Rutzovsk, Russia. The three of us are being driven through town in the back of a Russian police jeep. We only crossed the border about an hour ago. That's pretty good going.
If you'd told me that when I woke up - with a hangover, in a hotel room covered in talcum powder - I'd have probably groaned and rolled over onto one of my potentially cracked ribs and gone back to sleep. The weird of this trip is so relentless, it's almost becoming too much.
The day starts with us setting off for some new tyres. We had one blow up on us with the heat back in Turkmenistan, and another one is struggling to stay inflated - best sort this out before we go much further, especially now we're rolling on improvised shocks.
I get my first taste of car Par market, which is brilliant. We ask about Punto tyres at one shop - the guy listens to what we want, realises we don't speak the same language, shuts his shop up, lights a fag and wanders down the road to our car before squatting down and studying the wheels intently as he drags on his smoke. Nope, he says, can't do that. Trouble is all the cars here are massive - they have to be given the state of the roads, so no-one stocks wee spares for Puntos.
We're outside the tyre place when a big mellow guy wanders over in a vest, arms covered in tattoos, wearing shades, and starts speaking perfect colloquial English. 'One question guys. How many cars are doing this drive? Every day I keep seeing these cars covered in stickers.' We tell him there are 500 teams on the rally. 'Fuck me,' he says. It's one of the best exclamations of 'fuck me' we've heard in ages.
He's a really helpful bloke. But he's serious when he warns us against drinking with the locals in the city. He says they can seem very nice, but that they'll then turn on you. Before you know it you've got a knife to your throat. We tell him we were ok last night - we were drinking with the feds. 'You were lucky,' he says, and warns us to be careful. Maybe it's a good thing we're leaving the country in the next few hours. Into Russia, where nobody's mental.
Jeff asks the dude directions to the border. This is greeted by loud guitars blaring out of his jeep. 'Good rock,' says Jeff. 'I know,' he says. We follow him out of the city, banging our heads to the guy's Nirvana. He sees us off with a raised fist, a 'good luck guys', and a final 'be careful'.
And so we drive the 90km to the Russian border. The countryside is verdant and flat, and the road is surprisingly smooth. Steve's up doing 60mph and everything. Mr W gets there no worries. We even manage to get in a lunch at this little family-run roadside cafe involving jam and cream. Cream tea on.
We hit the border, and bump into two Italian teams queueing to get out of Kazakhstan. It's a long wait, but sedate compared to the border trying to get in, when it turned into a mental stock-car racing job. The Italian team are amazed we tackled the Semey road in our little Punto, and in the dark.
The only bummer is when the Russian soldiers tell us to unpack the car. It's the first time we've had to do that, and Jeff's up on the roof handing down guitar cases so they can open them up and sniff suspiciously at our packets of strings. Pretty soon though they're calling us the Beatles, and taking photos of us pulling away. Even in Russia, which we figured would be the hardest of all borders, it seems Mr W only brings smiles.
We drive on through the Russian countryside. The aim is to get to Barnaul, just one 600km drive from the Mongolian border. Mental. Trouble is it's getting late, so we pull into the town nearer, to get a hotel and some grub. Turn up, no-one speaks English at all. It's well off the tourist trail. The town is old and has a sad air, a big square in the centre where everyone sits mooching about, watching us on our hunt for shelter. It's not unfriendly as such, but standing out here feels different to everywhere we've been. It's no longer a case of being an amusing visitor - perhaps more potential target.
Even the word hotel isn't understood. We ask a girl, who points across the square. Too easy. We go in to find the huge dark hall of a dusty old hotel. It's brilliant. A woman sits in a booth in darkness in the corner. If you've seen the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink, it's like that, where if you rang the bell at reception its chime would ring unbroken for an hour. We convey what we want. The woman just shakes her head and says nyet. Blatantly because we're foreign. Shit.
We're tired. It's been a long day, of driving in a knackered car and long border crossings, with no food or water. It's times like this that everything gets testing. But luck is of course never far away. We'll find a hotel somehow. We go outside, and ask a couple of old dudes stinking of booze. They're a good laugh, and bicker for ages in Russian about what to tell us. They try drawing a map, he's holding his fag in the same hand as his pen. It's not going to work. We're about to try their idea, when we see an old couple and their grandson staring at our car. They point us around in the other direction.
We're on the way there when we pull over to get money - we've learnt our lesson of rolling into places with no cash. We're parked on a main road. Shit, the cops come past in a jeep - they pull in, probably to give us shit for illegal parking. It'll be our first taste of Russian law.
Jeff gets out and pre-empts them by asking if they know a hotel. They say to follow them. Unbelievable. First they tell us to park Mr W next to the police box, to prevent anyone giving us any trouble. Unbelievable. Then we jump in the back of the jeep and drive to the hotel. There's a huge rigmorale with the receptionist, who's on the phone to someone trying to organise everything. All we want is a room. No-one speaks English. But the policeman, Andrei, is still there dutifully helping. They try charging us $83 each, which is crazy. Andrei finds out about another hotel, $100 for all. So drives us across town, and out of among huge suburban tower blocks, to a hotel with knight-decorated banquet hall. Mental. Again, Andrei waits while it's all sorted. He's spent over an hour with us trying to sort out a room. Crazy.
The Russian attitude seems to be to cause as much fuss as possible about a simple request, and then to suddenly become incredibly friendly, as if nothing had ever happened. Anyway, the epic day ends with eating chicken and chips, and drinking a beer. I've never had as much contact with the police as this trip, and the vast majority has been positive, funny, and incredibly strange. We're now only a day's drive from Mongolia. Heh heh.
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