Mongol Saga Episode VI – The Russian Border
The hardest part of travelling across Europe before and during the Mongol Rally has been the clinging feeling of uncertainty – we don’t know whether our journey will be cut short in a matter of days or stretch for another month. We all still crave the latter, to roll into Ulaan Bataar in late August is still a magnificent dream to us. But as the days have turned into weeks and after a month of seeing the insides of many of Europe’s ancient cathedrals as well as its DMV-equivalents, and watching the rolling countryside through the window of our cramped yellow car, it is harder and harder to say we haven’t accomplished enough. I’m not sure we don’t already have enough stories to tell and that, given some of the difficulties we’ve experienced, we must push ourselves even further to reach some sort of catharsis, to feel like we’ve gone far enough.
Maybe that was the goal all along – to attain such a state of detachment that we would be equally open to returning home, tired and loose like a stretched out sweater, or heading still eastward through three giant countries that will toss us like rags, this way and that depending on the wind for another grueling month. Every day I ask myself if we are at the breaking point or just the halfway point.
The last few days have seen our odds of success (reaching the capital of Mongolia) twitch up and down like a seismograph needle during an earthquake. First our car broke down in Vilnius, Lithuania and we were on the side of the road in a light drizzle imagining the costs of repair overwhelming our travel budgets. Then the same day our car was miraculously running again, after the friendliest mechanics in Eastern Europe – at the Vilnius Nissan service station in case you are in the area – offered us parts and service free of charge. They changed both U-joints and two belts that were “too old” before making us leave without giving them more than a very sincere thank you. We spent that night admiring the bits of Vilnius we could scramble across, and the next day we were in Riga, Latvia doing the same dash through narrow cobblestoned streets. But, then our smoothly running car ran into the Russian border and we met even higher highs and lower lows than our mechanical troubles had presented us with.
We hit a line of semi-trucks around one in the afternoon, saw that it extended to the right at the intersection for half a kilometer and turned left, expecting to see the border around the bend. Instead we creeped along the line of trucks for several minutes until we found the end of the line for smaller vehicles, which was hundreds of cars long.
Two British Mongol Rally teams were already in line. One team, donning self-styled mullets, had already been turned away at the European border with Belarus for not having a visa, and so they were giving eastward a try again at the Russian border. By sundown, both teams were successfully inside Russia and we had gleaned a sizeable chunk of information from a middle-aged German who found that sharing anecdotes of his travels in Russian and Mongolia was less boring than waiting in his car. We had been waiting for ten hours and had not even entered the first checkpoint.
It was completely dark when the Latvian officials inspected our car and, twenty minutes later, let us move on to the Russians. The Russian portion of the border consists of a handful of checkpoints, checking passports, checking cars, checking papers…twice maybe, and for each checkpoint you wait. First you wait in a small group of cars to enter the checkpoint, then you wait for an official to finish with the car ahead of yours, then you might fill out a small bit of paper you didn’t know you had to have finished for the waiting official, then you wait to show them the bit of paper, and you wait nervously as someone frowns at your improvised scrawl in the Russian alphabet before saying something in their language and pointing toward imaginary Moscow. Then you drive 100 meters and do it again. One Russian official in a booth had a slight smile on her face as she checked our faces to our passports, at one in the morning perhaps enjoying the notion of the four of us youngsters taking on the widest country in the world, before stamping our passports and handing them back.
It took just that smooth forehead and up-turned corner of the mouth to tick our hopes into the positive quadrant, and we started finalizing our plan of attack – to spend the night in the car and drive to Moscow in the morning no matter how exhausted we might be. Ryan and Michael came back from yet another checkpoint, surely a formality at this point, with smiles on their faces after disappearing somewhere for 20 or 30 minutes. The news they had was perhaps the worst of our trip: no entry. Our temporary German vehicle registration was not enough to satisfy the Russians.
In those earliest morning hours we were basically halfway through the longest U-turn of any of our lives. We officially un-entered Russian and re-entered Latvia, meeting the same guards at the same stations we just labored through. We pulled into the same gas station rest stop we passed about 1 km from the border about 14 hours before, one with a bathroom so foul it deserves no description. We slept at awkward angles in our car seats, the dirty yellow creme in a Russian and Latvian semi-truck Oreo.
