Entering Russia
Siberia
October 31st
By Dan Murdoch

“For the love of God have you learned nothing from the mistakes of Napoleon and Hitler? Granted they were deranged megalomaniacs and you’re a local journalist, but still. Siberian Winter??”
Goolistan Cooper

DRIVING through Siberia was exactly how I imagined.
Thick forests of skinny, densely packed, skeletal trees, topped with a dusting of snow, and rooted in a bed of ice. For thousands of miles the road ploughs through the bright white landscape.
We camped our first night deep in a scary looking forest, but the next day the surroundings developed into rolling golden plains, the afternoon sun picking out a yellow haze across the horizon. We went through one strange looking wood, where only the very tops of the tall trees bore leaves, the trunks, hidden in perpetual shade, hadn’t bothered with foliage, the forest looked like it had a crew cut.

It was cold, cold enough to freeze our windscreens and leave icicles on our wing mirrors, but nothing like the dire predictions we had been given. It touched –5c at night, very manageable with all our bedding. Everywhere we went locals told us it was unusually warm for this time of year. Some good luck at last. It snowed a few times, but nothing heavy enough to slow us down.

I had an image in my mind of the stereotypical Russian. Gruff, shouty, impatient and quick to anger. But this has been thoroughly dispelled by the people we met during our first few days in Siberia. At the very first café we entered, a man enquired about our route, told us there was a quicker way, and insisted on leading us to the road. Once there he reached into the back of his car and pulled out six beers for us. A few hours later a bunch of lads led us around a town to find an ATM, then 20km up the road to a petrol station. The police pulled us over, but only to take our picture.

When we arrived at our first big city, Novosibirsk, I immediately hated it. A sprawling, industrial traffic jam covered in mud and ice existing beneath a dirty grey sky. Fez’s clutch plate chose to give up outside the city’s library. The night shift, Tony, Lovey and I, stayed up to fix it, while the day shift got some sleep in the cars.
Throughout the night a bunch of local lads, including two off-duty policemen, stayed with us and brought us beer. They said they had to go to bed at about 3am, but returned 20 minutes later with hot sandwiches and coffees. The Russians were winning me over.
The next day OJ got chatting to a couple of girls and one of them insisted we go back to her grandparents apartment to wash, do laundry and stay the night.
How could we refuse?

Kataya looked a little Chinese, but Asia (that’s how her name sounded, but probably isn’t spelled) was thoroughly European, a buxom blonde.
Kataya’s grandparents properly took us in, and gave Zsofi a whole load of clothes, and Carlos a very fetching stripy sweater.
The next day random strangers from the housing estate worked on the cars and a wonderful family nearby fed Carlos and I a huge lunch and dinner, then lashings of vodka and gave me a scarf. It was hard to refuse an invitation to Kataya’s friend’s 21st birthday party, and despite reservations about our schedule, we decided to go.
I presented the birthday girl with a bottle of red wine: “We’re Russian girls, we drink vodka,” she replied, to the cheers of her friends. They were a fun bunch, dancing to terrible RnB and cheesy pop, it could have been a 21st birthday party anywhere in Europe.
I was tasked with getting up at 8am to go to the car market and find a new bearing for Fez, so I resisted drunken antics. I did have a clear the air chat with Lovey though.
Back in Bishkek he read a blog on my computer about him threatening to go home a few months ago when we were in Armenia (Lovey Throws His Toys Out Of the Pram).
He said he hadn’t meant to bring it up the way he did (at a dinner with a load of old friends) but he’d been backed into a corner. He admitted that he got defensive, leaving a tacit acceptance that he hadn’t put over his point very clearly that night.
In the blog I wrote that he had gone down in my estimation, something he said he hoped wasn’t for good, but I left him hanging on that one.

The next day we got back on the 24-hour driving thing. The road quality deteriorated, making it hard for the drivers to drive and hard for the sleepers to sleep, slowing the whole process down.

On the long road to Irkutsk, Fez was kind enough to break down near a mechanics and, although it was closed, when they saw us jacking up the car in the cold and the snow, they invited us in to use their lifting equipment.
It made the job ten times easier and again we were left praising Russians. We currently have a strange set of mix and match tyres of varying sizes and styles, so we bought a few new ones off them.
While we were there some friends of the mechanic turned up with some weed. I hadn’t smoked since Budapest and I was keen to see what they had. The bifta was rolled strangely, a backflip with a long, wide roach that must have been half the joint. It was soap and it was pleasant.
Later they embarrassed me when, undoing a bolt under the Trabbi and surrounded by the Americans, one of them came up to the car and bent down:
“Hey Daniel, come.” he waved the joint towards me. I looked at the Yanks I know they’re not into it but I don’t know how much they disapprove.
“You want,” the stoner waved the doobie at the Americans.
“No, no, no, no,” they all shook their heads and looked at the ground.
Well bollox to them, I thought, I'm not getting peer pressured into NOT smoking a joint.
I shuffled towards him, awkwardly squatting under the raised car, and then he insisted on giving me a blowback. For those who never had a smoke when they were 15, that is where he reverses the spliff in his mouth, puckers his lips and pouts them close to mine, as if we are about to kiss, then blows smoke into my gob. A sensual manoeuvre when performed with an attractive, new female acquaintance at a party- but wholly inappropriate when attempted with a gold-toothed, slack-jawed Russian man in front of disapproving colleagues under a broken Trabant.
Of course immediately after the incident I spent five minutes loosening a bolt I should have been tightening (I was coming at it from reverse, honest guv). Embarrassing.

We made it out of the garage at about two AM; got something to eat, then found an ATM, which promptly ate OJ’s card. The big Slav cracked in a terrible way, I would have hated to be the plastic bin in the bank-o-mat booth. I actually had to walk away, I thought he might lash out at me (for I had led them to the machine).
In moments like these my reaction is normally the complete opposite- calm, rational: “How do we sort this one out then?” sort of thing. When I was a teenager my grandmother gave me Letters From A Stoic by Seneca, and I agree with a lot of it. It helped my crisis management.
But it wasn’t really the time to explain Seneca to OJ, who kept repeating the same mantra: “I'm gonna smash that fucking machine up.”

After getting a local to phone the number in the booth we decided to camp outside the bank until it opened, He got his card back the next morning and we finally arrived in Irkutsk on Wednesday night. We’d made an abysmal 1,100km in 72 hours.

Ends
mrdanmurdoch@gmail.com
For more of Dan’s blogs visit: danmurdoch.blogspot.com or www.trabanttrek.org