June 10th 2002 After serious damage to the Switch card and threats of a three month delay by the bureaucrats at the Chinese embassy we are still on schedule for departure on the 15th, watch this space!
July 5th 2002 We have made it as far as Berlin! The last two weeks have been quite hectic with our preparations for the main body of the trip continuing while we are still in the western world. Thanks a lot to the people who have put us up so far - The Malone-lees and Christina and Wolfgang. A little about the trip so far . . .
Holland was really great with flat lands Cycle paths and really friendly people. We met some British historians/actors in Apeldorn and got on fine there during one of our rest days - Alright Ade and Este. Otherwise the communication has been mainly hand signal and German based with Christ's previous knowledge coming in very handy, especially as we are using a 1:1000000 scale map!
We watched the world cup final in a German pub on the Elbe, we sat at the back of the hall and minded our P's and Q's. The outcome was disappointing for the locals but we didn't hang round long enough to join in their undoubtedly heavy commiseration.
Our stay in Handstadt was a very enjoyable break staying with Christ's aunt and uncle we were treated like royalty and ate just as well, being out in the country gave us the opportunity to sit around and let our legs recover, the new muscles that we need to pedal these sit down bikes are slow in the maturing! The weather has been quite atrocious recently but we have found that you can only ever get so wet! Mechanical problems have been limited to Christ's pannier rack, which appears to be made of some kind of cheese. We stopped in near the oldest airfield in the World (Havelland) and found a very friendly East German welder called Hans who made our first repair - Thanks alot for that. We also went kite flying with his son Renne and learnt a little about the social life for young people in the old eastern bloc.
Finding accommodation has always been a last minute affair so we have found ourselves in varying degrees of comfort, from a pension with a swimming pool to a rather less glamorous square of concrete on an industrial estate just outside Rotterdam. We bumped into the Ozzy P.M. the other day while mooching around the Berlin, the police and the bullet proof glass prevented any close contact but it was good to see the old boy. The more enduring sites of Berlin have been seen and done, the public transport round the town is excellent and there's loads to do here which is fine until you find the 30p cans of beer!
Christ and I are getting along fine, arguments remain quite frequent but are non-violent, we expect they shall remain so; until we start drinking alone in the backwoods with no other English speakers for company! Our first good knees up came on our first night in Berlin, we had a really good campfire session with some cool Dutch blokes we met, it is surprising how much the presence of a Dutch man can improve a party! (All right Renne, Marshall and Remko).
The social life in Berlin has slowed down our Russian visa application by a couple of days thanks to the strange early morning hours kept by the visa office. Today we took on the queue and the bureaucrats for the last time (hopefully); we are now waiting for Monday to get our passports back from the embassy and head on to Poland. We are hoping that the Ex director of the British consul in Russia, who we met at the embassy, may come in of use some time! We are staying on a very cheap camp site (~ 4 quid a night!) in Berlin at the moment it is a really nice place (in Tegal) with lots of young backer packers to-ing and fro-ing all the time (big up Anna and Marla) if anyone wants to "easy jet" out here you may convince us to stay on for the love parade next weekend!
July 15th 2002 Ohh the pain, Ohh the woe! It has been a week now we have been running around so frenetically that I have not had a chance to update the website. Things would have been different if some young opportunist hadn't made it away with our passports and bike keys! We were not entirely blameless . . .
The Russians finally relinquished and issued our visas on the Monday 8th and that very same day we left Berlin for a youth hostel just north of the city, unfortunately in our usual disorganised fashion we failed to book and were denied a place on arrival; it was still under construction! After swimming in the beautiful lake that it shall overlook when completed we had a couple of tinnies watching the sunset and congratulated each other on our achievements. I soon went to bed in my new tent leaving Christ to do a spot of fishing. At 2am he woke me with the news that his money belt was missing, I went back to sleep - it was pointless looking for it in the dark.
The following day we informed the police of the theft and spent an uncomfortable night on the YHA building site, we watched the bikes all night in the hope that our thieves would return, they didn't.
Since this stroke of bad luck our fortunes have changed, we have met an extremely kind family who are allowing us to stay in their garden while we take on five different nationalites of bureaucrat! Presently we are once more residing in Berlin, looking for work and waiting for the endless list of boxes to be ticked so that we can move on with a new pair of visa endorsed passports.
In a perverse way it has been quite a result! The saintly family that are looking after us (vielen dank to the Timms!) includes two Drs. and they have issued us with our very own course of antibiotics should we get ill in Russia! A photo of these living legends shall follow. The other piece of good fortune was that we managed to get to The Love Parade! Not being that much into my house music I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be pretty wicked! Loads of floats; every one decked with a massive rig, some decent tunes and loads of naked people! It's in my diary for next year! We have also had a chance to see the Bears of Berlin.
July 19th 2002 Things this lucky only happen in the pictures! We phoned up the Cops on Monday night to ask about our lost passports and I think its time to buy a lottery ticket because all our numbers came up (except $77)!
I'm now sitting in an Internet cafe in Poland.
We informed all the required diplomats of our incredible luck and left Berlin yesterday afternoon. The countryside between here and the Berlin has been beautiful, the poles have so far been very friendly and bar the torrential downpours every thing is going great guns. We met a bloke in Berlin who suggested circumnavigating Belarus due to the questionable sanity of its Leader, taking his advice we are now on the road for Lithuania. It is a pretty straight number, apparently one of Hitlers doing - although we have now stopped shouting "Achtung!" at the slower cyclists we pass!
Today we have given ourselves a day off to let our weakened legs recover. We are staying at what appears to be a polish youth camp, they seem quite happy for us to be there and have invited us to a party tonight where we can experience some more of that Russian Techno, although Christ is looking forward to getting a bit more Motorhead! Today we hitched into the local town (Walcz), I have taken the opportunity to get my barnet cropped and we are both taking great pleasure in doing some more beer tasting! Our collective Russian/Polish vocabulary is what the Russians call "malinki" so in-depth discussions shall be limited to our own experiences; I hope my Walkman batteries keep on keeping on! Time for some grass brewed Vodka!
July 27th 2002 We have arrived in Vilnius the hitherto unknown (by me at least) capital of Lithuania. Poland was good and flat for the remainder of our route (the top speed remains a little over 31 mph), we passed through the beautiful northern parks of the country and saw many a cool lake and forest glade, not to forget the midges!
We had one further rest day there which we spent in Maragow - "Piknik Country", we were a couple of days short of witnessing Polands largest country music festival but picked up some stickers for the bikes none the less. We tactfully refused the advances of a salesman who told us the stars and stripes would make an excellent addition to out flagpoles!
A night spent with some poles on holiday was not as boring as it sounds! They showed us great hospitality and were in no small way responsible for our lunch time departure the following day.
My spare tire (for my bike) fell off the back while we were putting some speedy miles between us and the campsite, causing me to get vexed cycling the 8 mile round trip back again to look for it. I hope the cheap Polish replacement I now own will see those Russian thorns thwarted!
On crossing the border to Lithuania one of the guards had a cheap laugh which almost called for another stop at the laundrettes - he told us we could'nt come in and would have to return home!
This is certainly the place to come if you are in the berry buying business, every man and his dog wants to sell you a jar! We don't pass much else along the roads apart form the woods they must pick them in. The Lithuania countryside is just as beautiful as the Polish but their architecture is far better, for the time being the landscape is free from those huge grey concrete flats the Russians were so fond of building every where.
The roads are still good and we made the 100 miles from just past Ogrodnik on the border to the capital yesterday in 6 and a half hours of cycling, I only wish the woman at reception hadn't decided to give us a room on the top floor of her 5 storey hostel! The weather continues to be rain free and our one sided suntans are coming along nicely! (Cycling east all the time isn't good for the catwalk!)
August 11th 2002 It suddenly got very hot! After enjoying a very cool Hip Hop night somewhere down the back streets of Vilnius we left the capital city a day later on a scorching Monday morning. Not really cut out for that shirt-drenching kind of weather we were forced to take lengthy lunch breaks out of the sun for the next few days, a practice we are no strangers to!
The lakes continued to appear along the road and we tried to fit in with their schedule for the lunchtime swim. It was great to get to the Latvian border in such a short time, even though we did have to sleep in some woods one night. Latvia was much the same as Lithuania in it's landscapes, the people were just as surprised to see us and just as difficult to communicate with, although our Russian words got an airing with better reception.
The Roads all disappeared off in the direction of some large cities we were not too interested in so we were forced to take a dirt track as far as the Russian border. Ignoring the advice of a local farmer, thinking our orienteering skills far surpassed his local knowledge, we took a right down a very tempting looking piece of asphalt road and ended up in Belarus - or so we think? Not to sure about Belarus, all we took from it were a large number of large bites from a swarm of even larger horse fly type beasts, maybe they guard the border?
Eventually we found our way to a small boarder town called Zillupe, there we stayed in a hotel, which doubled as school dormitory, all of the other guest were school kids so we felt right at home.
We had a day off there swimming in the river preparing for out assault on Russia with a Russian gutter language tutor named Alexi. The boarder was as formal as you would expect for a country whose reputation is along the 1984 line, we happily zoomed past the half km long queue of lorries to meet the border guards. Fortunately we alluded them, partly due to their bemusement about our method of transport I think.
We started on the M9 towards Moscow - which is not as big as it sounds - but our first mission to try and get hold of some roubles took us off down an A-road anyhow, these are to be avoided in the future (it was in an awful state of repair)!
Russians love paper work and the Russian babushkas love their beards (a few specimens have made me very jealous). I was about to encounter fine examples of both as I entered the local bank, not having the luxury of a hole in the wall I was forced to speak to an equally intelligent bank clerk, who had absolutely no interest in helping me. After a tour of the town on some kind of mad paper trail (constructed for their own amusement I expect) I ended up without a clue about what was going on and a very small amount of hard currency.
Things got a bit better, after a nice lunch in a local bar full of working girls we met a friendly local guy who presented us with a load of cucumbers, after a sunglasses exchange and fag packet signing session we moved off to find the M9 and tune back into reality. At our night stop we got a ride in a Russian panda car as the local constabulary insisted they took us to their favourite local swimming spot, I guess you've got to work the vodka and doughnuts off somewhere! That was the night of a great storm which left us even less capable of communication than usual.
After allowing a sub-machine gun toting rozza to sample the delights of cycling recumbent style we found ourselves near the town of Velikie Lukie, there we met an absolute legendary Russian called Nicoli. He pulled up in his fully working BMW 316 with his mates piled in the back and invited us back to his flat for the night. Not only did he take us out for a night on the town (a chaperon was more than welcome in the red-neck disco we visited!) but he also introduced us to an incredible concept, the Russian Banya . . .
Anyone who has not experienced one should come round to my house - when I get one! It was an all male affair and I shall not forget for a long time the image of a birthday suited Christ being whipped (birch twigs of course) by an equally naked grinning toothless Russian. I'm sure he has similarly dear memories!
We have met a German rally team manager called Jurgen, who was most interesting and friendly, judging by the roads it will not be our last encounter with his kind!
More gifts of cucumbers were made to the English tourists.
Truckers motels are pretty good over here and we have been making good use of these very reasonably priced roadside facilities. Though leaving the road for a local town is always an option we are enjoying the culture of the Russian long distance lorry driver; for it's rich and varied style of alcohol abuse! Fortunately the police are ever present with their automatic weapons to make sure things don't get out of hand! We had to catch a train into Moscow from Istra thanks to the unfriendliness of the town's hotel proprietors the lunacy of a few drivers around the city.
The madness has continued even in this relative centre of civilisation, I'm not sure who came up with the idea of not putting signs on anything but the Muscovites seem to direct themselves around their splendid Metro system with some kind of divine guidance; and when it comes to looking for shops you'd better bring your x-ray specs! Nice place though.
Tomorrow we are going to hit the train again to get out of town; we are aiming for a place called Noginsk where we will join the M7 on our way to Nishny Novgorod. It should take us about 5 days to get there. The Gigantic Volga River meanders though the place and we thought it would be wrong to whistle straight past with out dropping in!