We pass north of Berlin, about 700 km from Ostende, about noon Friday. As we approach the Polish border we see dozens of light trucks with trailers carrying cars. Some are parked in service areas, and men are working on the cars.
Mike says they are dealers who buy used cars in Germany to sell in Poland. Poland charges duty on used cars but not on car parts, so three or four friends will often get together to import several cars as parts.
They buy the cars whole, then take them apart in parking areas and sometimes even while they wait in line for customs inspection. By the time they reach the border they have several truckloads of assorted parts -- four engines on one truck, four transmissions on the other, 16 wheels in one load, four batteries on the other and so forth. When they get home, they will put the cars together again.
Mike is heading for a secondary border crossing because he figures there will be less waiting there, but that might not be a good move. Less than an hour later we pull up at the end of a long line of trucks in the right lane. We are about 12 km from the Polish border, Mike says, and it will take us about 12 hours to get there. He is wrong, it takes about 16 hours.
Mike's a pro at waiting in line and he carries a big stock of books. When we join the line-up Mike leans his seat back, rests his feet on the dash and pulls out a book. I go for a walk up the road.
But there's not much to see. We're in farm country with pastures on this side of the road and plowed fields on the other, and not a building in sight. The road has two tracks and four lanes, and the big trucks are lined up in the inside lane of our track. Cars and busses are passing us in the outside lane and there is light traffic coming the other way. The line-up of trucks passes out of sight ahead of us, and new trucks are coming up behind every second.
When I get back to our truck Mike is sitting on the guard-rail and talking to another driver. Ken Ward drives for Dar Trans, an international company with bases in England and Warsaw. Mike and Ken are old friends but they haven't seen each other for a while because Ken quit driving, to sell fruit and vegetables, about ten years ago. Now he's driving again and his truck is in line behind ours.
We are on the right side of the road, beside the truck. Suddenly we hear the whump!! of car hitting car, and tinkling glass. The accident happened right beside Mike's truck.
An old Opel was cruising slowly and a Mercedes running at highway speed hit it from behind. The Opel is driven forward about 50 feet, with the back end split wide open. Dozens of bags of candy, chips and cookies and cookies have burst out of back of the car but the Polish driver is only shaken up.
An overweight man and a couple of older women sit, stunned, in the Mercedes.
People come from all directions and Ken runs for his truck. Mike steps to the door of our truck and locks it and, as I look, Ken locks his. At a time like this, Mike says, someone could slip into the truck and steal our baggage. If it was night we would have to stand guard, because people might come from the fields to break in.
This is the first of literally dozens of wrecks we see on this trip. In nearly 16,000 km of driving through former communist states I lose count of the wrecked cars, trucks and busses we pass.
Where trucks are wrecked we see people trying to recover the cargo, and we see dozens of wrecked vehicles that had been stripped and abandoned.
I remember some bad pile-ups. In southern Kazakhstan a truck rammed into the back of a stopped bus. Near Samara, people dragged their baggage out of a rolled car in the field off to the side. There was a police post less than a mile from that accident and the police on duty must have heard it happen, but they didn't seem to be interested.
In the next few weeks I see a half-dozen trucks that have rolled off the road -- some apparently because they skidded in snow -- and one that rolled because it dropped a wheel in the ruts of a very bad road.
And I see the torn remains of one truck in a truck stop, apparently being driven back for repairs. The front of the cab is half crushed in, half torn off, and the upholstery of the driver's seat is smeared with blood, but the truck will run and it is being driven.
In some areas there are graves beside the road, some with steering wheels mounted on the tombstones. Outside the city of Petropavlovsk, there's a wrecked car mounted on a pylon in front of the police post.
At a truck stop in Moscow western truckers tell me they worry about accidents in Russia because they have all seen people bleeding and dying while looters casually sort through the baggage and freight of wrecked vehicles. We see a few four-wheel-drive ambulances on the road, but I would not want to depend on the Russian medical system for help.
But this is Germany and a police car and an ambulance arrive within a few minutes. Because the police van blocks the lane ahead of us we sit for a couple of hours without moving, but we're not going anywhere anyway. When the police van moves we pull ahead about a hundred yards. Ken makes tea, on a gas stove in his truck, and we talk.
Times have changed, Ken and Mike agree. In the old days there were few truckers on international runs, and most of them knew each other. Now there are too many, and most are strangers.
While we talk a couple of Russian trucks jump the line. Traffic has moved and some of their friends, about 10 trucks ahead of us, have held space for them. I resent that but Mike does not -- he says he has jumped the line himself a few times. Later I see him do it, when some Iranian drivers fall asleep on the Uzbek-Kazak border.
Someone is always waiting to get by, and with two of us in the truck Mike and I take turns staying awake in long line-ups. When he's alone, Mike says, he tries to make friends with the driver behind him. After they have talked the other driver won't pass him -- and if Mike has trouble down the road the other driver will probably stop to help.
Later Mickey Gill tells me that when he's alone in line he ties a light thread from one windshield wiper of his truck to the back of the truck ahead. When the truck ahead moves it will pull his wiper out against the spring, and when the thread breaks it will snap back against the windshield and wake him.
By 5:30 it is dark. The trucks ahead have their lights switched off and we can't see any building lights. I turn on a cab light and read my book while Mike and Ken talk outside. About 8 o'clock a vendor comes by, on foot, and Mike buys a couple of sausages on rye bread and four beers for 12 German marks -- about US$ 10. The vendor is a Pole and he probably had to sneak across the border to sell in Germany, but apparently few Germans live near here and there are lots of Poles on the other side of the border.
At night the car traffic tapers off and Ken pulls his truck up alongside ours. Now Ken and Mike can sit inside and talk through open windows, and no one can pass either of us if we fall asleep. Ken has a gas stove on a table beside his seat, and he keeps us all supplied with tea.
By 9.30 we can see the lights of the Polish border but we aren't there yet.
The line is slow and Mike says it is partly because of the weekend -- if we'd come on a week-day it would have been faster. Sometimes he can get through in a couple of hours, he says, and he usually makes it in less than 12 hours but he has heard of drivers who waited for days.
I've heard stories too. On a ride to Spain Colin Berry told me about a strike of Spanish truckers the year before, when they closed the French-Spanish border. Colin was stopped in France, about ten miles from the border. A couple of days later the trucks were backed up 43 km into France, and French police ran a mini-van back and forth, offering free rides to free meals in local restaurants and free sandwiches and drinking water for truckers who didn't want to leave their trucks.
Colin used to deliver ammunition from Belgium to the Aden Defence Force, at the far end of the Red Sea, and he sometimes had to wait two or three days at each of a dozen or more borders along the way. While he was waiting he began drawing pictures, then moved on to oil paint. Now he's an accomplished artist.
About 10pm Ken says he is now liable for a fine of 2,000 English pounds for driving over time. According to EEC hours of service regulations he should have stopped for a sleep at 6:30, but there is no way he can pull off the road, and he would lose his place in line if he did. Mike is supposed to shut down at 11:30, but he can't stop either.
It's about midnight when we reach the border. The guard glances at Mike's passport and hands it back. Poles like the English, Mike says, because England backed up Poland in 1939.
He tries to tell the guard I don't need a visa, but the guard says I do. I have to sit in an inner room in the guard shed and fill out a long form, while a half-dozen guards outside look over my passport. I guess in the old days they would have been checking to see if it is a forgery, but now they are just curious.
Later I see how Russian cops and guards cluster around to look at the visas and entry stamps in Mike's passport. While Communists ruled people were not allowed to travel and now few can afford it, and they are fascinated by the evidence that Mike and others like him cross continents as casually as most people cross a village street.
The Polish border guards are waiting for someone and he comes after about ten minutes. An officer who doesn't speak English, but smiles a lot. One of the guards asks in English whether I have any Polish money and I say no. The officer leads me to a change booth at the side of the customs compound.
I will need $19 for the visa, they tell me at the change booth, and I can change as much more as I want. I change $40 for a handful of zlotys. Later I find that I have a mixture of old and new bills -- one new zloty is worth 10,000 old ones, and my $40 is worth about 100 new zloty's.
The border office is early concentration camp, full of drab decor and dark corridors and heavy steel doors, and you need a key to get out of the building. It would have been scary in old days, but now it is just dreary.
I wait in the watch room, which is about like a small-town Canadian police station from the 1950's or earlier. A small room with a gray-green counter down the middle and across one end. There's a flap so policeman can pass through the counter, and a calendar and some notices on the wall. I stand at the counter while the officer takes my papers in to an inner office.
The shift is changing and one by one the border guards come into the office, pull the clips from their automatic pistols and thumb the bullets out. They hand them to another guard who is coming on shift, and put the empty pistols back into their holsters.
After about ten minutes the officer comes out with my visa, smiles and waves me on. Back at the guard shed I find that Mike has pulled ahead and to the side. Because the shift has changed we both have to wait until all the new guards have checked my passport, with the new Polish visa, and discuss all the old visas and entry stamps.
Across the border we run a gauntlet of small shops and street vendors offering cigarettes and liquor. Groceries are cheaper and better in Germany Mike says, but some things are cheaper here.
Near the end of the line we see displays of concrete garden gnomes. I think I see more garden gnomes offered for sale at roadside stands in Poland than anywhere else in the world, but I don't remember seeing any in gardens.
Ken is waiting at a modern-looking gas station about ten miles from the border. Mike beeps his horn as we pass, and Ken pulls out to follow. We travelled alone through Europe but now we will travel in convoy with other western truckers whenever we can -- which this trip is almost all the way. Travelers on the Silk Road probably teamed up too, so they would have a friend nearby if they had any problems.
We drive a couple of miles on a four-lane highway, then turn onto a two-lane local road with ruts in the pavement. The ruts are standard through most of Eastern Europe, Mike says, because they build roads with a base of sand and a thin layer of asphalt.
English drivers call the ruts "tram lines" but the poles call them "Koleiny". Some tram lines are inches deep and they have signs -- with a black-on-yellow picture of a car caught in ruts -- to warn when they get bad.
Ken Ward doesn't like tram lines. When you pass someone, he says, they toss your truck around when you go back into your lane. Mike says they are very slippery when they're wet.
The tram lines in south Russia are worse than in Poland and in Kazakhstan I will see a truck with the oil pan cracked by a ridge between ruts in a paved road.
The speed limit is 80 kph but at 45 we are rocking back and forth on the narrow road. For a while we drive on cobblestones, and they are better than the tarmac. At some points the speed limit drops to 40 kph -- which is about as fast as we want to drive on this road.
This is a side-road and most of the traffic is local -- Polish-made medium trucks and tiny Polish-made Polski Fiat 650 rear-engine cars. The Fiat company doesn't just sell cars -- it also sells car factories and the Russian Lada and the Yugoslavian Yugo are both Fiat designs made in factories purchased from Fiat.
It is daylight now and we see small houses with high, steep roofs in the towns and villages, and huge apartment blocks as we pass by the city of Stettin. At one point we see what looks like a town surrounded by a brick wall, about 20 feet high, with watch towers. It must be a prison.
Back on a main road we pass what looks like a modern truck stop but Mike passes it up. The food is okay, he says, but if I drink a cup of their coffee I will need a glass of water afterwards.
That's not quite true. Later on I find I want a glass of water after one sip of Polish coffee.
But some places have instant coffee. At a crossroads we pull in to a roadside snack bar, plastered with ads for Coke and Pepsi, Fanta and Sprite, Mars chocolate bars, Movenpick ice cream and Camel cigarettes.
Ken orders sausage and coffee for three. The kielbassa sausage is split and fried, and served with mustard on a paper plate. The coffee is instant, made with hot water from a kettle. Perhaps because we're foreigners the girl drops one spoonful of coffee into the cup, then looks at Ken. He nods and waves a flat hand sideways -- no more. Judging from the Polish coffee I taste later I guess Poles may take two or three spoons of instant coffee per cup.
We take our plates to a tiny wire-frame table beside a Coke machine. While we eat another English Dar Trans driver walks in. I later learn when any western driver sees a western truck parked in the east, he usually stops.
Dave Watson is mad because he was loading onions in a field and he got stuck, and the Polish farmers charged him 200,000 Zloty -- about $10, American -- to pull him out.
When we finish Ken pulls a handful of assorted change from several different countries out of his pocket and holds it out. The girl sorts through it, chooses a few Polish coins, and rings up the sale.
Like most North Americans I knew Poland was conquered quickly in World War II and was held by the communists after the war, and I guess some of my ideas about Poland are conditioned by the "Polish jokes" of the 1960's.
Remember them? How do you know it's a Polish airplane? By the hair in it's wing-pits. Why can't you swat a fly in Poland? It's the national bird -- and so forth.
But the reality is that Polish workers in the shipyards of Gdansk beat Communism, and began the collapse of the Russian empire. Now they are free the Poles show a design sense that matches the Swedes and the Danes.
Most of the buildings built since the war seem to be instant slums but the few pre-war buildings that are left are beautiful. Some new buildings are radical designs, and they look very good.
I liked Polish industrial design too. One local car comes as either a car or an over-size station wagon. The wagon version has the same body as the car, but the roof and trunk are replaced to make a much higher vehicle that can move furniture or other bulk loads easily.
The economy seems to be doing well and some people are aggressively market-oriented. One town has a forest of signs, like some southern towns on American Interstate Highways. The signs here are not as big as they would be in the States but one of them advertises Pizza Hut. In the town a lot of buildings need repairs but others look very nice, and some of the houses are great.
In one town we pass a busy market with thousands of people milling around stalls where farmers sell produce. The main road goes through that town, but they will soon need a bypass. As we pass some kids pump their arms up and down, in a signal that asks the driver to blow his air horn. This is the only place I have seen them do it in Europe, but it's common in some parts of America.
Between towns we drive on a two-lane road past fields lined with trees. This is near the end of October but the weather is still summer, with leaves on most of the trees and some mosquitoes in the evening. Mike says the weather is always nice around here -- they get snow near the Belarus border, but not much anywhere else.
Mike likes Poland. He says it reminds him of England in the 1950's, before farmers began cutting down trees to make big fields.
We stop in Poznan because Mike wants to buy groceries to take to Riassa, his girl-friend in Minsk. After weaving through town on jammed two-lane streets we pull off on a huge parking lot half-full of cars from Latvia, Estonia, Belarus, England and Poland, beside an American-style supermarket.
Outside is a big Pepsi-Cola promotion, complete with rock band. They play in front of a castle built of cases of Pepsi, while girls working on another promotion offer us samples from trays of assorted snack food.
Inside the store we find a complete assortment of western products. I notice Heinz ketchup, Uncle Ben's rice, lots of liquor, frozen cooked lobsters from Canada, disposable diapers, Lux soap and L'oreal hair coloring.
Poland is also full of flowers. The markets are full of them, and cars and trucks loaded with flowers pass us on the road. Later Mike points out a graveyard full of fresh flowers. He says it will be lit up at night.
When we see a couple of cars with Florida plates I assume they are American tourists but Mike says they are probably stolen. Cars stolen all over Europe are sold in Russia, he says. One time in a garage in Moscow he saw a half dozen expensive cars with German plates, and they all had wires coming from under their hoods. Mike says most of the western cars we see are stolen.
As we leave Poznan an on-coming Ralph Davies truck flashes its lights and pulls over. We stop, and the driver comes across to talk to Mike.
Bob Irvine was broken down for several days, about 90 miles this side of Minsk, and now he's heading home again.
Workman were repairing the road, he says, and when they quit for the night they didn't put up any warnings or barriers. Bob ran over a pile of dirt they left in the road, and knocked a fitting out of the bottom of his radiator.
I know about that already, because Bob reported in on the satellite system while I was in Ralph Davies' office. I also knew that several other Ralph Davies trucks stopped with Bob, and that a government garage in Minsk wanted 2,800 English pounds -- about $5,600 -- to tow his truck less than 100 miles to Minsk but they would not be able to fix it. When we left Cheltenham Davies was trying to make arrangements by phone for a Polish mechanic to go to Minsk, and for one of his other trucks to pick up a new radiator in Holland.
But none of that was required, Bob tells us, because he found a local village mechanic who fixed the problem for $46. The repair is not pretty, but it works.
Mike says Russian mechanics are very good at improvised repairs. They have to be, because there is no after sales service in Russia and there are not many parts available.
Now we're on a road that looks like an American Interstate, and it also has some of the hazards of an Interstate. When an on-coming car flashes its lights Mike slows down, and a few minutes later we pass a speed trap where a Russian truck is stopped and a policeman is writing a ticket. Mike says the fine will be about 15 German marks.
Ken went ahead when we stopped in Poznan but he drove slow, and we see him parked outside a hotel down the road. We join him inside, and order sandwiches.
Ken says there are 40 drivers in his company and only three are English. The others are all Poles, and Ken has to be careful where he parks for the night in Poland.
"If one of my mates sees me he will invite me home", he says, "and I can't handle the vodka.
"When Poles drink," Ken says "if there are three men they bring out three bottles of vodka. Then if a fourth man comes, they bring out a fourth bottle."
Ken used to truck to Poland while the Communists were in power, and he tells us about the time he got caught up in a black market operation. He was staying with Polish friends and they asked to borrow his empty truck for a while. He drove them out to a garage in the country where they loaded bolts of denim from a small van and brought it back to the house. That would be tame stuff now, but no joke in the days of the police state.
"I was really scared," he says. "I knew it was black market, and I was afraid we would get caught."
Like sailors of old Ken and Mike talk about the world they know. They both know the same roads, the hotels and many of the same people across most of Europe.
It's a strange world, incredibly broad and surprisingly narrow at the same time. They all know some parts of cities like Istanbul, Warsaw, Seville, Moscow and Budapest very well, but they have never seen the tourist sights and, for the most part, they have no interest in the cultural centers. They may have friends in all these cities but the friends are truckers too and their culture is the culture of the trucker, rather than the culture of the city.
Truckers are friendly but they are also cautious. As we leave the hotel there are a couple of Irani trucks parked beside Ken. Mike and I get into our truck but Mike watches as Ken speaks to the Irani drivers, and we don't move out until Ken waves to show that everything is okay.
Ken turns off outside Warsaw, and we continue through the city. Most of the stories I've heard about Warsaw are about the way the German SS wiped out the ghetto near the end of World War II, and about a poor city ruled by the Communists after the war. Most of my real-life memories are of beautiful buildings, wide streets with wide medians and parkland off to the side, and trolleys running through parks.
We stop that night at a Rafineria Gdanska gas station and truck stop, near the town of Zambrow about 80 km from the border. In the restaurant full of local teen-agers we meet Steve Goodchild of SLR Transport in Harwich, England, coming back from Lithuania. He and Mike have never met before, but they both know the same restaurants in Moscow.
Steve hauled British army camouflage material and beer labels to Lithuania and he had an armed guard there because the material was so valuable -- but when the beer labels were delivered the guard left.
Mike hopes we will get through without a guard. If the customs agents say our load is too valuable we will have to park until Monday morning, and go to Minsk with a convoy protected by armed guards. The convoy will cost us about 100 English pounds which is no problem, but Mike does not want the delay.
Most travelers on the old Silk Road were armed but in areas where serious bandits were known to operate caravans hired small private armies of professional mercenaries to escort them through the trouble areas.
Some of the escorts were provided -- for a price, of course -- by the local warlord who controlled that section of the road. In other areas travelers hired their own guards at a local market.
Some of the mercenaries hired by foreign caravans may have been the robbers themselves, honestly willing to work as guards. If the traders hire them they will do their job, because their friends in town know they have been hired to protect the caravan. If foreign traders leave town without an escort the mercenaries are unemployed armed men who know where to find an unprotected caravan that could be worth plundering.
Mike doesn't like military convoys because they're slow, but he had his own private mercenary on his last trip to Kazakhstan. He trans-shipped a load of clothing from Chinese trucks near Alma-Ata, and the Russian dealer hired a former Russian special forces soldier to ride along with Mike.
The guard's name was Andree, Mike says, and he was a nice guy. He spoke good English and carried a Makarov automatic pistol. He told Mike that he makes $1,200 a month -- a fortune in Russia -- and has a Mercedes Benz car.
Andree slept most of the day but when Mike stopped for the night Andree sat in the passenger seat, and he got out and looked around the truck every couple of hours.
He also showed Mike some back roads, and he got them across the Russian border without passing through a guard post. That was Mike's first hint that the load he was carrying was not completely legal. He assumes that some Russian guards knew he was coming, but they were paid off.
But Andree was a good man, Mike says, and they got along well. Too well, as it turned out, for Andree's good.
During one night stop he had showed Mike his pistol, and let Mike shoot it. One shot.
But Andree didn't clean the pistol afterward and as Mike and Andree parted in Moscow a city policeman stopped Andree and inspected his pistol. Because it had been fired, he arrested him.
Mike said that he had fired the gun, in the middle of a desert where there was no danger, but the policeman insisted. Andree told Mike it was not a serious problem, but he would have to pay off the cop. Mike says the Moscow cop seemed to hate Andree, and he was looking for something to nail him on.
That's not hard to understand when you remember that Andree makes 24 times the cop's salary of about $50 a month. It's quite likely that in the days of the Silk Road, the garrison guards hated the mercenaries who made more money and led more interesting lives.