by Paul Archer
I woke to find a text message from a considerably-more-concerned-than-my-so-called-friends Sasha, so I found the nearest Metro and went to the station by her place. Hopping out, I got on the bus from the stop we had taken the day before and absorbed the bright Arctic sunshine through the muddy windows of the trolleybus in an attempt to burn away some of the cranberry shots from the night before. I was pretty sure I would be able to recognise Sasha's place – it was the concrete prefab tower block by the red and white smoke stacks…
After the fifth almost identical red tower block, I realised I had no idea where to get off. I asked an old lady by showing her the text message and smiling. She looked at me gravely and pointed back the way I had come. I hopped off the bus and asked a passing gentleman the same thing. He started chatting away at me in excited Russian. I stopped him short with my new Russian phrase: 'Nay Par Ruski.'
'Americanski?' he enquired.
'No, no, no, English.'
'English? Anglaiski? LONDON! LONDON!'
He started hopping from foot to foot before pointing at his chest. 'St Petersburg,' he grinned.
I gave him a little cheer and he gave me a hug. He smelt of vodka, but then again, so did I.
He pointed at me, smiling.
'LONDON!' I could see how this game worked now, so I pointed at him.
'ST PETERSBURG!' He cheered, I cheered and we hugged again, both proud to have created and mastered the game of naming cities. However, it didn't cover the fact that I was still truly lost in a very large city. I showed him the address again and he smiled, turned on his heels and walked directly into the oncoming traffic with his hands outstretched.
I let out a little scream.
Fortunately, the oncoming Lada stopped and my city-naming friend spoke to the driver and hopped in, leaving me on the pavement looking very puzzled. The passenger door opened and he beckoned me in.
My mother told me as a child that I should never get into strangers' cars. She didn't, however, say anything about adults getting into strangers' cars in foreign cities, flagged down by other strangers you've just met in the street and with whom you've invented a new game. And then hugged. Twice.
Figuring that all the strangers and cars and hugs and games probably cancelled each other out, I hopped into the Lada. We started driving and my now friend-cum-kidnapper started gesticulating towards my phone for the address. I gave it to him and he read the address, but firmly held on to the phone. I started to scrutinise my kidnapper a bit more closely now I was out of the dazzling morning sunlight. He was covered in tattoos from his neck to his knuckles, he was wearing a tracksuit and he had my phone.
'Oh God. You're being robbed, you silly tit,' my hungover brain rationalised with me.
In fact, I was being robbed and kidnapped. And I had got into this car willingly.
What an idiot. Who actually willingly gets into their own kidnapper's car?
We were driving pretty far as well. I started to look panicked and pointed at the address. My kidnapper spoke to his getaway driver; they both laughed.
'RUSSIAN TRADITIYYY-SHON.'
Kidnapping is a Russian Tradition? I knew I should have read the Russian Lonely Planet.
'ST PETERSBURG!' Tracky-tat-kidnapper cried, smacking his chest.
'London!' I played back, weakly.
I tried to smile – endearing myself to my kidnappers would minimise, or at least soften, the inevitable beatings.
'RUSSIAN TRADITIYYY-SHON.'
We kept on driving. Faceless tower block after tower block, redand-white smokestack after red-and-white smokestack passed. I remembered reading somewhere that you should memorise the route the kidnappers take so you can backtrack your way if you ever escape. But backtrack to where? The red-and-white smokestack? I was bloody lost in the first place!
We drove for about 20 minutes, further and further away from my last known whereabouts; but a few more rounds of the 'cities' game made it an amiable and rather enjoyable kidnap. The Lada stopped in a grubby car park next to a stairwell and my kidnapper gave the driver 100 roubles, about £2, and got out, still holding my phone. I could have run, but he had my phone and on my phone was my only way of finding my way home, so I wandered along with my kidnapper.
The stairwell was dank and smelt like piss, much like the majority of stairwells the world over – being mistaken for a urinal appears to be a global stairwell problem.
We stopped at some heavy steel doors at the top. There was nobody around.
'Russian TRADITION!' he shouted again, and with a flourish, he pushed me through the doors.
It was dark inside. I could hear Russian voices and it smelt like vodka (although that could easily have been me… or him). As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I made out a snooker table, then another five.
And a bar.
My kidnapper pushed past me, went to the barman and patted the stool next to him, proffering a small glass of clear, triplefiltered 'Russian tradition'.
'VOD-KAHHH!'
He wasn't kidnapping me – he was taking me for a drink.
It was 9 a.m.
Feeling relieved and not wanting to be rude, I drank. Then another was poured, and being English and polite, I drank again. Another was poured, so I took out my phone and pointed at the address. He fired Russian at the pretty waitress who appeared and she translated it into English.
'Yes, he will take, but first you drink, it is Russian tradition you see?'
I saw, and then I saw off my shot.
We drank another shot; he slapped her on the bum and winked at me. I nodded my approval, as that seemed to be what he was looking for and we drank another shot.
'No more, I must go,' pointing at my phone.
'NO. Russian tradition,' he looked hurt as he poured another shot. Not wanting to offend his heritage, I felt obliged to drink it. Pointing at his chest he said, 'ST PETERSBURG.'
'London!'
Turns out the cities game was even more fun with vodka.
By 10 a.m., I was smashed.
At 10.30 a.m. I told him I had to go, so my new best friend – and definitely not my kidnapper – walked me down the stairs and around the nearest tower block. Parked in front of me was a 1992 London black cab. The bar was around the back of Sasha's flat.
We hugged our goodbyes, with my new friend looking very sad. He asked to come up, but I told him no (he was, after all, a stranger from the street, covered in tattoos and in a tracksuit – even if we had invented a game together and had a relationship that involved a hug every couple of minutes) and watched as he stumbled off into the street to get another unsuspecting lost tourist drunk. Well, Russia is different, I thought as I headed upstairs and attempted to sleep off my unexpected morning inebriation.
Sasha and her friend Anna were so taken with the idea of the taxi that when the time came for us to leave they caught a lift to the next large city with us. At the time I couldn't really understand why they'd want to drive for four hours south crammed into a bumpy and smelly car just to get a bus straight home again. However, they looked so happy when we dropped them off at the bus station in Novgorod that it all made sense to me. The ride for them, as it was for us in theory, was so much more about the journey than the destination. The drive in a London black cab through northern Russia was the perfect experience for a girl who loved England so much she had an English fiancé, studied English at university and now worked as an English translator. It was also our way of expressing a tiny bit of gratitude for the great hospitality they had shown us.
The journey itself had been as we'd promised: boneshatteringly bumpy. After driving through Sweden, one of the richest countries in the world, and seeing the havoc that the winter conditions wreaked upon their roads, we hadn't held high hopes for the state of Russia's road surfaces. Frequent and deep potholes littered the surface, forcing us to quickly adopt what we called the 'Russian driving technique'. The main feature of the RDT was a constant, sharp weaving from side to side as the driver tried their best
to pick the least bumpy path around the scattered craters while keeping up the maximum possible speed so as not to lose the road position to one of the many Ladas. All lane discipline went out of the window as the fast lane, the hard shoulder, the other side of the road and even the opposite hard shoulder all became fair game for overtaking.
Once the girls' bus pulled away we realised that for the first time we were stuck in a strange city after dark without an inkling of where we could rest our heads. We had been surprised to discover that this city of 200,000 people had no emergency Couchsurfers we could call on, but it was a small blessing in disguise: after nearly a month of nights spent on strangers' sofas, a real hotel gave us the chance to officially register our Russian visas and catch up on admin. It was also a chance to have a decent night's sleep without any guilt – we loved staying with Couchsurfers and were extremely grateful for all they had done for us but it was sometimes hard to muster up the energy to face a new inquisition by friendly hosts asking us where we dreamed up the idea for the trip or what we studied at university. Sometimes, the greatest luxury is just to sleep.
CHAPTER 10
'TO INTERNATIONAL FRIENDSHIP'
Moscow: home to the Kremlin, Red Square, St Basil's Cathedral, the Bolshoi Theatre and people in funny fur hats, not to mention Dostoyevsky, Kandinsky and Anna Kournikova. One of the greatest cities in the world.
However, it was also home to a lot of concrete Soviet tower blocks and one of these was to be our home for the night, as we were once again Couchsurfing – this time in a commune just outside the city limits. We envisioned another open-door community with Beatles lookalikes baking bread for us upon arrival, but when we stepped through the main door to the building we were met with a dimly lit hallway that reeked of urine and was filled with empty vodka and super-strength beer bottles.
When we reached the top-floor flat, we were greeted warmly by a grubby toddler and our host, her father, who gave us the grand tour of two rooms and a kitchen crammed within dimensions not much bigger than our taxi. A hole in the brickwork revealed a miniature shower.
'No fucking in shower,' our new host announced with a big grin on his face and an air that showed he had been practising this phrase. From the way it was said, I presumed an industrious duo had succeeded before.
It transpired that this was home to Sasha, his wife Dina, their daughter, and four other guests, as well as ourselves. They were all part of a 'hitchhiking community' with a penchant for super-cheap travel and an aversion to furniture; they had nothing other than camping mats covering every inch of the floor. They pointed out that one was the three-piece suite, another was the chaise longue and another the table. Chuckling at their joke, we stepped in and were quickly reprimanded for stepping on the table. Apparently they weren't joking.
Although we were massively grateful to have been invited into Sasha's home, we were exhausted after a 14-hour drive, which made the hours until it was acceptable to go to bed tick by frustratingly slowly.
If Dina and Sasha's place lacked anything in space, furniture and creature comforts, they certainly made up for it with their warmth and kindness. Just after we were settled in and were making exaggerated yawning noises, while wondering where exactly we were all going to sleep, three more people appeared at the door and shoehorned themselves into the living room. One was cradling a rather large bottle of vodka and this was soon doled out into all manner of cups and containers as we sat crosslegged on the camping mats. A bottle of vodka between 12 people doesn't last too long in Russia and I was secretly relieved when the bearer told us that it was now illegal to buy hard liquor in Russia after ten at night – it was now nearing 11 p.m.
'It's OK though,' he grinned, 'I know shopkeeper!'
Slightly reluctant, we whipped out our wallets as an offering and he returned with a couple more bottles that were soon cracked open for toasts to the Queen and 'international friendship'.
The vodka was chased down with nothing more than raw pickles from a head-sized jar and as it disappeared so did the language barrier we had so awkwardly felt upon our arrival. Thankfully, the quantity and the strength of the alcohol we drank ensured the cramped conditions were not a problem and we slept like logs.
We had found a Couchsurfer in central Moscow who was keen to have three smelly lads to stay, so we made our way into the centre of the city. Moscow has some of the worst traffic in the world. Crawling the final miles took hours and wasn't helped by our first run-in with the local constabulary.
A policeman flagged us over with a baton – the kind ground crew use to guide approaching planes – and walked to the taxi's passenger window. After a moment of confusion before he realised that the person he was interrogating didn't have a steering wheel in front of him, he trudged to the other window. It didn't look like he had seen the funny side of the situation.
'Machina passport?' he asked, his breath stale with vodka – possibly explaining his slow reactions to finding a right-hand-drive car.
I handed over the V5 ownership document with the rest of the paperwork, along with our passports, and waited as the officer took them back to his car to scrutinise everything. He eventually returned and started to speak to me in Russian. I smiled and looked at him blankly, raising my hands in an apologetic way and brought out my trusty phrase.
'Nay par Roooski.'
More document analysis followed as he strived to find the slightest error in our paperwork that would presumably result in a fine. Having apparently failed to find anything, it was time to try plan B. The officer looked at me, then did a chopping motion with the flat of his hand against his neck. As far as I was aware, the only meaning for that was chopping someone's head off. More puzzled than concerned, I looked at him blankly and he did it again. Was this policeman threatening to decapitate us? Our paperwork couldn't be that bad? The officer then started to flick his throat with his middle finger.
Again he got a similar puzzled response.
'Vod-ka?' he asked, again chopping his neck.
It appeared that in Russia, chopping your throat means 'Have you been drinking?' It was one in the afternoon and the effects of the previous evening had long worn off.
'Nyet, nyet!' I stressed.
However, the officer wasn't going to give up that easily. He started miming a breathalyser and threatening that he would take us to the station (which was ironic, given the smell on his breath). Unless of course… he trailed off in that inimitable way corrupt officials do when hinting that an arrangement could be found.
He clearly thought I was trying to call his bluff and tried to reaffirm that he actually would breathalyse me, as though to say, 'Of course you're drink-driving – everybody's been drinking. The difference is, I'll actually bust you for it unless you bribe me…'
Knowing full well I would pass a breathalyser test, and refusing to bribe him, we were at a stalemate. After 45 minutes the thought of doing actual paperwork finally got too much for him and we were released on our way.
Four thousand miles through the harsh northern climes of Scandinavia in less than four weeks had battered Hannah's already-shaky electrical system and now each morning brought a lottery about which part would fail next.
Every time one problem was fixed, another seemed to pop up somewhere else, just like those fairground moles. The one snag that had been consistent was the lack of indicators. Apart from a short time where Leigh had temporarily patched up the wiring, we had been without a left indicator ever since we left London and as something of an indicator pedant this massively annoyed me. Back in the UK I would use my indicator for even the tiniest manoeuvres, so driving through France, Belgium and the Netherlands without the little flashing orange light really got on my nerves. But as we hit Germany and Denmark I had started to get used to the idea and by the time we reached the Arctic Circle I had even started to think that it might be funny to drive all the way to Australia without them. Whenever Leigh mentioned fixing them I would subtly steer the subject on to something else, to Paul's
increasing annoyance.
However, the moment we hit the central Moscow traffic I immediately changed my mind. The dirty grey slush on the road mixed with the grime from car and truck exhausts had formed a filthy layer on all of our windows, and our tiny ineffectual wipers only cut a narrow swathe to peer through. With vehicles merging from multiple directions into lanes of their own making, I decided too late that the indicators were actually a necessity and not a luxury, even if the Russian drivers would ignore them anyway.
We were left with just our arms to indicate a turn, making driving through the dense fast-moving traffic a half-blind, terrifying ordeal, punctuated by cries of 'stick your arm out!'
The horrifically bad traffic and a number of lengthy police stops meant that we were characteristically late to meet our next host: a student called Anna. This wasn't a huge problem as we were planning a quiet night anyway – our daily budget and our livers had been utterly obliterated over the past few weeks.