by Paul Archer
It felt like we were in a computer game as the dim headlights illuminated the snow-covered boughs and the troll-like lumps of snow emerged out of the deep blackness. By the time we collapsed into bed that evening we had already planned another full day of snowmobiling; our planned departure down to Helsinki was now delayed with the minimum amount of persuasion.
The next morning our plan to drive all the way to Rovaniemi along the trails was foiled within a few hundred metres of the barn, as we sank the heavy machines into a deep snowdrift of soft powder reaching up to our chests. We had been cautioned to stay off the roads but the trails next to them were seldom used and covered with a heavy coating of fresh snow. Over the next two hours, we heaved the snowmobiles towards the more established tracks less than a half a mile away.
All the exertions were worth it though and by the afternoon the three of us were racing along at 40 mph on the two snowmobiles, swapping every so often to give everyone a turn at driving. It was the perfect way to blow off steam after weeks of being cooped up in our taxi. That was until Paul and I came around a corner and saw Leigh's snowmobile on its side next to a fallen tree, far ahead. About four metres in front of it, Leigh was lying on his back in the snow. He wasn't moving.
As we skidded to a halt, I noticed that we were in a massive open expanse and the tree that Leigh had hit was one of only a handful for hundreds of metres. He had managed to drive full-pelt into one of the solitary trees, catapult himself over the handlebars and fell the tree in the process.
'Quick, take a picture!' howled Paul, as Leigh came around and struggled to pick himself up out of the snow.
'Guys, the worst thing was…' Leigh giggled, once we had confirmed that both he and the snowmobile were unharmed, 'the last thing I remember is that I was humming the James Bond theme tune.'
Overjoyed from our day of snowmobiling, we relaxed in a sauna before being treated to the most incredible Northern Lights show from the roof of the barn. It was more spectacular than it is possible to describe, and nothing could have prepared us for how beautiful the display of colour was. We weren't missing the long days in the bowels of Aston engineering department's basement now.
The next day we visited the 'real' Santa Claus in Christmas Village, who signed our world record evidence book. Unfortunately, his elves – who were disappointingly full-sized humans with skinny jeans and hipster haircuts – wouldn't allow him to come and sit in the taxi for a picture.
Taina had one more surprise up her sleeve – Santra was home with her team of huskies, who needed running, so she took us husky sledding around the forest. It was the perfect way to end our time in Rovaniemi, and Taina and her family had made us so welcome that we almost didn't want to leave. Our few days here at the top of the world had quickly become a highlight of our trip.
We had planned to drive most of the length of Finland down to Helsinki over two days, but the extra hours snowmobiling and husky-sledding meant we now had a day to catch up on. Luckily the roads and weather were relatively calm for most of the way until we were a few hours north of the city, when a heavy snowstorm struck and our tiny windscreen wipers decided to quit.
One of the blades had pinged loose and was flapping around on the end of the wiper-arm, in danger of flying off into the slush, so we pulled over on the hard shoulder to attempt a quick fix. Standing there in the biting wind with 18-wheelers roaring past, I tried to snap the blade back into place with numb fingers. Suddenly the spring-loaded wiper arm slipped out of my hand and thwacked into the windscreen, sending cracks spiderwebbing across the glass.
I looked in horror at the guys through the windscreen for a painfully long few seconds before we all burst out laughing. Barely a month earlier Leigh would have probably punched me in the face, but now he just chuckled at my clumsiness.
Thankfully the fractures hadn't reached all the way through the glass but we spent the rest of the drive trying to figure out where and how we would get a London taxi's windscreen replaced in Finland.
CHAPTER 8
TO THE EAST
After another party and another night of Couchsurfing, we were up and back on the road and heading to the Russian border. Leigh and I were sweating out the evening's booze thanks to the new heating system. We had spent the night at a gig watching a Finnish folk-punk duo called Jaakko & Jay. They had toured all over the world with some of my favourite bands and I felt a bit star-struck as we chatted with them in the club afterwards about life on the road. I felt a certain affinity between their touring lifestyle and our first three weeks on the road around Europe. We all just seemed to drive during the day then get drunk with strangers in the night, every day bringing a new city and new friends.
We had been acutely aware that every accidental hungover lie-in was a missed opportunity to explore the cultural richness of Europe but in reality we were also having a great time. After all, we were three 20-something lads who had been dreaming about this trip for years. It was natural that we wanted to let off a bit of steam and we knew that there would be plenty of great cultural sights to come, but for now we were content just to get our partying out of the way and see how the Europeans kept themselves entertained.
We drove along smooth roads through the snow-white landscape, drenched in the blindingly bright sunlight that can only be found in the early morning of the Scandinavian spring. It felt strange to be leaving Finland, where we had found an almost overly civilised society of some of the nicest people in the world. It was even stranger to think we were now about to enter Russia, the first really alien country and one that has always felt a lifetime away from my life in England.
This was our first real border – country number nine – and the first crossing where we had to have our documents checked. Our passports were seen by a gruff looking border guard in a woollen hat and a trench coat. He had the look of an extra from Goldeneye and we were all very excited as we realised we were entering real ex-Soviet land. Having budgeted for spending the day at the border, we were pleasantly surprised to be waved on and drove straight past the queues of lorries trying to go the other way.
'Well, that was an easy border crossing,' I chirped, as we were given back our passports and trundled down the heavily potholed road that lay between rows of grey-green pine trees. 'Let's stop here and see if we can get Russian car insurance.'
It was a windowless shack. Inside, there were rows and rows of cheap cigarettes and bottles of vodka of all shapes and sizes, but our requests for machina insurance were met with blank looks. A passing English speaker overheard our predicament and casually informed us that we were actually at an inter-border duty-free shop, not in the mighty motherland herself.
'This not Russia. This no-man's-land,' he graciously informed us, 'Russia: two kilometres!'
Paul and Leigh cursed me for speaking too soon.
'Johno! Why'd you have to go and jinx us. Now they're probably going to strip search us all,' moaned Leigh.
The road wound through a forest and a line of lorries materialised on the road ahead. We queued, our passports were looked at, our visas scrutinised, and we were presented with a form. I took the lead as the car and all the paperwork was in my name, and, besides, being the holder of no skills of note or a big camera, I was in charge of borders.
My English is OK, my French terrible and my Russian is limited to the word 'cheers' – and the only reason I knew this was because a barman once told me (he was from Bristol and had never been to Russia, so I wasn't even confident that was correct). Even worse than my Russian is my knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet, which was all that was on the form. We laughed about the ludicrous situation, still elated by the excitement of our first border in an exciting country, but the problem started to seem insurmountable the more I analysed the form. The guard looked at me and shrugged in a fabulously Gallic manner when I asked for help. Eventually I was shown, by a helpful old woman who got out of her beaten-up Lada, to an old form taped to a window that had been completed in the Latin alphabet (but was still
in Russian). Reverse-engineering the form against our V5 vehicle registration document, I eventually got to the end and presented it to the border guard with a flourish, grinning at my triumph.
He withdrew a red pen from the depths of his trench coat, crossing out, scribbling and circling all over my document, and handed it back to me. I looked at him blankly. Only when he took a new form from the stack and shoved it to my chest with a grunt did I realise he wanted me to redo the form. Unsure of what had to be done, I tried again, writing more clearly. The same thing happened, but he circled other sections in red this time. I filled in the form for the third time, made a mistake (biros and fingers don't work well in sub-zero temperatures) crossed it out, corrected it, then handed it in.
No mistakes allowed, do it again.
This process was repeated seven or eight times before the guard accepted the form and eventually allowed us through the border. We watched people in the queue of traffic ahead as they stopped at one last checkpoint and then sped off into the distance. We could almost taste the success of our first major border crossing.
After being channelled away from the main queue and into a warehouse, our eyes lit up as the first guard entered: she was the spitting image of Tatiana Romanova, the femme fatale from From Russia With Love. However, the second guard, who was clearly the dominant one, dragged us back down to reality, looking like a 1980s Bond villain who bench pressed Aston Martins with one arm. She was closely followed by a sniffer dog, its handler and more guards.
The guard barked something in Russian, which we assumed was something along the lines of: 'You have been specially selected for a customs inspection due to your good looks and charming personality.' Turns out it wasn't a compliment, as they thoroughly searched the cab, which we had left in a characteristic shit-tip. Every box was taken down and a sniffer dog gave it the once over. Panels were banged with fists and every nook and cranny had a nose shoved into it. We weren't sure what they were looking for and even more puzzled why anyone in Finland would be trying to transport illicit items into Russia anyway. Perhaps they were so confused to see a black cab at their border that they just had to see what was inside.
We were given the all clear – it was reassuring to know my two travel companions weren't secretly drug smugglers – until one of the guards found our first aid kit, built by Leigh's parents who worked for the NHS.
The guard began cross-checking every single item against a little book of 'Drugs legal to import into Russia'. It dawned on us that although the drugs in the box were all legal in the UK, it didn't mean they were legal in Russia. This was it: we were going to a Russian jail for importing illegal drugs. She held out the offending item, giving us one redeeming chance. It could have been the syringes, the amoxicillin, or the dextropropoxyphene, whatever the hell that was. But it wasn't. In her hand was an unassuming box of Tesco Everyday Value antihistamines.
After giving up on the Russian translation, Leigh tried to act out what the antihistamines were for: theatrical sneezes, a wipe of a runny nose, a rub of the eyes. Johno and I burst into hysterical laughter at the display and, despite the angry looks from the guards, after six hours of having our feet frozen in the snow they eventually set us free.
We were on the road to St Petersburg, hoping the next borders would be easier.
CHAPTER 9
'RUSSIAN TRADITION!'
As we inched through the stacked banks of dirty, shovelled snow and into the inner suburbs of St Petersburg all we could see through the dirty, fogged-up windows of the car were the ubiquitous squat, concrete tower blocks lined up in rows. Since we left Finland we had put our trust completely into the satnav. Every so often a text message would arrive from our next host. The latest one said:
Hurry up guys, it's Mardi Gras so you can't get here too late.
This new titbit of information spurred us along through the traffic-clogged roads as visions of bikini-clad girls with sequinned masks and strings of beads around their necks flooded our minds.
'Yeah, I'm gonna get me some beads, I'm gonna have a good time!' whooped Leigh.
'But, how can it be Mardi Gras?' asked Paul. 'It's about minus ten outside.'
Leigh and I ignored him, happy in our fantasies about the parade that awaited us.
Climbing out of the warm cocoon of the car and into the crisp evening air, I stamped my feet briskly while I searched for the correct apartment number on the peeling metal panel. As we stared up at the snow falling thickly around the huge tower blocks an industrial-sounding buzzer echoed and the heavy door jumped ajar, almost like something from a fallout shelter. I tugged it open with a mighty heave and we stepped into the damp and dimly lit lobby.
A musty smell filled my nostrils as we warily climbed into the creaking lift and pushed the chunky Formica button to take us up to floor 11. I studied the graffiti-covered walls as the cables groaned and breathed a sigh of relief when the doors parted and we were met by our smiling host.
Like many of our Couchsurfing hosts, Sasha came from a relatively well-off middle-class family and any preconceptions I had about her place were washed away as soon as we stepped through the two security doors and into a bright and warm apartment. The place was stuffed with the kind of trinkets families collect over the years and Sasha explained that the place was her parents' but these days they spent most of their time at their summer dacha in the countryside leaving this city apartment to her.
Soon afterwards we were sitting in Sasha's kitchen as she whisked up some eggs and flour in a bowl.
'So do they have a parade in the city for Mardi Gras?' Leigh asked, the visions of the beaded-girls clearly still on his mind.
'For Mardi Gras? No, normally we just make pancakes… you know, to mark the start of Lent,' she replied, motioning at the mixture.
Chuckles burst out all round as we realised our mistake. Mardi Gras was Shrove Tuesday in Russia; very different to the parade held in New Orleans every year. Our parade dreams vanished into thin air.
We quickly found out that Sasha and her friends were total Anglophiles; they loved the British comedy shows we showed them on YouTube and were in awe of Hannah. Before long they decided to repay the favour and educate us in their Russian culture.
We found ourselves in a vodka bar where the last five minutes of every hour were deemed 'Very Happy Five Minutes', with all vodkas half price. It didn't take long for us to feel like we were fully versed in 'Russian culture'. The next thing we knew we were all hopping out of unlicensed cabs back at Sasha's apartment, but Paul was nowhere to be seen.
'I thought he was in your cab?' I asked Leigh.
'I thought he was in yours?'
Although we had only just arrived in Russia and were already a man down, I wasn't too worried as I knew Paul was an incredibly resourceful guy. Whenever we pitched up in a new city it was always Paul who almost automatically figured out his bearings, leaving Leigh and me tagging along like two toddlers on a walk to the park. If anyone could find his way home it was Paul. Besides, after braving the new and challenging Russian roads for eight hours and then drinking a small distillery's worth of vodka, after our much-feared crossing of the Russian border and spending the previous night partying, all I could think of was sleep.
I wandered out of the loo and failed to find Johno and Leigh, so I did what all self-respecting males do when they lose their friends – I went to the bar. A beer later and they still hadn't turned up, there was no answer on their phones, the club was kicking out and I didn't have Sasha's address to give to a taxi driver. I knew how to get there from the Metro station, but the trains had stopped, and although I would recognise the Cyrillic of the stop on a map, I was unable to ask for a taxi there in Russian. So, with few other options, I wandered around a bit, found the cheapest hotel I could, checked in and went to sleep.
When the Russian living room stirred through my blurry eyes the next morning and it became clear that Paul still wasn't back, I immediately felt terrible. How could he still not be home? It was now alm
ost noon with no word from him. While we had been tucked up in our toasty flat with its furnace-like heating, the outside temperature had been way below freezing.
Leigh remained unconcerned, mainly because he hadn't yet awoken from the comatose state he had immediately fallen into upon our return. In the night Sasha must have positioned the huge teddy bear that he was now cuddling up to next to him. The only sign of life from him was his occasional nuzzling into the furry chest and his murmuring of pleasant-sounding sweet nothings to the huge stuffed toy.
I had a minor panic when I realised my phone battery was dead, and I rooted frantically through my bag to dig out my phone charger. Luckily Sasha was way ahead of me; although she couldn't get through to Paul, she had texted him her details and she was confident that he would be able to decipher the Cyrillic address and make his way home.