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St Petersburg, Roosia

Route: Helsinki - the border - St Petersburg

Riding the bike today has been one of the biggest thrills of my life. The buzz I got.. inCREDible.. breathtaking moments.. as in moments when my breath *literally* was taken away.. such an impact that the only word I could think of to describe how I felt was "stoked".. an Americanism I hope I've never used before and never shall again. That's what riding in to the heart of St Petersburg has done to me.

.. and yet, and yet.. in the sharpest of contrasts, I've also felt a yawning well of sadness for Russia and the Russians, at the way their lives are and appear inevitably to be.

--

To start at the beginning. Wake. Shower. Coffee. (Very good coffee -- thanks again, Anna.) A morning walk with Emil, Stella and the pushchair. Once again, I didn't get to ride in it. Packing. Farewells. BIG thanks.

I decided to tackle the downtown hell of Helsinki full on - good practice for St Petersburg. Helsinki has something of the air of a Soviet, or ex-Soviet, city about it. Finland has always been a Scandinavian country in my mind. It is - but it was also a frontline state bordering the Soviet Union and always aware of the might of the Roosian Bear; a recent chattle of Old Roosia to boot, Finland emerged as an independent coountry less than a century ago, taking advantage of the turmoil of the October Revolution 300 miles away in St Petersburg. Before that, all the road signs were in Russian as well as Finnish. And Swedish. The architecture, too, was Russian. And the climate.

Now, grey apartment blocks give way to grey office blocks as you reach the centre. The streets are dirty. The weather has a lot to do with that too, and on cue it was bitterly cold.

I took wrong turn after wrong turn. 'Just follow the coast' seems so easy. But in a big city it's so easy to lose all concept of direction - especially when you can't see the sun, let alone the sea.

But soon enough I found myself barreling out of the city towards the East. Simply follow the lumbering trucks with Russian number plates painted on the back. I stuck to the main road rather than hugging the coast, after the hours spent trying to escape from Helsinki, and reached the border at 4.07pm.

I left the border at 5.46pm - 99 minutes to get through Russian border control? A new record!

--

There's a German joke (honestly!) that I heard at least three times while queueing up.

   "I'm thinking of going to Russia," says Hans.

   "Why not?", replies Franz. "Your car is already there!!"

(I never said it was funny, just that it was a joke. A German joke.)

But, just like good humour, there is an element of truth here. I didn't have the guts to take my camera out in the border area to record this, so you'll have to
a) take my word for it
b) travel to the Finnish-Russian border at Torfjanovka
or
c) find someone who didn't wuss out of taking pictures in a restricted zone

but I must have seen two hundred car transporters waiting to cross the border. Each carrying, say, ten cars - high-powered executive toys, big shiny 4×4s, Mercedes and BMWs and Volvos. I've heard so many stories about cars stolen in London, Munich and Paris turning up in Roosia. It all seemed so *blatent* - until i remembered another old and unfunny joke and realised they weren't smuggling stolen cars across at all.

They were smuggling stolen car transporters.

--

How To Get Through The Finnish-Roosian Border

1. Queue on the Finnish side of the border. Make sure you're in the car lane and not the truck lane, which looks like it takes days to pass.

2. Five vehicles at a time are called forward. There's a customs window which you can avoid unless you have something to declare, and a cursory passport check. Back to the bike.

3. Ride a few hundred metres to the Roosian border facility. The trucks are way off to one side. They look like they've been parked there since the late 1980s.

4. Don't join the first car queue you see: instead, weave through past the suckers who'll be there for ages and find space at the front. (This may work better for bikes than cars towing caravans. This is a good thing.)

5. Again, a small number of vehicles are called forward, this time by a strangely attractive gun-wielding security guard. (Then I realise it's not the gun that turns me on, but the fact that under the big Cossack hat is a beautiful young woman. Phew.)

6. Bearing in mind that all signs are in Roosian only, do what everyone else does and head first for a phonebox-sized hut in which sits another foxy soldierette checking visas, glancing at official invitation documents and stamping passports.

7. Reach the front of the queue, (remembering not to flirt with someone who carries a gun) and be told there's a form to fill in before the passport can be stamped.

8. Go off and fill in the form (which is all in Roosian, but there are examples pinned up if you can't read Cyrillic).

9. Queue again.

10. Realise the soldierette is flirting with you. Decide not to risk it; emerge with passport stamped.

11. Join the next queue at the next phonebox and present accumulated documents. This soldierette doesn't flirt but, on reflection, you've never really had a thing for Roosian shotputters.

12. She will tell you you have to fill in a customs declaration form, in duplicate, and fishes out someone else's form as a guide to what to put where.

13. (Briefly consider stealing this poor innocent person's identity; then realise the same thing will probably happen to your form, when completed. Sigh.)

14. Soldierette #2 will have explained that you also need to buy your vehicle insurance and pay the 100 rouble entry duty before returning to her.

15. Off, then, to the main building to buy insurance - or rather, to queue to buy insurance. One month's insurance costs about £12 and is "not worth the paper it's printed on." Helping the foxy clerk fill in the details is challenging. Note that you apparantly now ride a 'Bonneville Triumph'. Just be thankful that you don't ride a 'British Citizen' or that your Reason For Travel isn't 'Born in Norwich'. Not that any such mistakes would make the insurance document one kopeck less worthless than it already is.

16. At a separate window, behind an unmarked door, queue to pay your entry duty.

17. Acknowledge the German businessman to your left who points out repeatedly and loudly that this duty is "illegal" under "international law", that all Roosians are "criminal" and that the border guards are "all mafia - everyone knows that" and the only good thing about the country is "the cheap vodka and the cheap women". (He may be there when you cross. He also told me makes this journey every week on business.)

18. Hope the bank clerk, a woman, doesn't understand English.

19. Realise the bank clerk doesn't understand English. And is making a damned good fist of not understanding that her job is to take 100 roubles for an illegal entry duty.

20. Explain her job to her in a language in which you know five words. Pay the 100 roubles.

21. (Don't expect to be able to pay with a credit card. Take cash: roubles, if you have any, or Euros or dollars, which you'll need to change into roubles at an 'interesting' rate of exchange.)

22. Emerge, battered but unbeaten, with stamped duty document.

23. Remembering your passport, invitation, duty document, insurance document and duplicate customs declarations, queue up for soldierette #2 again. She dimly recalls having seen your face at some stage in her long, hard life.

24. Watch with bemusement/ amusement as she types one-fingeredly everything you have written out into her computer.

25. Smile.

26. Be patient.

27. Wait for her to ask "what your name?" and then point to the bit on the form where you have written your name.

28. Wait for her to ask "what name bike?" and then point to the bit on the form where you have written the make of your bike.

29. Wait for her to ask "No no no, what name bike?" and then point to the bit on the form where you have written the registration number of your bike.

30. Wait for her to ask "what you birthday?" and then point to the bit on the form where you have written your date of birth.

31. She will print out the resulting form and hand it to you, together with one of the customs declarations, now stamped several times, your insurance document, your entry duty document and your passport.

32. Try to find space in your panniers for all these new documents, none of which you really want to lose.

33. Ride forward to the 'STOP' sign, be waved on by one guard and ride about two metres into Roosia.

34. Stop when the other guard blows his whistle at you. Get off, remember which pannier you put all the documents in, open it, find the customs declaration and smile inwardly as he says "Good. Is drive on" before you can even unfold it.

35. Turn the clock on your handlebars forward by an hour remembering also that, even though it may not feel like it, it *is* still the same day that you arrived at the border.

Welcome to Roosia.

--

And just to rub it in - it had been dim and dry when I arrived at the border; by the time I left, it was dark and the rain was coming down in cascades.

--

About three miles inside Roosia the clock ticked round to 14,680 miles -- exactly 10,000 miles since leaving Norwich on 26 July.

--

The first miles inside the former Soviet Union are so unlike the Good Old Days, and so very unlike the barren, restricted border on the road to Murmansk as to make me rub my eyes. Which is no mean feat when you're wearing thick winter biking gloves and riding on busy roads in the rain.

In place of the long empty stretches of forest and tundra, here are gaudy neon signs promoting supermarkets, blinking arrows pointing to cheap motels, lights blazing from the forecourt of one petrol station after another, each trying harder than the last to attract the Finns who come here to stock up on the cheap. They are quite happy to put up with the border crossing because petrol and other goods are half the price here. The last time I saw such flagrant cross-border profiteering I was admiring the way so many Finns cross over to work in Norway - where they can get paid up to six times more than at home.

If they're the same Finns... well, they're onto a good thing.

Road conditions from the border to St Petersburg appeared to be pretty good. I say 'appeared to be' because what with the dark and the rain, I couldn't see much of the road. And yes, Mum and yes, B, I * = *know* = * I promised not to ride in the dark again.. but I was already wet by this stage and decided that I'd rather get to Petersburg (as us locals call it) in one go than stop in a crummy motel tonight and have to get into wet things for another run tomorrow. Anyway, the signs and the lights and the motels soon disappeared behind me and I settled into the groove of another Russian road.

There were three elements ahead of me. The sky. To either side, forest. Below and stretching ahead out of sight, the road. All three were variations of that peculiarly purply green shade of grey that broccoli turns to after it's been sitting in the bottom of my fridge for three months. But you don't need or want to know that.

The sky, the forest to either side and the road ahead of me were all shades of purple, green and grey. There, let's leave it at that.

To break the monotony of the greys there was also a white-ish line down the middle of the road - some of the time. This is another unfunny joke, made at the expense of tourists who might consider that it implies where on the tarmac a car or lorry should be, depending on the direction they are travelling. Ha ha!, think the locals, as they veer off in any which way they like. The road is nominally one lane each way. As traffic built up closer to the big city, road hogs in both directions were using the white line as their personal property, veering back into line only to avoid the equally idiotic maniac coming the other way.

The only time they refuse to cut in to the flow of legitimate traffic is on the brow of a hill or round a bend, where to do so would imply they were cowards and weaklings and the rest of us would all laugh at them.

In one bunched up section of traffic, I joined the tail of a queue of cars waiting to overtake a particularly slow, belching, grinding lorry. Riding defensively and with due consideration for all conditions, I placed myself 3 seconds behind the car in front of me and took the dominant position in the lane -- somewhere between the middle and the left side, making sure that I was completely visible to traffic behind me and anyone in front. While I could easily out-accelerate all the Ladas and Volgas, I was taking no risks as one after another they whined and creaked and groaned their way past the slow, belching, grinding lorry. In short, it was a very ordinary stretch of driving, mentioned here mainly because I was * = *under* = *taken by a rusting white Lada that rode halfway onto the hard shoulder in order to squeeze past me.

Fair play to the guy - he got past the Westerner on the big, expensive Western bike. He certainly showed me, eh?

Sadly for him, he then got stuck one place in front of me for several miles. And the headlights are powerful and strong on my big, expensive Western bike and I managed to shine them straight onto his rear-view mirror.

I'm assuming, of course, that he had a rear-view mirror fitted in his car and that he occasionally would have tried using it.

--

To St Petersburg.

This is the map I had punctiliously copied from Google Maps.

OK, punctilious may be stretching it a bit. But look, there's the river Neva, there's the Hermitage (which is very big so I figured I'd spot it) and down in the bottom left is the Hotel Sovetskaya, incorrectly spelled but pretty close, which looked and sounded suitably Stalinist in this review and may just be the hotel I stayed in when I came to St Pet-- I mean Leningrad as a 17-year-old Trotskyite skoolboy.

Of which, more later.

Amazingly, that map was enough to get me to the Sovetskaya.

What I may have overlooked before setting off is that the second biggest city, an industrial sprawl of five million people, in the largest country on Earth, a country not noted for its organisational discipline, a country whose language eludes me and whose alphabet is different to our own, that this city might be difficult to navigate in the dark. In the rain.

... that knowing the word tsentr means 'centre' would help only if there were signs pointed to the centre, and/ or only if people I managed to stop and ask agreed with me on what constitutes the centre of the city.

... that asking someone where Nevsky Prospect is, say, or the Hermitage, works only if they point. Not if they explain at great length where you need to ride, how many blocks before you turn right (or was it left?) and to look out for the thingummyjigski. In the rain.

... that the roads of this city might be pock-marked and rutted.

... that traffic lights might be ignored - where they exist.

... that sitting on the car horn is the polite way of expressing your thoughts about your fellow man.

... that speed limits are for wimps.

I confess - even though I was riding slower than the traffic most of the time, pulling over to think, relax and regroup, there was a visceral thrill to be riding with the pack. Many drivers gave me the thumbs up - hopefully this is a positive sign in Roosia and doesn't mean "I'm going to take you out at the next corner."

Above all, what I had failed to prepare myself for was the beauty of the city.

St Petersburg is a pearl beyond belief. I'm a fearful old cynic when it comes to palaces and churches and such like, but the sheer volume and size of them, slap bang in the city, brilliantly illuminated through the rain, takes the breath away. They bestride long, wide canals or they form the apex of an explosion of broad avenues. The rest of the buildings are just as memorable, block after block of imposing four-, five- and six-story apartment buildings painted all shades of the pastel rainbow, or crumbling, collapsing edifices with just enough shabby gentility clinging to them that they appear compelling and charming on first viewing. (No, I don't want to live in one. And feel desperately for those that are obliged to.)

It's dark - but not just night-time dark, or not the kind of night-time dark I'm used to after 20 years in London. The famous buildings are illuminated, and there is a degree of street lighting, but nothing compared with the UK. I'm a huge fan of less light. Environmentally, ecologically, to reduce the unnatural glare of the 21st century, to reduce light pollution. Nevertheless, it takes some getting used to. The streets reflect some light because of the rain water gathering on them, but the canals are dark and brooding. You see what your headlight picks out. Outside that cone of light is darkness. In an urban setting, that feels.. ironic, isn't it?.. unnatural.

And then a right turn (the right turn, as it happens) propels me onto a bridge and out across the river Neva, at this point broad and proud. Suddenly, to my right, I recognise the tall golden spire of the Peter & Paul Fortress. That means (although I hadn't drawn it on the map, I remembered) that the Hermitage will be sitting on the other bank. And Yes! there she is. The Winter Palace. The heart of old Petersburg (and a point on my map -- yaaaay!)

Those moments, crossing the bridge and turning right to ride past the Winter Palace, will stay with me forever.

Being in the centre also meant there were tourist boards with big maps by the side of the road. They're aimed at pedestrians rather than road users, so I hope you don't mind, Mr Mayor, that I rode up onto one particularly elegant pavement in order to read the map without getting squished by your fellow Petersburgers. Who were all too busy doing illegal U-turns, screeching away from the lights on the wrong side of the road and dialling their mobile phones to even notice me.

The map agreed with my own, and I edged closer to the Sovetskaya.

In one square, I parked up close to a bar and asked the bouncer for directions. One punter was just leaving and offered to guide me there on his way home. Another added directions in perfect English and gave me his business card, in case I needed anything during my stay. And two minutes later I was pulling into the car park of the Sovetskaya. It looks like it may be the place we stayed in all those years ago, but it's certainly warm, it's dry and it's bloody cheap.. which is good enough for me.

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