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Published: August 16th 2013
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I love the signs at the entrances to cities: concrete, bold, futuristic and dated Sitting in an Internet café in Novosibirsk I noticed that there were 2,400km between me and Severobaikalsk and only four days remained until the start of the volunteer project I had signed up to. I realized that I had a lot of driving ahead of me.
I’ve always enjoyed long journeys for the meditative experience of sitting patiently, waiting and observing the scenery changing. I’ve had a fair amount of experience on Russian trains, which offer an almost unique experience of enforced inactivity. I can’t think of any other time my life where I’ve been offered such a slim variety of activities as sitting (or lying) on a train for days on end. The only wise option is to take a good book, sleep lots and slow down both mental processes and physical movements (there’s a kind of long distance train journey etiquette surrounding the latter).
In place of a good book to read, for my car journey I had a variety of audiobooks on my mp3 player. I’d already listened to Huxley’s
Brave New World and
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse by the time I got to Novosibirsk. I also had some books in Russian with me:
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Early morning in the village I’d started listening to
Idiot by Dostoevsky three times, but its dense descriptions and complicated language made it a poor choice for car listening. I found more success with Lyudmila Ulitskaya, a famous contemporary Russian writer I like who evocatively and compassionately describes life in the Soviet Union in the sixties and seventies. I listened to her novella
Sonechka. But leaving Novosibirsk I wanted something more philosophical and so I put on
Molloy by Samuel Beckett, a strange and confusing novel about a disabled man with a completely unexpected narrative structure. After that I switched to something lighter: a detective mystery by Tatiana Ustinova called
My Personal Enemy.
Armed with these books, a box of easy to eat one-handed bread snacks placed on the passenger seat and a sleeping bag, I entered a satisfying travel rhythm for a few days. The weather was good and I usually stopped for a couple of hours in the middle of the day to have a nap and take a walk. The scenery included vast forests, prairies, marshes and beautiful stretches of wild flowers. Interspersed were the huddled wooden buildings of villages and the gross concrete of abandoned factories and collective farms. There
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And Ust-Kut isn't even halfway to where I'm going! were lots of rivers and lakes and I found a few places where I was able to swim. I drove until it got dark, stopping for tea or some food at a roadside café. I think that the food gets worse as you drive east in Russia, and the tea definitely gets sweeter. However there are delicious berries sold by the side of the road, which was another factor that contributed to the general soiling of Agatha’s interior.
At nightfall I looked around for some suitable place to park up for the night, having decided that Siberian motels aren’t worth staying in. Agatha’s comfortable rear seat and the prospect of waking up at dawn surrounded by trees and grass were much more appealing. My friends in St. Petersburg warned me that bears aren’t the biggest danger in the wilds of Siberia; I should watch out for local hooligans and runaway criminals. But I slept easily with the crowbar Nadia gave me within close reach under the driver’s seat and was only disturbed a couple of times: once, incidentally, by police looking for an escaped convict and once by a polite old man who asked for something to drink. As
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Is this really a main road? the morning rays of sunshine filtered through the trees I opened the window and handed him a bottle of water. ‘No, no, I mean vodka’ he replied.
I think I like the smell of early mornings most of all. Stretching as I got out of the car, pausing to breathe the damp fresh air, then urinating onto dew-covered leaves before driving along a bumpy track past misty fields, this was my second favourite moment of the day. My favourite moment came a little later when after an hour or so of driving I pulled up at café and had eggs and coffee for breakfast. That all said, I’m glad that I’m not a professional driver. I had plenty of time to observe long-distance lorry drivers in the cafés I went to and, with their stiff limbs, bulging stomachs and weary faces, I had the impression that their job is both physically and mentally destructive.
A definite sadness of travelling in Russia is the quantity of litter to be found in almost every place where people stop. There are many logical causes: underfunded municipal rubbish collection, few rubbish bins, an idea that there is so much space that something
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Wild strawberries for sale thrown away can be forgotten and a culture in the Soviet Union which goes back Marx’s attitude to nature as something valued only for its contribution to human wealth. I’ve seen small villages which have a rubbish disposal policy of just digging a pit somewhere nearby in the woods and just throwing everything there until it overflows. Just how deeply littering is part of many people’s mentality was illustrated by some hitchhikers I picked up outside Kansk. A couple with a small baby and a Lada had broken down and wanted a lift home. It turned out that the husband was a long-distance lorry driver who often went on trips to Europe, taking his wife with him. On one occasion in Germany she’d thrown a cigarette butt out of the window and had been fined 130 euros. I did a quick calculation and worked out that this must be about a week’s wages for her husband. However, she explained, ‘I just keep forgetting’ and has so far picked up three such fines.
Looking in my road atlas at the route to Severobaikalsk, I saw that the road was clearly marked as ‘a main route with asphalt covering’ I already
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Arrival in Severobaikalsk knew that this was probably an optimistic description and that, in accordance with the budgetary expenditure on infrastructure of a middle-income country with a large landmass, there would probably be some patches of inferior road quality. What I was distressed to find was that the road atlas corresponded to some planned road construction (by 2016, I was told later), not to existing reality. For the last 600 km of my journey, there road was mostly gravel, with a few sections of asphalt. Poor, poor Agatha. I followed the protocol of other drivers and was able to go a reasonable speed on the flat wide sections of gravel road, but for the final couple of hundred kilometres the holes, boulders and general lack of road meant that it took over six hours. As well as the continual jolting and bumping, the gravel surface threw up huge quantities of dust, so when I arrived in Severobaikalsk the car was covered inside and out with a thick layer of grey grime and I was more dirty that I think I’ve ever been in my life.
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