It takes us 20 hours to get through the border between Poland and Belarus -- once called White Russia. We leave the Rafineria Gdansk truck stop early and about 8am we pull up at the end of a long line of trucks on a straight road through dense forest.
Among the trees beside us is a small wooden house. A sign says it's a bar, and speakers hopefully blast rock music toward the road.
Two trucks that pull up behind us are German, but one of the drivers is British. Dirk Otto is a German from Dortmund and Tim Mead is a former British soldier who now lives in Dortmund. His wife is German but her mother was born in Portsmouth. Mike says a lot of British soldiers marry German girls, and work in Germany when they get out of the army.
Dirk is driving a new Mercedes with a special trailer hauling a road resurfacing machine to Samarkand, and Tim drives an Iveco with a load of equipment and spare parts for the machine. Dirk will leave his rig with the machine in Samarkand and ride home with Tim.
Dirk and Tim have never been as far as Samarkand and they ask Mike what kind of weather they can expect. While they talk I check out the bar.
Inside I find a rough wooden counter and a couple of tables with chairs in a bleak room. A Kalashnikov automatic rifle hangs on the wall beside a Budweiser sign.
The menu offers pizza and I wave the others in. We sit down to a soft crust with sauerkraut, peas and bland cheese on it. At least the beer is good.
Looking at the Kalashnikov Dirk says guns are cheap in Russia. In Samara a few months ago a man offered him a Kalashnikov for $200, or a Makarov automatic pistol for $100. The man had both of them, and a case of hand grenades, in the trunk of his car.
But Dirk has never been beyond Samara and he questions Mike about the police, the restaurants, the parking, where they can get decent coffee and other matters of importance to truckers.
That's social life on the road. Old hands talk about their experiences and new truckers ask old hands what to expect. By the time we leave the bar, the line-up stretches out of sight behind us.
It's cold here, and Mike is still wearing his T shirt. Ten years ago he would have idled his engine so he could use the heater, but modern trucks have fuel-fired cab heaters. Mike fires up the heater, and we sit in comfort.
While we wait I read a book and Mike cleans the cab of the truck, sweeping the floor with a whisk-broom and tidying up the receipts and other bits of paper that collect on his dash. If you don't work to keep a truck cab clean it can get incredibly dirty, and most truckers I know try to keep their cabs clean. Some don't wear boots -- or allow their passengers to wear boots -- in the cab, and I met one trucker who cleans his cab with a feather duster.
By supper time we've moved on but there's another bar in sight. I decide to walk up and check it, and Mike tells me to ask for "pivol" -- Polish for beer.
A couple of hundred yards from the truck the other bar is in a big old house off to the side. The front yard has been gravelled and there are a half dozen cars and a couple of local tradesmen's trucks parked there.
There's a deep ditch beside the road and before I reach the entrance to the bar I spot a log across the ditch. I walk the log and cut diagonally through a field.
The bar is nice and fairly busy but the ten or so people there are all locals. The hundreds of truckers on the road out front are not going anywhere, but most of them can't leave their trucks. Even Dirk and Otto can't take a break, because it's not safe to leave a truck un-guarded around here and one man can't watch two trucks.
The bar also offers food to go and I bring schnitzel and chips, as well as beer, back to the truck. As we eat I tell Mike the restaurant looks good, and he decides to try it for a full meal.
I stay with the truck and about 45 minutes later Mike comes back, licking his lips. Try the balaca, he says. It's pig's knuckles, very popular in Poland. I've never had pig's knuckles but I go back to the restaurant and order them. They come on a paper plate with very strong horse radish and coarse rye bread, and they are fat and chewy, and good.
When I get back to the truck Mike has a message from the office, via satellite. Mick has cleared the Polish border, and he is now less than a day behind us.
About midnight we come to a set of traffic lights on the edge of a village. The border is three miles away, Mike says, but they don't want trucks lined up through the village. No surprise there -- when we came there was a solid line of trucks for five km from the first bar to this village, and before we left the bar there was at least another km of trucks behind us. If they allowed trucks to line up through the village, it would cut the village in half.
We wait another hour for a green light -- 17 hours after we joined the line-up. Now we drive the last three km to the border and join the middle of three lines of trucks waiting for inspection.
This is the Belarus border now but the buildings date back to the days of communism, and the paranoid Russian Empire. The inspection sheds look like a railway station without the tracks. There are about eight lanes, each with platforms, like railway platforms, on each side and with dirty green steel roofs over the platforms. Concrete bunkers at the end of each platform have dirty windows. It's night, and the whole area is lit by glaring floodlights.
Most of the border guards wear fatigue uniforms and fur hats and carry Kalashnikov automatic rifles with folding stocks, but some officers wear fancy uniforms that look like a comedian's costume. The guards scowl at us, then stand around and talk as we and dozens of other truckers wait. Off to one side cars and tour buses move faster, past another checkpoint.
One guard has a vicious dog. Perhaps for lack of anything better to do he sets it on another guard, but holds the chain. The other guard watches as the dog lunges against the chain, barking.
Finally a couple of guards come to us and Mike shows them his passport. Between them they read it through, page by page, a couple of times. When Mike says we're going to Tashkent they look at him with respect. "That's a very long trip," one says.
Then it's my turn, and a guard says I need a visa. Mike leads me across a couple of inspection lanes to a small, dirty concrete building, and we step into the vestibule. A uniformed guard glances up, then back at the picture magazine he is reading.
"Visa?" Mike asks.
The guard looks up, glances to one side, then back to his book.
"Visa?", Mike asks again.
The guard looks up, grunts, points to a closed door, then looks back to his book.
Mike doesn't speak Russian but he understands grunts in any language. "We've got to wait for someone," he explains. We sit on a dirty wooden bench. Maybe fifteen minutes later a pompous-looking officer comes into the building, and goes through the closed door. A couple of minutes later he sticks his head out and waves us in to a dingy, dirty gray office. His desk-top is dark green linoleum.
"Passport!" He holds out his hand, and I give him my passport. He glances through it, and seems to be satisfied.
"Money!" He says. He writes the number on a slip of paper. $60. He means American dollars -- the government of Belarus does not accept it's own money, from foreigners. Nobody in the former USSR wants rubles. I hand him a $50 and a $10 bill.
He looks at them, then grunts and hands the $50 back.
"It's too old", Mike interprets. "They won't take money older than 1993.
"I sort through my wallet for a newer bill. The officer fills out a paper, stamps it, and tucks it into my passport."
"Keep that," Mike says. "You will have to turn it in when you leave the country."
Soldiers in coveralls have crawled under the truck with flashlights, another officer is now looking at the trailer and Mike is talking to yet another. All told, we have to pass seven different inspections before we cross the border.
But once we're through, we're almost through. In the old days one set of inspections would do for border formalities for all Russia. Now we will pass through four independent republics, but most of them just want money and they won't inspect us.
About 4am we drive slowly forward, just about 20 hours after we joined the line-up outside that Polish bar. About a hundred yards down the road three soldiers flag us down for a "security check".
Mike knows the drill. He shows them his passport, then hands them a chocolate bar from the Polish supermarket. They wave us through.
The old-time traders used tea to pay their bills along the Silk Road. Some Chinese merchants actually made "tea money" in the form of tea pressed into thin blocks, about the size and shape of flat roofing tiles, with patterns stamped on them. The blocks of pressed tea were accepted across Central Asia, and you could break bits off to make tea for drinking.
The Maya of Central America used cocoa beans for money, and chocolate seems to be the modern currency of Eastern Europe. Like tea, it was originally a stimulating drink.
It's made from the beans of the cacao plant, native to Central America, which are roasted, ground and then pressed to squeeze out a vegetable fat called cocoa butter. The powder that's left is called chocolate mass and it may be stored loose or pressed into blocks. Cortez tasted bitter chocolate at Montezuma's court in Mexico, in 1519, and he brought a load of cacao beans back to Spain. For nearly 100 years the drink, made with cacao beans and flavored with honey and cinnamon, was a Spanish secret.
In 1657 a Frenchman opened a shop to sell solid blocks of chocolate in London. It was so expensive that only the nobility could afford it, but it was very popular. Within a few years, most of the major European cities boasted chocolate shops.
Pure chocolate is bitter but by 1700 the English were adding milk to chocolate. to make a drink we would identify as cocoa. In 1847 the English were processing their own chocolate and a company called Fry & Sons mixed sugar and cocoa butter into chocolate powder, to make the first eating chocolate. Within a couple of years bakers were making chocolate cookies and cakes, and in 1847 Swiss candy-maker Daniel Peter invented milk chocolate.
Chocolate is not only the world's most popular flavor, it's also a stimulant and you can actually get drunk on it if you eat or drink enough. It also contains a chemical called phenylethylamine that is produced by the human brain when we're in love, and eating chocolate gives us the same good feeling we have when we're in love.
Chocolate is also the foundation of some modern fortunes. The company that makes Mars chocolate bars has expanded into a major food company with dozens on familiar brand names and the Walter Baker company that made Baker's Chocolate was the foundation of the giant General Foods company.
Like most international truckers in Russia Mike keeps a box of small chocolate bars behind his seat, to pass out to policemen at spot checks. Later a Russian woman who wants to make friends gives me a big bar of chocolate.
Mike tells me that the English Cadbury company used to send chocolate to Moscow by container ship, but they quit because full containers of chocolate used to go missing. Now they ship by truck.
And so do others. Ralph Davies once told me his trucks sometimes haul one kind of Mars chocolate bar from England to Moscow, then bring another kind from Warsaw back to England. As it happens I will ride from Warsaw to England with a load of chocolate on the last leg of this trip.
But for now I am about to be introduced to the myriad police inspections and ripoffs that are still part of daily life in Russia. A hundred yards from the Russian border another group of soldiers wait. They let us pass, but stop a bus. Less than an hour later we are flagged down by three policemen who already have 10 cars pulled over.
They say Mike was speeding, but it's a shake-down and Mike knows it. He refuses to pay the fine they demand, and gives them a pack of cigarettes instead. They grumble, and wave us on.
Police checks are still a fact of life in Russia and there are still police posts, and guards with Kalashnikov rifles, at every major crossroad and at the entrance to every town. In the days of the workers' paradise you needed a pass to get by each post, but now most Russians just slow down as they drive over the "dead-man" bump on the road.
We are waved over often and Mike pays the police off with a chocolate bar, a dollar, cigarettes or a beer.
Each time the cops stop us we know it's a shake-down. Legally there is nothing they can do but they could take a couple of hours to check our papers or make us wait a day while they wire Moscow to check something. On the other hand they won't shake us down for much, and they are friendly when we pay them off.
And all told I felt better toward the police in Russia, where they shook us down for small change but protected us from violent crooks, than I do in the States where highway cops and truck inspectors rip off truckers for big bucks for weigh-scale and other violations.
Truckers in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia knew for years that one scale near Truro was inaccurate but the provincial Department of Highways refused to replace it until a local judge, who also knew the scale was inaccurate, refused to convict on overweight tickets issued at that scale.
One Canadian trucker carrying hazardous materials through Washington State faced criminal charges because the papers describing his load were not in his door pocket, as U.S. regulations demand. They were in his hand, because he had taken them out of the door pocket while he was looking for the log book the inspector demanded. The charge was later withdrawn, on the orders of the prosecuting attorney, but only after the trucker had paid for a lawyer at a preliminary court appearance.
The Texas State legislature passed a bill saying that small villages can keep only 30 per-cent of the revenue from speeding fines after it was discovered that the one village took in between 80 and 90 per-cent of its total revenue from speeding fines. The village then had to look for other sources of revenue but, predictably, the other sources were mostly other traffic offenses for which out-of-town truckers could be fined.
In a legal suit against the State of Tennessee's Public Service Commission the Owner/Operator Independent Driver's Association of Grain Valley Missouri established in court that Tennessee truck inspectors were required to write their quota of tickets, and that they were forbidden to write tickets against trucks owned by some local companies.
One former Tennessee PSC officer told investigators that inspectors who wrote more tickets than others got raises in salary, and that the "top" inspector in East Tennessee in 1990 had inspected 1,495 trucks and written 712 citations, including 447 for unsafe operation. Inspectors who don't write enough tickets don't get annual raises, and they may be fired if they fall more than 10 per-cent below quota.
Hoping to build a weigh scale on Interstate 155 near Lennox Tennessee, PSC commissioner Frank Cochrane told Dyer County Executive Don Dills the station would cost about $30,000 to build, and would return about $100,000 a year in court costs. Court costs in Tennessee average $103 per case, of which $15 goes to the police department that issued the ticket, $28.50 to the state, (less 15 per-cent to the local administration for collecting it), and the rest goes to the local municipality.
Those are just the court costs, and most truckers don't bother to go to court. Many times they would have to take time off work and travel hundreds or thousands of miles to enter a defense and, even if they know they are not guilty they also know that the courts will believe anything a policeman says, and that the policeman will say whatever will make his charge stick.
Some of the world's worst police thefts are in the U.S.A., where the Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization laws allow police to seize virtually anything they want, from anybody, with no appeal to the law.
In theory the law allows American police to confiscate the proceeds of crime from criminals, but in practice it allows them to take whatever they want from anybody. Some estimates say the take is now more than $4 billion.
All they have to do is suggest -- not prove, just suggest -- some connection with illegal activity. That's not hard because traces of cocaine can be detected on about three quarters of all US currency in circulation. If you are carrying money that has cocaine on it, you may be connected to the drug trade.
The law seems to be most dangerous to travelers who can be stopped and searched for almost any reason, and expensive cars or large amounts of money taken, but American police may also invade and confiscate homes.
In one famous case, police shot a land owner in an attempt to take his $5 million hobby ranch for use as a public park.
Early in the morning of Oct. 2, 1992 thirty local, state, and federal drug -enforcement officers and officers of the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, led by sheriff's deputies from Los Angeles County, cut the padlock on a gate leading down a dusty road to Trail's End Ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu.
They surrounded the house of multimillionaire Donald Scott, who was still asleep. He and his wife, Frances Plante had been up late, drinking, and taking Valium, and Scott was still intoxicated.
Deputies broke the door with a battering ram and rushed in, with guns drawn. When Scott came into his own darkened living room, carrying a pistol, a Sheriff's deputy ordered him to drop the gun, then shot him. There is no evidence that Scott threatened the deputy.
In later investigations it turned out that the US National Park Service had been trying to buy Scott's land for years, but he would not sell. Someone pointed out that if they could find 14 marijuana plants on the 200 acre property the local sheriff could seize the $5 million ranch, and sell it to the Parks Service.
Marijuana is a common weed across North America and the chances are good that you will find at least 14 plants on 200 acres of land, but this time the police goofed. They found no marijuana and could not seize the land, but a police investigation found that the shooting of Scott was "justified."
But the police also protect us from criminals, and that's a useful function. Everybody in Russia worries about robbers but international truckers are special targets because they have to carry big money in hard currency. There are no credit cards in Russia and, for a trip through a country where the average income is less than US$ 50 a month, Mike started with 2,000 American dollars and 2,000 German marks for expenses.
Most truckers carry cash, and everybody knows it. Two years ago Mike dozed off in a line-up on the Rumanian-Bulgarian border, and he left a window open. He thinks someone gassed him, but all he knows for sure is that he woke up hours later with a headache, and with about 1,600 German marks missing from his pocket.
Another Ralph Davies trucker lost more than US$ 1,000 when he was gassed in his truck near Minsk, a couple of weeks ago.
Mike lost his CB radio when someone smashed a window and broke into his cab five months ago. Mickey lost about 1,200 pounds sterling in one break-in and 9,000 Spanish pesos to another, and he lost 112 cases of chocolate when someone broke into his trailer.
When I rode with Colin Berry he told me of a German driver stabbed to death when he tried to stop a thief from searching his clothes while taking a shower in the customs compound in Barcelona. Another English driver told me of two truckers gassed to death in their truck when they stopped for the night in Portugal.
Where there is wealth there are people who want it. While Ghengis Khan ruled most of Asia Mongol soldiers patrolled the Silk Road and in those days it was safer to travel across Central Asia than to travel across Europe.
But that was only for about 50 years. For most of the 1,500 years or more that the route was in common use local robber barons controlled sections of the road. Most of them charged tolls and pretended to control bandits, but somehow the soldiers were often so busy collecting tolls they didn't have time to chase bandits. Chinese archaeologists have found several hordes of coins that were apparently buried by merchants to hide them from bandits. Nobody knows what happened to the merchants, but they never came back for their money.
A couple of hours from the border Mike pulls over beside a police post and pays the officer in charge a few dollars. A policeman waves to a spot under his floodlights, and we park for the night under police protection.