59. Day 53 (Part 1) – We made it to Moscow

Monday 28 May 2007

It continued to rain during the night but we slept well.  After a nice hot shower we were back on the road at 9.18am.  This was a very rough road with huge trucks passing us in the opposite direction while other trucks overtook us at over 100kph.

The trucks were bringing freight in from Finland and from the port of St Petersburg.  Car carriers had loads of brand new cars heading for Moscow.  There is clearly a huge economic boom going on in Russia.

As we drove the sun came out and the rough roads sometimes changed to good roads for no apparent reason.

We passed many attractive wooden houses.

Also many old homes in need of some repair.

We stopped at a petrol station and purchased a map of this area. There were more service stations along this route, at least every 10 to 15 kms, more than we have seen anywhere in the world. Also new motels appeared occasionally.

Dick remembers in 1966 how the Trafalgar Tour bus spent hours somewhere between St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) and Moscow, searching for a service station and all they found was an old dirty pump in a back street of a small town.

The scenery all the way from the Finnish border, other than the cities had been high trees and swampland but now we started to come into a little bit of farming land.

It was 68 degrees F with a little bit of rain every now and then but a lovely day for driving. We stopped occasionally to make ourselves a cup of good Aussie tea.  Unfortunately the batteries in the campervan seemed only to last about ten minutes with the inverter.  We believe that the six months of hibernation in Scotland, even with Jo Ann kindly starting the vehicle regularly for us, had damaged them.  Fortunately in an emergency we can run the engine to power the inverter.

As we got closer to Moscow, we came upon a special Russian system – the three lane highway with an alternate passing lane. The bad roads in Russia are bad because the roadbed was never properly formed and with the huge number of heavy trucks, it has sunk in places.  Modern Russia has solved this problem and the new roads we travelled on were as good as anywhere in the western world.

When we were 279kms from Moscow we noticed that the road signs were in both Cyrillic and the English alphabet making it much easier for us to navigate.  We phoned Dmitry and arranged to ring him when we got to Klin.  The temperature increased the further south we got.  At 190kms from Moscow it was 89 degrees F.  We kept passing the police checkpoints but fortunately they didn’t pull us over.  The temperature rose to 90 degrees F as we crossed the Volga River.

The Volga runs in a giant loop around Moscow and ends up in the Black Sea.

Near Pemknhd we crossed a river with lots of little boats on it.  We were at 1,190feet and the temperature was now over 92 degrees.  We also noticed an increase in the number of police around mostly pulling over trucks.  At Spas-zavlok we were pulled over at a check point but once Dick spoke in English, the official did not even want to look at our documents; he just smiled and waved us on.

We passed through the town of Klin, where Tchaikovsky wrote the Nutcracker suite.

There were huge heating pipes beside the road, the type we had seen in Eastern Siberia at Provideniya.  In the old Soviet days, rather than individual houses and apartments having heaters, the Government provided a huge boiler system with insulated pipes that travelled right throughout the town or city and connected to each house with hot water.

On the good road out of Klin, we rang Dmitry as we passed our first McDonalds since St Petersburg and we started to pass high rise buildings and apartments.

We were still 70kms from Moscow and Dmitry gave us a latitude of 55 degrees 54.7N to meet him, near an Ikea Store.  At about 20 kms from Moscow we saw the huge Ikea store and there standing beside the road was our friend Dmitry.

He had his driver take his car and he jumped in our vehicle and directed us around the first and outer ring road of Moscow.  The traffic was truly staggering with six lanes of traffic going in each direction, all bumper to bumper and hardly moving.

As we crawled along Dmitry told us about himself. He had been with the military as a young officer and a rocket engineer.  In his early days, at the time of the Soviet Union he was told he would never be able to travel overseas however in the last decades he had left the military and started his own business in banking and had done very well.  This not only allowed him to travel extensively everywhere from South America to Africa but also to employ 20 staff and have an apartment in the city of Moscow, a beautiful modern home in the outer suburbs and his own plane.  This is because he is a good businessman and an extremely hard worker.  During the journey Dmitry spent time on his mobile phone giving orders to his staff – or that is what we thought he was doing, considering he was speaking in Russian and we don’t know Russian!

We had met Dmitry around 4pm and at 7pm we were still slowly moving on the perimeter road. We passed huge shopping centres and new apartment blocks.

Every now and then we found a broken down car on the highway.  It always seemed to be a Russian Lada and at one stage Dmitry said the words to this effect, “Only a stupid person would drive a Russian car in the 21st Century!”  He made a good point because every vehicle around us seemed to be German, Japanese or Korean.

At 7.35pm we arrived at Dmitry’s house in an outer suburb on the southern side of Moscow.  The house was a new, modern two storey home with a big yard with a security fence and gates.  Situated in one corner of the yard was a large building housing the sauna and in the other corner, a house for their hired help and security staff.

We met Irene, Dmitry’s wife and Alex who is Dmitry’s driver and security guard.  We all enjoyed a lovely evening eating schevlick from the barbecue and a glass of champagne.

Dmitry is clearly very bright and an academic.  He told us the history of the Tsars and early Russia and he had an extremely good knowledge of world affairs.  Both Dmitry and Irene speak very good English.  They have a daughter, Olga who also speaks good English but unfortunately we didn’t meet her as she was studying at University in Moscow.

Click here for the next day – the last day of Stage 4.

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