It's on the Meter

by Paul Archer

  'Yes.'

  'When?'

  'Well… apart from being born in Bahrain? Lots of times, you have my passport, it's probably best if you look for yourself.'

  The guard had my British passport that I had generally reserved for Western countries, like America and Australia, and after looking through it thoroughly he couldn't find the stamp he was after.

  'I can't find the stamp… do you have a second passport?' he asked.

  My Irish passport was in my back pocket, containing stamps and visas from Israel's worst enemies. But there was no point in lying – Mossad probably knew what I ate for breakfast. Reluctantly, I handed it over. He opened it, and, by complete chance, it landed on the worst possible page:

  VISA: ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN

  The guard's mouth fell open and his face showed a look that said, 'This is way above my pay grade'. He couldn't even string a sentence together, just mumbled, 'errrrr', and disappeared around the back at a brisk jog.

  Ten minutes later, my palms were flat against a wall of a curtained-off cubicle.

  I was wearing nothing but my tatty, ripped boxer shorts and a gloved hand was examining my manhood.

  As I zipped myself up after my strip search, I attempted to be jovial – as much as I didn't want to be strip searched in Tel Aviv Airport at 4 a.m., I knew that my searcher had probably never harboured dreams of nightshifts searching foreigner's privates. Ready to go, I grabbed the pile of change I had emptied out of my pockets and gave him a mischievous smile.

  'How about a tip?'

  He looked me in the eye and in a flat voice without the slightest hint of humour, said, 'I'm sorry, it's against regulation for me to accept that,' and returned to his form.

  CHAPTER 53

  TROUBLE AT THE BORDER

  Leigh and I hitchhiked up to the airport and waited for the flight to Greece in a McDonald's, chosen for the trusty free WiFi. It was peopled with teenage conscripts horsing around, with their assault rifles piled up next to the straw dispensers and ketchup sachets.

  After arriving in Greece, the next task was to get the car released from the port, albeit with no registration document, no insurance and, worst of all, no vehicle owner, as our rendezvous with Paul hadn't gone to plan.

  All we had was a colour photocopy of the elusive V5 document that Leigh had printed at the airport. Somehow, that, along with our dubious English charm, was more than enough for the relaxed Greek customs agents to let us retrieve Hannah. We loved the laxness of the Greek authorities.

  The Romanian and Bulgarian borders also accepted the forged V5 with no problems and we started to wonder what all our worries had been about as we whizzed past the many roadside prostitutes and up to Bucharest. We had missed Eastern Europe's bizarre quirks dearly. The hearty, fatty food easily gave America a run for its money and the cheap and tasty beers knocked anything Israel had to offer right out of the bar. With only four new countries left to go what could possibly go wrong?

  'This is copy.'

  'No, it's not.'

  'Yes, this photocopy, I can tell from the lines. It's forged.'

  The Moldovan border guard in his big, flap-eared Soviet woolly hat was, of course, right.

  The Romanians who had just let us out of their country had also noticed this small hiccup, and now they wouldn't let us back in. We were, quite literally, in no-man's-land between the countries and royally stuck.

  The Israelis swore blind that the Americans had lost the original V5. The Americans said they handed the documents over, and seeing as their job is shipping multi-million-dollar vintage sports cars, and having seen the chaotic Israeli shipping office, I was inclined to believe them.

  I had ordered a brand new V5 from the UK to replace the old one but it still hadn't been printed, let alone shipped out to us. Until we got that, we weren't going anywhere. Besides, where would we ship it to?

  Three Unwashed Idiot Boys

  Pink & Leaky Pop-up Tent

  London Black Cab

  Somewhere between Romania and Moldova

  We had nothing but a packet of crisps and a cold hot dog. This was also pretty embarrassing as an old Moldovan friend of ours from university had offered to put us up that night. Well, technically her mother had, as Nelly was still back in Birmingham doing her finals. Her mother had insisted that we stay with her and was already cooking dinner, while her cousin came to meet us at the border – the border we couldn't get through because we didn't have the right paperwork. We had driven around the whole world, but we couldn't get into Moldova. Leigh made the call to Nelly to apologise.

  'Hey, guys, hang fire,' she said. 'I'll make a few calls and see what I can do.'

  'I'm not sure you can do anything without this document; it's like trying to cross a border without a passport. You'll have to be the Queen… or a president or something. Plus we've tried to do it on forged documents, we're… er… kinda in trouble!'

  'OK, I understand. But just wait there while I make some calls – don't go anywhere.'

  We couldn't.

  Twelve hours later, Leigh had almost run out of action films to watch and we'd caught up on writing all the blogs we needed to write, when the boss came over.

  This wasn't the boss of the guards; this was the boss of the whole border post. She efficiently strode towards our stinking tin hovel.

  'Passports, paperwork?' We handed them over.

  'We… um don't have… um… nyet machina passporta,' I tried to look apologetic.

  'I know. I also speak English. I'll be back. Don't go anywhere.'

  There was still no risk of that.

  She returned 15 minutes later with our passports and ushered us into the main queue.

  'Hey – she's given us visas,' Johno piped up after checking his passport.

  The cars in the queue of traffic in front of us were unceremoniously ordered to pull into the side and we were directed through the gaps. This was either going really well, or we were about to get into even more trouble.

  The guard grabbed our passports again, which were promptly stamped before being handed back to us with a flourish, a smile and a simple, 'OK!' as she pointed us through the border.

  Waiting on the other side was a brand new Mercedes and out stepped a leggy blonde, who said, 'Hi, I'm Lena, Nelly's cousin. I'm the host of Moldovan Top Gear.'

  We were a little bit impressed. 'Hi! Great to meet you!' we enthused. 'So it was you who managed to get us through the border?'

  'Oh no… that was Nelly's mum. She called the President.'

  'The… President?'

  'Yes, he has given you a pardon – now we must move, dinner is getting cold.'

  Nelly's mother was an absolute saint. She invited us into her home and made it her job to ensure we all put on a stone each from all the wonderful food she cooked for us. We celebrated Easter with her, acting as surrogate children while her own were still studying abroad.

  But there was a problem – even with the President's blessing – as without our V5, we were still stuck in Moldova indefinitely, unable to enter any other countries. It could take weeks to be processed by the good old DVLA in Swansea (perhaps their employees were too busy trying to have sex with black cab exhaust pipes at Full Moon parties…) and there was still no sign of the old one in Israel. I tried one last-ditch attempt with the Israeli shippers, insisting categorically that they lost it and mentioning the damages they may be liable for, in a desperate attempt to persuade them to take their feet off the desk, stop smoking and start searching their office.

  'OK, OK… we look again.'

  And, all of a sudden, it materialised. I expect they never bothered to look in the first place. But this wasn't the end of our problems – we now had to get the document from Israel to Moldova, hardly a route regularly serviced by DHL, and it was still the Passover week in Israel, so no couriers were working. The fastest we could get it was a matter of weeks and we were due in Moscow as GetTaxi's guests of honour at a huge tech conference in a few days. A load of inte
rviews had been scheduled soon after that, along with various flights, meetings, visa restrictions and our imminent arrival back in London.

  But we had one characteristically convoluted option. Fini, an overworked PA and general saviour at GetTaxi who had had the unenviable job of translating my constant requests to the shipping agents to 'search harder', had an idea. Her father was flying to Romania the next morning for business. With a few calls and some favours, the V5 was on its way to us via a rather unusual route. Fini drove from the shipping agent to her father's house and handed over the document. He flew to Bucharest and handed the document to his secretary before going to his meetings. A courier collected it from the secretary, took it to the bus station and handed it to a bus driver. The bus driver drove his bus from Bucharest to the border with Moldova, where he dropped his passengers off, and handed the document to another bus driver. The second driver then drove to Chisinau, the Moldovan capital, where he was met by one of Nelly's mum's employees (we weren't allowed to go as a feeding was due), who then drove the document up to Nelly's house and dropped it off just in time for tea.

  The Moldovan border guards couldn't stop laughing at our rubbish car as they stamped us through. The Ukrainian officials weren't quite so jolly and unceremoniously demanded to know whether we had any pistols or narcotics as they led sniffer dogs around the back of Hannah.

  One police stop later we were back in Kiev, back in Joanna's hostel – where we had celebrated our first month on the road – catching up on the last year and a half and drinking vodka. It was like déjà vu but this time the birthday boy changed from Paul to Leigh.

  'I don't want to go to exactly the same bars and do the same as Paul on his birthday, I want a different experience,' he said.

  But before long we were back in the same underground bar, again a little worse for wear, watching the same barmaids breathe shots of fire over a very jolly Leigh's head.

  CHAPTER 54

  THE 'FILTHY RAVE CLUB' – TAKE TWO

  Last time we were in Moscow we didn't see too much apart from the inside of a police station and a few hazy clubs. This time we were determined to actually see the sights, after first spending a night camping on the vast Russian steppe. Driving in Russia had reminded us how much we hated the bumps, and the appalling drivers, but it also gave us the chance to partake one more time in that Russian tradition.

  In the morning, three huge guys in a gleaming BMW stopped to take photos with us and chat, all smiles. One of them asked, 'Is it too early?'

  'Erm, for what?'

  'Vodka! It is Russian tradition!'

  We informed them that 9 a.m. was slightly too early for us and they accelerated off in a screech of wheels.

  Russia passed in a flash of interviews, meetings and press engagements with GetTaxi and the crew in the Moscow office. The Russia we saw was slightly different than the one we had seen before, but there was a friendly face waiting for us; we had met a photographer called Rob in Ukraine, 13 months earlier. He was now teaching English to the kids of oil billionaires in Moscow and jumped at the chance of another international trip in Hannah.

  In ancient China a unit of distance known as the li was used to measure the difficulty of a journey, rather than the actual physical distance. So in one direction two towns could be 100 li apart but going back might be 200 li, if, for instance, it was all uphill. Using the li would have been useful in Russia where one moment we could be zipping along on autobahn-like highways and the next bouncing around on India-esque tracks.

  We had one day to get out of Russia and a mere 200 miles to go. For most of the way we were blessed with empty, arrowstraight and surprisingly smooth roads. We even took some leisurely stops where we saw, at what could barely even be called a hamlet, a well-tended war memorial next to a couple of tumbledown houses. A fatherly statue of Lenin quietly watched over them while a lonely pigeon sat perched on his head. The extensive lists of names were testament to how thoroughly the war ravaged this area of western Russia and every falling-down barn and dilapidated house represented someone's destroyed future. Each pile of decaying beams was once someone's dream; thought up and painstakingly built, but then left to rot by a builder who would never return. With every mile closer to the Estonian border, I felt more and more relaxed. Now we would definitely make it out in time, short of a major disaster – a major disaster like a two-day long queue of vehicles at the border.

  Like the one that greeted us around the next corner.

  The whole car winced.

  'Just go around, it might be for trucks or Russian cars only,' I said hopefully, but as we rolled along slowly on the opposite side of the road it was clear that the line was for all vehicles and that it was at least two or three miles long.

  We crept forward, and within sight of the border there was a break in the line of cars. We pushed in, using all our British arrogance and Rob's passable grasp of Russian to skip hundreds of waiting people.

  'We just drove all the way around the world!' we explained, to the angry glares as we passed through the checkpoint and out of Russia.

  The first flowerings of spring were blossoming and I quickly remembered why I loved the Baltics. Rob described them as 'like Russia but with smiles and Jägermeister'. It certainly was good to be back in Europe.

  We reached Latvia and reunited a bemused Laila with her lost straw hat, before meeting one of the last Couchsurfers of the trip. Ance lived with her family in a beautiful house in the forest, complete with a sauna outhouse of which we soon sampled the delights. It was like our relaxing break in Finland but without the snow, and we each had our own bedroom for the night – exactly what we needed after rattling through Russia.

  We drove all day and crashed out in fields and on Couchsurfers' sofas at night all the way through Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Germany on our way home. The typical European scenery rushing by was comforting after spending so long on the other side of the world, and we were relishing the sense of familiarity that being so close to home brought. We paused only for Leigh to purchase a questionable rubber phallic-like object from a Polish service station to be our new taxi mascot.

  We arrived in Berlin mid-afternoon in an attempt to experience properly the nightlife we had tried so desperately to find last time we were in the city – although this time hopefully we wouldn't wake up the next morning and find our taxi had been lost.

  It was a Friday night and we were staying at Anne's again. We learnt from our previous mistake and dressed as 'hip' as we could before we headed out. The next morning we found ourselves swinging in a rowing boat pirate ship that was strung between the trees in the garden of an ex-brothel-turnedelectro-nightclub. We were suitably satisfied that we had 'done Berlin'.

  Driving out the next day, we stopped to prepare our road sandwiches in the usual way – using the bonnet as our picnic table – and planned the route west, when there was a shout.

  'Hey! Hey, taxi boys.'

  There, out of the blue, was Felix; the German guy who had hitched a lift from Georgia to Armenia with us. We were in his home city, and after catching up briefly we were back on the road, amazed at the odds of the chance meeting with someone we had met half a world away.

  A friend of ours was living on an army base just outside of Hamburg and had invited us to dinner in the Officers' Mess. After cruising down the autobahns, we were uncharacteristically on time – and everything was going well until we heard that familiar 'pop' and crunch, as what felt like the hundredth ball joint of the expedition failed. A roadside bodge job allowed us to limp to the base to find the officers of Her Majesty's Mercian Regiment drinking gin and tonics and awaiting our late arrival.

  It turns out the damage to the cab was more substantial than we had initially thought and soon after dinner, as Leigh and Johno worked on the cab, Captain Martyn Fulford and I were searching through rows of huge battle tanks trying to find a bolt of the right length and thickness.

  We failed, and the next morning took a trip to the other side of the base
to the mechanic's, manned by a combination of British soldiers and local Germans. They carefully examined Hannah's knackered front end before trying to remove the shattered ball joint, amid an unceasing barrage of World War Two-based banter from the British mechanics.

  'No wonder you lost the bloody war, you can't even remove a simple ball joint!'

  The German mechanic gave a few more heaves on a huge spanner and the parts plopped out on the floor.

  'We may have lost the war,' he started, standing up and wiping his hands, 'but we have better women, beer, cars and economy. Now,' he smirked as he tossed the bits over to his British counterpart, 'be kind enough to press this joint back together so your countrymen can be on their way.'