Breakfast Wednesday morning is hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes with cold meat and Bulgarian wine.
A message on the satellite terminal says Mick and another driver, Rene Baashe, cleared customs at Grodno last night, and should reach Minsk this morning. We hitch up the trailer and drive through a light rain to the Motel Minsky, on the highway, where Mike hopes to meet them.
Three years ago you could hardly get into the parking lot here, he says, but then the thieves came and the truckers stopped coming. Now there are only about six trucks.
Mike stays to guard our truck while I look into the hotel. In the huge, cold marble lobby an old woman wearing an overcoat sweeps the floor. The restaurants are closed and the public washroom off the lobby stinks so bad I can't enter it.
Back at the truck I find Mike at the satellite terminal, and we get an object lesson in the dangers of satellite communication. Mike sends a message to London that Mick and Rene have not arrived, and the message comes back "RING RD".
Obviously, some problem has come up, and the dispatcher wants us to phone Ralph Davies. Mike checks the hotel and finds that the phone is not working. He sends a satellite message back to Cheltenham "NO PHONE FOR ONE HOUR" and we set out to look for a phone.
A few minutes later the terminal beeps again, and I pick it up. The message says, "WHY PHONE?" At Mike's instruction I type in the words, "YOU SAID RING RD".
It takes a few seconds for the message to jump from Minsk to a geostationary satellite, 22,000 miles above the equator, then to a processing center in Los Angeles and from there by another satellite link to Cheltenham, a total distance of perhaps 100,000 miles. Then the return message has to come back by the same route. In about a minute the terminal beeps again.
"NOT PHONE. MICK IS ON MINSK RING ROAD"
Mike laughs, and keeps driving. He says we'll pick them up a new truck stop farther east. We drive out a straight two-lane road through a forest of conifers. The rain turns to snow, and Mike says we could be in for a rough crossing of the Urals.
A few miles on we come out to fields and low rolling hills. We pass a couple of villages, then a truck stop and a fenced truck park. The others are not here but Mike says we'll wait for them. He turns at an interchange and cuts back on a sideroad to the stop. A sign in English tells us it's the "Trucker Stop Autodach."
From a distance it looks like a North American gas station with three rows of pumps under a canopy, a small concrete building for the office and store, and some small out-buildings.
Up close we see that the yard is not paved, the concrete building is old and battered, and the store and restaurant are closed.
From the smell I can tell that one out-building is a toilet. I circle and approach it from up-wind.
It's built of brick, with three doors in the front. Each door opens to a stall about six feet square, with a square hole in the brick floor. A shovel leans against the wall.
European "squatter" type toilets are a surprise to most North Americans, but they work well when you get used to them. Most Europeans prefer them, for public toilets, because you don't actually touch them.
But this is different. The holes in these toilets are easily big enough to a child to fall into, and they stink. Later I hear that these particular toilets are famous among western truckers. One driver claims to have seen a rat climb out of one.
Mike calls from across the street. He is standing at the door of what looks like a small house and, as I turn, he waves and goes inside.
I follow, and as the door closes I find myself in total darkness. I open the door again and look around. This is an entry hall, about eight feet long, and there's another door at the far end. I close the outer door and grope my way to the inner door.
Inside is a restaurant with walls panelled in light-colored wood, a high ceiling and a line of stained-glass windows above eye level. The tables and chairs are made of wood, and very clean. Two men sit at one table, and Mike sits alone at another.
Later I explore, and find another room about the same size as the restaurant but surrounded by doors. A couple of the doors lead to washrooms -- they have American-style toilets but no seats -- and the others lead to a shower and to small sleeping rooms. The big central room has a couple of tables and chairs where truckers can play cards or do paperwork.
When I join him he says this place is run by a Russian trucking federation called Devtranss Ereice. The food is good, and we will eat here.
The waitress wears a long skirt, high leather boots and a red sweater. We each order four eggs with sausage and bread for a total of $6, and it is good. As we eat, Mickey and Rene arrive.
Mickey Gill is 36 years old; short, solid and balding. He started work as a fitter in a truck maintenance shop but he's been driving since he was 21 and with Ralph Davies for eight years. He says Davies had only seven trucks when he started.
He's married and owns a nice home in a village in Scotland but he doesn't get there often. When he's in England and can't get home, his wife comes to meet him wherever he is.
Rene Baashe is an East German from Zwickau. He's been driving truck for Western companies for six years now, and he's been with Ralph Davies two years.
He likes the work because he loves to travel. For most of his life he needed a pass to visit the next village but now, as an international trucker, he travels regularly through most of Europe and into Asia. At 26 years old with six years' trucking experience he's still a junior in this company and he doesn't get the really long runs yet, but already he considers it normal to pass through three or four different countries every week.
It's his fault they are late at Minsk, he says. He was caught speeding near Grodno, where they crossed the border, and it cost him a bottle of Champagne worth five German marks to get out of it.
Most drivers carry chocolate to buy off the police but Rene says he likes eating too much, and always eats his whole stock of chocolate.
His love of eating shows and he demonstrates it by ordering two half chickens, four eggs, sausage and bread for breakfast.
He likes this cafe and he stops here most trips. At night, he says, the table we're sitting at now is reserved for whores.
Rene is hauling canned goods to Moscow but he came this far with Mick and he will travel with us now. That's good news because he learned to speak Russian in school, and he knows his way 'round.
When he pays for his meal the restaurant is short of change, so he buys a handful of chocolate bars. They're Turkish, and when he tastes one he decides he doesn't like them. That's good, because it means he will save them for the Russian police.
He gives the one bar he opened to me. It's harder and drier than the chocolate I'm used to, but it's not bad.
On the highway some signs point to Moscow in English, some to Moskva, which is Moscow in Russian but spelled with the Arabic letters we use to write English. Others point to something that looks like "Mockba", but is actually Moskva spelled with Cyrillic letters.
Parts of the road are dual track but so far only one track is in use. At one point a truck coming toward us pulls out to pass, then crosses the median to the other track when the driver sees us.
Some of the village houses are built of logs. Small groups of people stand by the road with buckets of pears and apples for sale. It's cold and snowing, and they huddle around fires.
Other people stand by the road and point their thumbs down -- like an upside-down hitch-hiking symbol. They're offering to sell diesel fuel, Mike says. It's a black market, but there's no attempt to hide it.
Buying fuel in Russia is often an adventure. There are some gas stations but they're not always open and they don't always have fuel, so we bought most of ours from roadside vendors. The thumb-down signal is standard across Russia,
The big dealers have tank trucks but others may have barrels or jerry-cans in the back of cars, in motorcycle sidecars, or even stashed in the ditch. We buy most of our fuel from tank trucks but one time Mick fills up from drums at one stop in Kazakhstan and another driver buys 300 liters of fuel from a bulldozer that had been working by the side of the road.
Fuel prices in Russia varied from about US$ 10 to US$ 20 for 100 liters. You never get accurate measurement at the roadside, of course, but you don't get accurate measurement at a gas station either.
At Russian gas stations you pay for your fuel and the attendant sets the pump to deliver. Most times, the pump shuts off about five liters short of what you paid for.
About mid afternoon we reach the Russian border. Under communism there was no border here and for a year or so after the collapse, Mike says, it usually took longer to get from Belarus into Russia than from Poland into Belarus. Now most of the former Russian states have joined a customs union called the Community of Sovereign Republics, and we drive through.
On the border there is a monument to the eternal friendship between the people of Belarus and the people of Russia. Communists were big on eternal friendship, but most of their eternal friendships broke down when the Red Army was no longer able to enforce them.
Guards on the Belarus side wear khaki and blue jeans but the Russians have smart uniforms. A stone tower with two flags marks the border, and we drive slowly between black and white poles in front of a police post.
It's 450 km to Moscow and we're not going to make it tonight, especially with snow falling.
Mike and Mickey plan to stop at a truck park beside an Intourist Hotel in Smolensk, about half-way to Moscow, but Rene suggests a place called the Oasis near the village of Jarzewo.
Mike stopped there three years ago, but in those days it was a log cabin. Now it's a four-story brick hotel with a walled parking area, Rene says, and they have a clean bar with good food and a floor show. More important, we and the trucks will safe for the night because the Oasis is run by the Russian Mafia, and nothing is ever stolen here.
That's a good argument. In a small village about 100 km from the border we turn into a big yard, several hundred meters square, surrounded by a high wall of pre-cast concrete panels. It looks like the Berlin Wall, and we will see a lot like it in Russia.
This is a TIR park -- the letters stand for the French words "Transporte Internationale Routier" -- and we will look for something like this every night while we are in Russia. If we can't find one we will park by a police post, or at the very least with a lot of other TIR trucks.
The price is 10 German Marks -- payable in marks -- and we register and pay as we enter. The fee gives us rights to the washrooms in the hotel, and protection from muggers and petty thieves for the night.
Rene says the protection is better here than in other TIR parks, because other parks will call the police if they catch a thief. Here, they don't call the police. The so-called Russian Mafia has no connection with the Sicilian or American Mafias but the same general rules apply. No thief in his right mind steals from the Mafia, or from anyone under Mafia protection.
It's easy to knock organized crime but in some ways it's not that different from government. Around here the government has failed and, legal or not, the people who run this place do what they have to. From our point of view they offer a safe and comfortable place to spend the night for a reasonable price and their employees seem to be well paid, by local standards.
There were probably equivalent places on the Silk Road. Some robber barons charged extortionate tolls for "protection" but the route branched in hundreds of places. Where travelers had a choice of routes some warlords probably found it worth while to make the route that passed through their territory cheaper, safer and easier than others.
There must be a hundred or so trucks in this park already, but after driving around we find three parking spaces side-by side under a big light and about 50 yards from the hotel. After he shuts the truck down Mike digs his wallet out of one of the storage over his head. It's a European trucker's wallet that opens like an expanding file with about ten different compartments, and there's a different type of currency in each one. Mike selects a handful of bills and stuffs them into his pants pocket, and we head in to the hotel.
Inside the back door is a small room, perhaps 15 by 15 feet, with a wash-stand and a mirror on one wall. Past the entry we come to a sort of lobby with a cashier's window in the wall. I line up at the window and buy 88,000 rubles for $20 American.
The tavern looks like other taverns around the world -- booths and tables where men drinking beer, and TV sets that nobody watches. This doesn't fit my conception of a caravan stop on the Silk Road and neither do other taverns I will see in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, but that should be no surprise.
This is what taverns look like in the 1990's, and the caravan stops of the Silk Road looked like other taverns of their era.
Past the tavern we enter the dining room, with rows of long tables and benches in front of a stage. There are no women, and later in the evening we will see a half-dozen tough-looking men wearing leather coats. One coat is open, and I can see the automatic pistol stuck in the man's belt. They are quiet and polite, but I have no doubt that they are very effective bouncers.
Our table is empty when we sit down but a couple of Russians join us later. Rene recommends the steak dinner and Czechoslovakian Gambrinus beer, and he orders for us.
The waitress is beautiful and graceful as a dancer. Before she takes our order she warns us that the show will start in less than an hour, and there will be a cover charge of 10,000 rubles -- a bit more than $2 -- if we stay for it. Rene says that's okay.
Rene does most of the talking but Mike and Mick can both communicate with Russians if they want to, partly by waving their hands. Many of the nouns -- like "truck" and "diesel" are well understood, and waving hands provide the verbs and adjectives.
Mike says truckers can't communicate well on the phone, because you can't see their hands.
Rene advises me to enjoy the show, because this is the end of the world and beyond Moscow, I will find no amusement.
The show is one of the best I've ever seen. It is also a bit strange because the dancers are obviously trained ballerinas and they are trying to do a ballet interpretation of a raunchy bump-and-grind dance.
It's different because the girls are built like ballerinas -- slender, and without the bouncing boobs that most raunchy dancers flaunt -- and these girls can really dance. Their bumps and grinds are a bit forced but the rest of the performance shows their years of training.
The show also includes a duet of piano and violin. We drink beer and talk, mostly about life on the road. Rene tells me about the time last year when he and Mike went to Krasnador, in the Ukraine, and Mike ran out of diesel. They used a ladle to dip enough fuel out of Rene's truck to drive more than 400 km until they could buy more.
I have my own memories of something like that. On one trip the truck I was riding ran out of fuel on an isolated road about fifty miles south of Labrador City, in Labrador. In 40-below weather the driver and I used a drain hose torn from his reefer to siphon fuel from the reefer tank, and an empty oil can to carry it to the truck's tank.
Mick and Mike will juggle fuel on this trip too, because Ralph Davies wants to know if a truck can make to Tashkent without a belly tank and he sent Mick out without one. As it turns out Mick can't make it but when he runs low he switches trailers with Mike for a few hundred kilometers. As he drives, Mick's tractor tanks are filled from the trailer's belly tank.
Traders on the Silk Road didn't use diesel fuel but they must have had their own stories about running short of fodder and water for the animals. Like the camel pullers of old we spend most of the evening telling tales about our life on the trail.
We leave the bar about 1:30 and head back to the trucks for the night. It's snowing now, and there's about an inch on the ground.