It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  Naturally we blamed our tardiness on our various run-ins with the law and Anna reassured us that she, and pretty much everyone else in Moscow, hated the notoriously corrupt police. She invited us to sit down and made us feel at home.

  'So', she said, 'have you got any good stories about your journey so far?'

  CHAPTER 11

  MOSCOW PRISON BLUES

  The doors slammed behind us. My knees were by my chin, interlocking with Leigh's, whose now ghostly white face was inches away from mine. Judging by the wire mesh and the pervading smell of shit, we were in the dog cages.

  The dog cages in the back of a Russian police van.

  On our way to jail.

  To make sense of our new confined surroundings we need to rewind a few hours. Soon after meeting Anna and telling her about our quickly emptying pockets, she had told us to get ready for her friend's birthday party that evening, reassuring us en route that she had a plan to save us some roubles.

  Anna's idea was to pick up some cheap bottles of vodka and cognac and swill them down in Red Square in front of the Kremlin, one of Moscow's biggest tourist attractions and Russia's centre of government, before heading to the party. It was a sort of two-for-one, time and money-saving measure.

  'Are you sure we're allowed to do this?' we asked as we looked around the garishly lit Kremlin, decorated like a Poundland store at Christmas.

  'Yes, yes, of course, "Russian tradition!"' she scoffed sarcastically.

  We weren't fully convinced. This was one of the most famous landmarks in Russia and Anna was quite obviously hiding the bottle. A few drinks later, though, we no longer really cared. We had even made up a stupid little song that we sang quietly, giggling, 'We're the kings of the Kremlin, you're a dirty gremlin!'

  With the bottles about half-empty we moved out past the brightly coloured onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral and made one final toast to being the 'kings of the Kremlin', when the police car screeched up and we were caught looking like guilty schoolchildren.

  Anna turned around and her expression had changed, 'This is bad, do what they say and I'll try and fix it.'

  We were not giggling anymore.

  Contrary to everything that was going on, strangely, I didn't feel scared or nervous. I had a dangerous feeling of invincibility – maybe I was blinded by the arrogance of being a Westerner with a British passport, or (more likely) the fact that there wasn't much vodka remaining in the bottle – but something in my gut told me we would be able to get out of this situation.

  'What could they do?' I foolishly reasoned with myself.

  At that moment a phrase that Dutch Jasper had told us in the depths of the Amsterdam haze sprung to mind – a moment of clarity from this stoned sage, issuing words of wisdom from a porn set surrounded by swingers and nutjobs: You never get any good stories when everything goes to plan…

  It was true; it's always the things that go wrong that you tell people about. For better or for worse, I thought that maybe I'd be telling people about 'that time I got arrested for drinking vodka in front of the Kremlin' for years.

  Unfortunately it looked like Leigh did not feel the same as his face developed a pronounced shade of white.

  'Mate, this is going to be such a good story!' I grinned.

  He didn't.

  'I've still got the vodka in my jacket pocket,' he squeaked, tapping the lump in his ski jacket. He looked more like he was about to get busted for sailing a yacht full of cocaine and guns (or even antihistamines) into the country than having a bottle of the national tipple in his pocket. Judging from our previous run-ins with Moscow's boys in blue, the officers driving our van probably had one of their own. However, it's easy to be flippant when you're not the one carrying the incriminating evidence.

  At the station we were led past the open Wild-West-style cells housing Moscow's criminals. They reached out through the bars for cigarettes, making me feel like I was in a bad prison film. I think we were all thankful when we were taken to a separate interview room and the four of us were told to sit on the hard two-man bench.

  Two serious-looking police officers, both resembling their great leader, Vladimir Putin, entered the room and began the interview.

  Anna translated for us, telling us that we would now be searched. We had heard of a well-known scam where the Russian police take foreigners' passports and don't return them until a substantial bribe is paid, but luckily we had left our passports behind at Anna's. I went first, depositing my wallet and phone on the desk before being loosely frisked. Johno went next, removing the four hoodies he was wearing against the cold in lieu of a proper jacket he was too tight to buy before we left. From numerous pockets came his wallet, phone, various scraps of paper and… a toothbrush? Even the police laughed at his optimism for the direction of the evening.

  Anna followed suit and then it was Leigh's turn. He had, if it was possible, turned even whiter, and silence descended on the room. He rose to his feet with a stance that couldn't have looked guiltier if he had tried. For a moment we thought he was going to refuse to unzip his jacket, but at the policeman's fierce look he gave in and haltingly pulled out the almost-empty bottle of vodka. He let out a very guilty sigh.

  'Oooooohhhhhhhhhh,' said the older officer. Both police officers tried their best to look disapproving of Leigh's major crime, while the rest of us tried to stifle our half-drunk giggles.

  What followed was the least effective, most absurd good cop, bad cop routine I've ever seen. I have never been required to actually carry one out myself, but I've watched enough episodes of The Wire and Police Academy to have a pretty good understanding of how it should be done.

  Anna translated.

  'This is a very serious crime,' said the younger officer. The other nodded gravely. 'We cannot leave it unpunished. My colleague will take some of your details now.'

  The older officer upped and left, locking the cell-office behind him, and the younger one put on a big smile and asked us what football teams we supported.

  Much to my father's constant disappointment, my interest in football is so negligible that I would rather watch an episode of Loose Women than the FA Cup. However, when travelling, football can be a fantastic talking point when you only share a handful of words in each language, and which team you support is often the first thing asked when somebody finds out you're from England. The concept that you don't actually support a football team is often met with dismay and general confusion, so I usually just say Manchester United, which provokes a look of satisfied glee because the person you're talking to has actually heard of the team. (My local team, Swindon Town, doesn't have the same reaction – I've tried.)

  The other lads' feelings towards the sport are similar, so we plumbed for the nearest geographical locations to our homes; Johno opted for Manchester United, Leigh for Aston Villa and myself, knowing only one other team name, Chelsea.

  Our teams were greeted with a satisfied nod, before the younger officer launched into a long diatribe about how poor he was, how poorly paid police in Moscow are and how expensive it is to live.

  'This is true,' Anna embellished as she translated, 'but they make so much money in bribes that they make more money than most – and certainly more money than me.'

  He then went on to say how the other officer wanted to write up our crimes, pointing at a form on his desk, but that he liked us so he just wanted to let us go.

  Right on cue, the older officer came in with his best stern face and started to write up our 'crimes'.

  'Name?' he demanded.

  His partner jumped in and said something that made him huff and puff, and then leave. The same pleas followed.

  The farce repeated itself a couple of times and started to get quite boring. It didn't look like there'd be any other way out of this without spending a night in one of Moscow's finest jail cells, so we started dropping hints back.

  'I wonder,' Anna translated for us. 'Is there possibly a way we could just… make this go away?'

  W
e don't pay bribes generally. No matter how difficult people make our lives, if we haven't done anything wrong, we're not going to bribe a corrupt official. However, when you're caught in front of the national government office with two bottles of spirits, singing poorly formed nursery rhymes and you have an important party to get to, sometimes one needs to hurry things along.

  The three of us were sent out and Anna was kept back. Ten minutes later she emerged saying that we were being fined 500 roubles each (£10), but 'so we wouldn't have a record' our names wouldn't be put on the forms and the forms wouldn't be filled out. Wishing they had just asked for the bribe an hour and a half earlier, we paid up and were greeted by an instant change in our captors, who both became very jovial as soon as they had each doubled their salary for the day. As we waved do svidánija to the older officer at the door, he called me back. I walked back over and he produced our half-full bottle of vodka. Thinking this was a gaff, I joked, 'For me?'

  'Da!' he said.

  I reached out, took it and mimed walking off – expecting him to take it back with a cheeky chuckle. But he just nodded, turned and strolled off, leaving me, vodka in hand, to hail a cab with the others and head to the bar.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE CITY OF RUIN

  I unpeeled my face from the leather Ford Cortina seat – rubbed raw by 30 years of arses – that we had bolted in for extra passengers, and rose to the sound of a large truck revving next to us. I woke up the lads from their equally uncomfortable sleeping positions in the back and we began the drive onwards to Minsk. We had stopped at the side of the road after a late-night dash through the border out of Russia; no hotels in the area would accept our visas, so we were forced to use Hannah as our accommodation for the night.

  I've never known a thing about Minsk. I had always incorrectly presumed it to be a virtually uninhabitable city in the farthest reaches of Siberia, basing this assumption (and I would guess I am not alone in this) on an episode of Friends.

  It is in fact the capital of Belarus.

  Directly translated as 'White Russia', Belarus is a dictatorship situated on the European side of Russia, just north of Ukraine. Minsk was rebuilt in the 1950s by Stalin as a show city to display what the USSR had the potential to produce. It is still a show city, albeit a slightly eerie one, run by the only totalitarian regime in mainland Europe and one which is desperately trying to prove that it can hold its own on an international level.

  Our decision to go to there was a simple one: nobody in the team had ever known anyone who had been and it sounded like an adventure. We stayed with a Couchsurfer host called Tania, who was attempting to study Art and Business in a country where, like everything else, both of those things are highly influenced by the state.

  The sun was out and Leigh finally fixed the indicators on the car before we toured the city. We each went our separate ways to explore the collections of Stalinist monuments, show lakes and functional tower blocks, forming a bizarre combination of Western-facing show city and run-down ex-Soviet dive.

  When it was time to go, after giving Tania our final bottle of French Couchsurfing-host wine, we decided to restock The Bar with Belarus's famous vodka. I chose a random selection from the vodka aisle (yes, a whole aisle) and left with 12 bottles of the stuff, having only parted with the equivalent of £20. We liked Belarus.

  Outside of the capital, Belarus presented a different, more natural side, with quaint villages and miles of rolling greenery bordered by arrow-straight roads. The border crossing into Ukraine went without a mention of the shipment of smuggled vodka in The Bar and after avoiding the car insurance touts we drove out of the border complex and on to the slightly smoother roads. It is strange how crossing a line marked on a map almost always immediately changes the way mundane, everyday things look and this was no exception. The open fields were immediately replaced by diagonal rows of reddish pine trees, the low sunlight casting long shadows across the road.

  Once again, it was dark by the time we made it to Kiev; so far we had driven after dark in every country that we had vowed not to. This didn't stop the Ukrainian police spotting us and instantly pulling us over, demanding our documents and asking us if we had any weapons in the car.

  They were unrelenting in their interrogation and it looked like they were just about to find the stash of vodka when the officer who seemed to have a better grasp of English suddenly understood the purpose of our trip and explained it to the other. The mood changed immediately; packets of cigarettes were produced and offered around, and the officers even gave us a small wooden toy as a good luck charm, before releasing us with directions to the hostel around the corner.

  The door was answered by a girl in her early 20s who eyed me suspiciously. When I asked her if she had space for three English guys she looked hesitant, no doubt her impression of us already informed by the many British stag parties that ravage the city.

  '… and do you have anywhere we can park our car? We're, er, driving a black cab from London to Sydney,' I quickly added.

  Her face lit up. 'What? Shut up! I have to see this car.' She pulled on her shoes and ushered me down the stairs.

  As soon as she spied Hannah we knew we had a place to stay, and Hannah had gained another fan. Joanna absolutely loved the car and excitedly directed us to a parking space hidden away in some alley outside the hostel while quizzing us about the trip so far. Her cosy little hostel had the same atmosphere as a friend's house. We quickly settled in and got to know her and her guests, telling them about our big milestone: tomorrow would mark the end of our first month on the road and Paul's 24th birthday.

  We tried to explain to Paul that it wasn't that we'd rather spend the day in a radioactive exclusion zone than with him on his birthday, but just that Leigh and I were desperate to go and visit Chernobyl and this might be our only chance. Paul couldn't really see the appeal of paying £70 to spend his birthday 'looking at ruined buildings and getting cancer'.

  'We got you a birthday gift though,' we woke him to tell him just before we left at 7 a.m.

  His sleepy face lit up briefly then immediately dropped as he saw the large shot of Belarusian vodka we presented him with and a cactus we had bought from a tiny babushka in a nearby underpass. He swore at us but took it in good spirits and we promised that we would take him out properly when we returned in the evening.

  After handing over 1,000 Ukrainian grivnas to a dodgy looking fellow named Igor, we boarded the ancient minibus and made our way to the site of the world's worst nuclear disaster. In 1986 Reactor Four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant exploded resulting in the eventual evacuation of the whole region, including the city of Pripyat and its 50,000 inhabitants. The resulting radioactive fallout spread throughout the entire continent of Europe, even contaminating sheep grazing far away in the Welsh highlands. Some areas in Chernobyl still show around 75 times the normal level of radiation today.

  Thick grey cloud and heavy flakes of snow set the perfect atmospheric background as we drove into the deserted and decaying metropolis. The city centre housed an unused fairground, complete with a large fading Ferris wheel and mouldering bumper cars, that had been due to open the week after the accident. Now it lies rusting to dust after the inhabitants of the city were told they had two hours to pack their passports and a small bag, to evacuate for a few days. They were never allowed to return.

  One of the most eerie areas of the town was the main school where children's drawings, a quarter of a century old, were still pinned to the wall next to crates of unused gasmasks and where posters still advertised the Soviet Union in all its glory. Everything was untouched since that fateful day; a sobering and eye-opening experience for both of us. Once we had been ushered back into the minibuses we sat in silence as they took us past the longdestroyed reactor itself, and mounds of dirt that buried entire villages. We wondered what Paul had been up to back in Kiev.

  CHAPTER 13

  NAKED COUNTRY!

  Sometimes the miles just melted away and someti
mes we had to drive every single one. The road to Poland was one of the latter long slogs and the police weren't as friendly as the ones in Kiev. Rather than giving us good-luck charms, these officers wanted hard cash, although it turned out to be surprisingly simple to barter them down; Paul got his 'fine' down to £6. I got away with giving them Paul's birthday cactus. Leigh was now the only one who hadn't been caught or fined.

  After hopping through Austria our short time in Liechtenstein was characterised by a game invented by Hannah's newest passenger, Paul's friend Wikey. He had flown out to join us to celebrate his birthday on the road and his suggestion for the day's entertainment was to drive through an entire country naked. One of the benefits of having a country a hundred times smaller than Yorkshire was that this didn't actually involve all that much time being naked, so we agreed.