound traffic flowed freely and inbound traffic suffered. The police was not far away, just a kilometre after the crash site, busily fining speeding motorists. They clearly have different priorities.


The road to Kazan goes through places which strangely resembled Finland: small hills, a lake here and there, a winding road. Then a roadsign or a Kamaz quickly returned me to reality. In the town of Igra, some 150 kms on E22/P242 soutwest from Perm, there was a roadsign for Kazan to the left, towards the city of Izhevsk and all the trucks turned that way. Garming said I should go straight and as I was trying to solve the dilemma, a friendly passer-by said that Garmin is right, go straight ahead. The road was excellent for the next 150 kms and I wondered why the trucks do not come this way. Soon I found out why: a 10 km reasonably bad stretch of road that would have justified a 50 km detour. The only problem was that it was slow or very slow so not really an issue for me.





At a 'Kafe' they were busy making the garden pretty for the season. Technical realisation is good although it may not get full points for the artistic impression.





I've always admired the Russian pragmatism and willingness to adapt new innovations. The esthetics of this architectural solution may be debatable but I'm sure it fulfills the purpose.





After the village of Kilymez it got serious: a warning for 'something' for 22 kms, I didn't dig out the dictionary to check it. Maybe I should have! To fill the holes, the road had been completely covered with soft sand, there was maybe 20 cms of it, perfect for a beach but not something one would expect to find on a road. It was impossible to keep the bike up: in the first two kilometres I dropped it three times. I know, the tyre pressure was too high, it might've helped to lower it but the basic problem was that I had a heavy bike with too much load in the wrong places. The familiar question: should I continue? I did. On the rest of the road I dropped the bike only once, sand was either blown away by traffic or washed off the road by rain.





I didn't remember having seen the symbol that Garmin displayed for the next move but no problem, I found that out soon enough: there was a ferry, 'pyatka' in Russian. A number of cars and some trucks transporting lumber had been waiting for some time already. The ferry apparently worked on timed schedule although no one could tell what it was. They load the cars, trucks and passengers, wait a bit, traverse the river (it takes maybe fifteen minutes), unload the ferry and wait for a half an hour before they restart loading again. We waited at least an hour – I didn't care to look at the watch anymore.




At first the deckhand didn't like to have his picture taken at all but after seeing the result he changed totally. We joked about eating - not enough/too much, travelling far and wide / from shore to shore and in general everything one can talk about with a vocabulary of ten words. And he insisted to have a picture taken of the two of us.





Once over there was under two hours ride left to Kazan. The weather forecast predicted rain with 30% probability. I got a 100% rain for one hour and it rained hard until the sububrbs of Kazan. As I was going to stay two nights in Kazan – this is a holiday trip after all – I had chosen Giuseppe's, a good hotel a few blocks from Kremlin and the pedestrian street. They didn't have the double room they had promised but intead, offered a single room at normal price or a suite for the price of the double. I took the suite: I just couldn't bear sleeping in the same room with my riding gear. Maybe I've been on the road for too long: my helmet smells like an old tent after two weeks of camping in rain and I barely need a coat hanger for the driving suit: it is enough to just let the pants and the jacket lean against a wall and they stay up straight – dirt makes wonders. I did not feel much better myself, the afternoon's bikelifting exercise had drawn all the juice from me. I wasn't happy with the mattress but it didn't bother me for long.

Very interesting

nice report. thats a true adventure, like stepping back in time.

Gardening in big cities is apparently a big thing nowadays. My hotel was no different. At least lettuce was fresh.




When going out in the morning there were policemen everywhere, also in the the hotel lobby and a pizzeria next door. They were DPS (traffic police) officers in full dress uniform: president Medvedev was on a state visit to the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan. However, apart from the presence of policemen and an occasional small motorcade, there was nothing that would've disturbed the life of a tourist. It was only later I understood the need to keep the people away from the streets when the president was driving. Apparently he forgot the gear in D position when he got out of his car and only his security men with quick reflexes saved people from being crushed. I didn't manage to embed the video but here's the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhReMfwDU8M&feature=player_embedded

As a good tourist I visited the Kremlin. I don't understand much about old buildings so I took a museum tour, first the natural history museum. The ladies keeping watch must have had a slow day and were aching to tell me all they knew about the evolution of the earth and I couldn't stop them and they didn't let me run away: I did understand the cambrian, perm and devon eras and which forms of life were prevalent and when but, honestly, I missed the details, my Russian is still rather rudimentary. After the geology lesson she handed me over to a colleague who continued with zoology including a detailed presentation of the dinosaur fossils and the inevitable mammoth (this was a juvenile), cave bear, some extinct horse and a giant moose species skeletons. The icing on the cake was a cute 20-cm long reptile fossil. No, it was not from Tatarstan but from Morocco. I'm not sure if I was any wiser when I finally got out.

The art gallery next door had a calming effect. There is an art school in Kazan and after the Revolution there was an avantgardist group that gained some reputation. Their works did not appear that avant-garde to me but they must've been so 90 years ago. They were definitely good painters, I wouldn't mind hanging their works in my living room. All of the painters whose works I saw seemed to have died after WW2 so they must've escaped the Stalin's purges. Next stop was the exhibition of a painter of the following generation. He had also been the director of the art school after WW2. The tide had turned in Russia (or rather Sovietunion) and avant-gardism was out and social realism was in, as dictated by Stalin. He couldn't stand anything he didn't understand and art was one of those things. The paintings were greatly idealised so that the war heroes or the heroes of 'socialist struggle to build a better society' looked like caricatures. I can't tell if the guy was serious about his work or if he just painted as he was told to do (not a bad strategy for survival in those days) but if I see them again I'll laugh aloud and that would not be good because he painted 'Serious Things about Heroic Deeds at the Great Patriotic War' and one doesn't laugh at anything about the Great Patriotic War.

And one more thing: there was also an exhibition of a Buryat (he was born in Buryatia, somewhere south of Lake Baikal) sculptor, Dashi Namdakov. His sculptures are incredible: a kind of mixture of the Lord of the Rings and Michelangelo. If anything, they're technically complicated. Some are a bit disturbing but it's OK in broad daylight.




The Kazan Kreml is a 'World Heritage Site' so everything there is as well taken care of as it can be. Rather boring actually.




When walking on the main pedestrian street the need for more work strikes the eye and they are working, no doubt about that.





The aforism must be immortal but so badly cut off that I can't imagine what the author tries to say.





I'd think twice before entering this establishment though.



I'm not much of a shopper and can't say if there was everything a man might need, even less about the needs of a woman, but I did find the postcards I had been looking for since Altay. Not a bad place at all! The rest of the day I spent trying to put together the story. Slow going! And there is always the first time: for dinner I had a pizza, the first on this trip. It was an Italian hotel after all.

Sometimes before eight on Saturday morning on the way to Nizhny Novgorod. just outside the Kreml,




I stopped at the red ligth next to a biker. His name was Anatoly and he was on his way to Cheboksary, halfway to Nizhny. As his English was not very good he invited me to join him, there was a bikers' meeting and there would be many who I could discuss with. He took me to roads I wouldn't have driven and rode at a speed I never drove myself – I was never in a hurry in Russia. The campsite was on Volga, opposite to Cheboksary and there were maybe a dozen bikers (but some twenty tents so more participants on the way) when we arrived in mid-morning. They were an easygoing bunch of people and immediately invited me to stay for the day and the night: vodka and rock'n roll, a big party! Unfortunately I had exceptionally already reserved a room at Nizhny so I couldn't stay. Their bikes were mostly big H-Ds and they wore vests with fresh 'probationary' badges. Apparently the Kazan branch of MC Rossija had received a promotion and they were celebrating. At the time I didn't think it a good idea to ask them to be photographed but it seems my shyness was totally unnecessary: there were plenty of pictures of the guys on the internet. Anatoly saw me off to the road to Nizhny.



The road from Cheboksary to Nizhny Novgorod was packed with trucks until a hundred kilometres before Nizhny, then the trucks turned to Moscow. Roadworks slowed the traffic and it was hot. The Heidenau was a good tyre but the sections where the top layer of asphalt had been grated off the were a pain, the tyre sought the right groove and going was wobbly. I had a biological break at a service station. When i had started to put the helmet back on, two men came running to see me. I was certainly not an ordinary sight but I wondered what was so special about me. One of them wanted to ahve pictures taken of me and him, his friend and son and blabbered all the time; I understood 'Kazan', 'pjatka', 'jouki pauki' (the only Russian curse word I know) and made signs of me being tired. The waved me off and only after I was on the road again I realised that he was the deckhand on the ferry of the River Vjatka, reliving my ride on that path that was marked as a road on the maps. Clearly the heat was taking its toll.
Nizhny was quiet except for the pedestrian street. I didn't get much out of that place but wasn't too eager to find anything either. Clearly I'd done enough tourism for this trip.

Nizhny Novgorod is the first place where I realised what taiga really is. Since Jektarinburg I'd been driving in the forests, sometimes hundreds of kilometres but somehow I hadn't seen the forest for the trees. There it is: mostly flat, only marshes and a rare town cut the monotony. Taiga's in the background. In front another eternal flame.




In Nizhny they still keep up with traditions although I suspect this café is for tourists only: cold coffee, warm beer and rude service, in the true spirit of communism.




Enough of Nizhny, I wanted back home: under two thousand and some kilometres. The road to Vologda followed the Volga for the first fifty kilometres and I made little progress. Just outside Vologda I stopped at a roadside vendor of garden decorations. I was speechless!




The shopkeepers, Vera and Yuri, had come from a town near (relatively speaking) of Penza, some 500 kms southeast of Moscov and nearly 1000 kilometres from Vologda. They had come to Vologda in May and intended to stay until August, sleeping in the car, a Lada station wagon. Understandable, they couldn't leave their stock unattended for the night. Apparently a colleague replenishes their stock during the summer. They invited me for a coffee and were apparently happy to receive a tourist. I dare say I was the first Finn at their shack ever.



When I was leaving they presented me a small green porcelain frog. I'm not particularly fond of this kind of things but that piece of art (well..) will have a place of honour in my garden.

One of the last villages wished me good roads, the last one said nothing.




This time I mostly drove same roads with the trucks and only occasionally took a shorcut. I had learned something: maybe I made some extra kilometres but it was not nearly as difficult as some sections before Kazan. My collection of pictures of statues of Lenins gets more diversified: the first one painted silver _and_ he keeps his hand in the pocket.




The churches are being renovated and rebuilt everywhere but there's still some work left. I doubt if this'll ever be restored in its' former glory: the average age of the population seemed to be over 60 and going up and the most active place in the village appeared to be the cemetery.





Traversing Yaroslavl was simple although big cities are always a pain. The road from Moscow to Archangelsk goes through the city so there were no unnecessary stops and the road up to Vologda could have been from anywhere in Europe except for the taiga. Downtown Vologda was a city of human dimensions. It was again one of those places where the oligarchs hadn't decided to demonstrate the size of their egos.



And then there was the river. Replace the boats with steam-driven ships and that could be from a novel by Tshekhov.



The rest you don't want to know anything about, it was just like any normal, depressing Russian city. The hotel was good and as the name, Angleterre, implies, the girls at the reception spoke perfect English. Better than I but I don't qualify as a yardstick in any respect in any language. I was too tired to go outside to eat so I had dinner at the hotel restaurant. There the menu was in perfect English but I spoke more Russian the personnel spoke English.

I had planned to stay the next night in Tikhvin, some 450 kilometres away, some 200 kilometres north of St. Peterburg. It was supposed to be some kind of tourist site, due to a monastery which houses a precious icon but it was not exactly so. The hotel I tried to find was not at the address indicated by the LP and when I called them they explained that they were fully booked for the night. That can happen for a hotel that has eight rooms. The local 'intourist' relic was not that attractive so I drove to Volhov, 70 kms closer to St. Peterburg. No chance, they had TWO Intourist relics, both fully booked. This started to get interesting, maybe I'll have to use the tent, after all. Some hundred kilometres closer to St. Petersburg, maybe 50 kilometres before the city, I turned off the motorway (yes, there was one) to the town of Schlisselburg and Garmin found a small hotel, 'Star', next to the shipyards. The owner seemed to have contacts with the navy brass: in the breakfast room there were pictures of him with admirals. Unfortunately he only spoke perfect Russian so I'll have to go back some other time for more details.

The hotel was next to a park and being near a naval shipyard, it was decorated appropriately.




All that was left was two hundred kilometres of bad roads or roadworks and one dead end to the border. That was the only time I really had to return some ten kilometres because the road just wasn't there. I also noticed that the Russians do not take any chances with railroad crossings.



Unfortunately the holiday season had started and the queue was at last three hundred meters when I arrived. When I finally got to the Russian immigration the queue was half a kilometre. Timing was not perfect but could have been worse, I only queued for an hour. Ffrom the border, Helsinki was only an hour and a half away. I kept the speed just below the limit I'd lose my licence if caught. Irene hadn't forgotten how to ride at decent speed.