Next morning the sky is cloudy, the temperature is just barely below freezing and there's about six inches of wet snow on the ground and on the trucks. We clean the windshields, then decide to buy coffee before we leave.
At 6am the hotel dining room is open, but empty. Finally a waitress appears and agrees to bring us coffee. It's slow coming, and not very good. The bill is 10,000 rubles, and by now we are in no mood to leave a tip.
We're not the only ones in a bad mood. More than 100 trucks are trying to get out of the yard at the same time, and one is stuck near the gate. You'd think a Russian driver would be used to snow but apparently this one is not because he's burning his tires trying to get going. We can't see his license plates, and he could be from some southern country.
We're trapped in our parking spaces with a solid line of trucks in the aisle ahead of us. The line extends to the left, then turns right at the side of the lot, right again at the end and left at the gate. Finally Mike opens the window and shouts to Mick to back up as much as he can. Rene watches, and backs too.
Mike turns right, against the one-way traffic in the lane. The others follow and we drive to the right side of the lot, then left and straight to the gate, which is clear because other trucks can't reach it. Rene runs in to the office to get receipts for the night's parking.
He takes a while to come back and later he tells us why. He was stopped by a German driver who wanted advice.
The German had unloaded in Moscow the other day and is now heading back, but he's just been looking at his papers. The customs stamp from the place where he unloaded doesn't look quite like other customs stamps, and the German is afraid he may have been hooked into unloading for hijackers.
We will never know, but Mike says he has heard of other cases where it has happened. That's no surprise, because hijacking can be a problem anywhere. A truck-load of freight is worth anywhere from perhaps $100,000 to several million dollars in the west, and a truckload of western freight represents a serious fortune in Russia.
Goods gain value as they move around. We use the phrase "carrying coals to Newcastle" to typify useless work but the opposite -- carrying coals from Newcastle -- is useful work. Coal -- which is mined near the English city of Newcastle -- has little value in the city where they mine it, but it becomes more and more valuable as you carry it away from the area where it is produced.
Some cultures used sea shells or huge rocks that had been brought from a long way off as "money". The wampum of the plains Indians was sea-shells, which were valuable because they had to be carried a long way from the coast. The "stone money" of the island of Truk, in the South Pacific, was huge disks of rock that were quarried and formed on another island. Because it was hard and dangerous work to bring them by canoe to Truk, they were valuable.
All goods gain value as they are moved. Two thousand years ago common people in China wore silks that were worth their weight in gold to Romans. One thousand years ago eastern peasants used spices that European nobles could barely afford. For the caravans of old and for today's trucks the value of the load increases as they travel, and at the end of a long trip you have to expect that someone will try to steal your cargo.
Mike has already warned me, if anyone asks, to say our cargo is paper forms printed in England for the government of Uzbekistan. In fact our computer is too big to be of any use to hijackers, but if people knew we were carrying a computer we could be in danger.
The road to Moscow runs flat, straight and covered with snow through a forest of pine and birch, and between lines of wrecked cars and trucks and street vendors. Every few miles we pass another big expensive concrete monument to something or other. We see monuments on highways all through Russia and I find that strange, considering that when the monuments were built few people were allowed to travel from town to town.
Every day we pass a half-dozen or so truckers parked by the road and fixing tires, and we see literally thousands of scrap tires left by the roadside. In some areas I count at least one big tire every fifty meters or so for kilometers on end.
But the scrap tires serve a function. Some of the roadside vendors and some of the truckers who stop for repairs, set scrap tires afire for heat and light. Besides the tires, we see thousands of the rusted bundles of wire that are left after tires are burned.
Some roadside vendors sell food. Across most of Russia we see vendors with steel fire-boxes offering shish-kebabs toasted over a wood fire. For 1,000 rubles each -- less than 25 cents American -- they offer a skewer of toasted meat and a slice of bread.
I like the shish-kebab but Mike and Mickey make most of their own meals. Lunch is often sandwiches, with local bread and fillings from England, and dinner is canned food heated on gas stoves in the trucks. They usually prepare one dish each, and follow up with tea and coffee made with water brought from England.
Never touch the local water, they warn me. A few weeks earlier a Ralph Davies driver swallowed some water while he took a shower in Russia. He made it to Germany but they put him in hospital there, and he was too sick to fly home by air ambulance.
And I learn why they avoid local restaurants. A few hours after we leave the Oasis we join a half-dozen trucks parked in front of three cafes. All three are closed -- two are boarded up and one is being renovated -- and a kiosk nearby offers only the Russian staples -- vodka and cigarettes.
When I ask a Russian trucker about coffee he shows me a bottle of vodka. "My coffee!" he says. He is drinking it straight from the bottle.
We drive on, and stop at the place I remember as the cafe from hell. It's a concrete building in early concentration camp style, set back from the road. Inside it is like a big, dirty, tomb.
We are the only customers but five fat women, all in a bad mood, work behind a prison-style food counter. The food is already cooked and for 20,000 rubles -- about US$ 4.50 each-- we get a plate of limp salad, a glass of tea and a soup bowl containing a lukewarm and greasy leg of chicken, a slice of meat loaf and some boiled vegetables.
When Rene asks for a knife one of the women hands him a six-inch jack-knife from her apron pocket. He gives it back to her. Mike, Mick and I all got a knife, fork and spoon table knives rolled up in a napkin. Rene got only fork and spoon, but as far as the woman is concerned that's his tough luck.
Mike has another reason to regret that stop because his right front tire is flat when we get back to the truck. Mickey and Rene help him change it, with one of Mick's spares because it has more tread than Mike's. Mike doesn't want to get his tire repaired here because he will not trust a Russian garage to do it properly. If we want the tire repaired we will probably have to do it ourselves.
We don't, but Mick's spare leaks and it has to be pumped up every couple of days for the next month. We do it in the morning, with a line connected to the air brakes. To make it work faster, I sit in the cab and pump the brakes while Mike fills the tire.
Driving in Russia reminds us how incredibly good western tires are. When I got my first car tires lasted perhaps 20 or 25 thousand miles, but now we expect 50 to 100 thousand from good tires.
And modern truck tires are incredible. Depending on the type of tire truckers may get more than a hundred thousand miles on the first tread, and modern truck tires can be and often are re-capped up to five or six times.
Some people think that's why you see thrown-off truck-tire treads beside some highways, but that's not so. One study showed that more than half the treads found by one highway were from new tires.
That study was conducted by a tire recapper's association and it may have been biassed but the fact remains that new tires can throw treads too. They do it when they are run under-inflated, because heat builds up under the tread. When the tire gets too hot it forms a blister, and if you keep running the blister spreads until the tread comes off.
It can happen to car tires too, but when a tire develops a blister it makes a thumping sound and when one of the four wheels of a car thumps the driver usually hears it long before the tire comes apart. On a truck the blister may be on a trailer wheel 50 feet behind the driver.
All truckers know they should keep their tires properly inflated but it is a drag checking pressures on 18 or more wheels. Trailer tires may not be checked very often in North America because many truckers pull "pin-to-pin" -- they pick up a trailer at one location and drop it at another. They all know that every driver should check the tires but it's easy to argue that the last driver who pulled the trailer should have checked the tires and the next driver should check them, so it doesn't matter if the driver who has it now skips the check.
Tires are checked when the trailer comes back to the trucking company's yard but some trailers may go from customer to customer for months without ever coming back to the company yard. Some very big trucking companies maintain their own truck stops, where drivers are required to stop. The stops perform several functions, but one is that it gives company mechanics a chance to inspect trailers.
Even with Western tires we will have some problems this trip, and on the run to Moscow we develop a fuel problem. The truck lacks power, and Mike thinks he has a bad connection to the belly tank of fuel under the trailer.
He had trouble a week ago with a cracked fitting on the fuel line and it took the mechanic a while to get the tank working before we left England. Now he thinks the engine is sucking air, so he switches his fuel system to draw fuel from the tractor's tanks. The truck gains power, and Mike is convinced he's right. We can run on the tractor's fuel today, and when we stop tonight Mike will take the fitting apart and re-set the seals.
Camel pullers of the old days had to know how to treat camels for sore feet or other problems, and modern truckers hauling into Russia and beyond have to be able to fix their own trucks. Later this trip I will see how important it is that both Mike and Mickey are trained and skilled mechanics.
The road is covered with slush and snow and we pass several accidents. In most cases the wrecked cars are still on the road, and traffic moves around them. Vendors by the side of the road huddle over fires.
We pass through a few villages of wooden houses. Most are the silver gray of un-painted wood but many have painted patterns around the windows. The colors are faded, but they still look nice. Most houses near the edge of the village have chickens, ducks or pigs in the yard, and many have piles of firewood.
In some villages, deep ditches between the houses and the road are crossed by crude bridges.
Between villages we pass through long stretches of forest. The countryside here is flat, but otherwise I'm reminded of some sections of the Alaska Highway.
But the country is not empty. Often we see people walking, miles from any buildings. We pass some bus shelters, with people standing in them.
It looks like we are alone, but in this world we very seldom get very far from people. Most times when we thinks the country is uninhabited, it means the locals don't want to talk to us.
About ten years ago I drove up the Dempster Highway, in the Canadian Arctic, in mid-winter. Near the base of the Richardson mountains, at least 50 miles north of the only building on this part of the road, I saw an Indian boy perhaps ten years old.
In that kind of country you usually stop and greet everybody you meet. When I asked this boy where he lived, he pointed to a clump of trees about a mile off to the side. Looking carefully, I could see a thin wisp of smoke and the corner of a tent.
About a hundred miles of the road south from Laredo, Texas, to Mexico city passes through desert that looks uninhabited, but Indians by the side of the road offer dried rattlesnakes -- an expensive delicacy -- for sale. If you look carefully you can see their houses, nearly hidden in patches of brush a few hundred yards from the road.
Most of the vehicles on this highway are trucks, and many of them are badly loaded. We see one load of used corrugated steel roofing held down only by a couple of wires, and the top couple of panels are literally flying. If one of the wires breaks, the steel will be all over the road.
Dump trucks carry loose bricks that look as though they were dumped in by a front end loader. The trucks are carrying only about half the load they can handle, and they must break a lot of bricks.
One tractor trailer is missing a wheel from the rear axle of the tractor, and the end of the axle is dragging on the road. I've seen trucks run with missing wheels in northern Canada, but only after the driver has chained the axle up so it doesn't drag on the road.
As we get closer to Moscow the police posts look like airport control towers, with an upper story completely surrounded by windows. Mike slows as we approach each one because he says they have radar, but there is no speed control between posts. At the post we have to slow right down and ease over "dead man" bumps in the road, or around a barrier. Police with automatic rifles watch us, but traffic is relatively heavy here and we have no problems. Later we will pass through remote areas where the police have nothing better to do than stop trucks for inspection.
As we approach Moscow we run into heavy traffic, and see buildings beside the road. As we pass through the outskirts in rush hour it looks almost like an American city with heavy traffic and big buildings, and some of the police cars are American Fords.
And the city is growing building fast. New buildings and road interchanges seem to be under construction everywhere and are so many heavy machines working on one interchange that they seem to get in each other's way.
Mike is navigating by memory and for a while he thinks he has missed his turn. There is no sign, but he says the interchange looked familiar. He worries about it and considers turning back, but then sees a power station he recognizes and he knows he's on the right road.
He spots his turn and we leave town on a four-lane road.
We're on highway M5 and there's more development this side of Moscow, and more traffic. More accidents too -- we pass three wrecks in the first 110 km out of Moscow. As a former newspaper photographer I've seen a lot of accidents and I'm sure the third one must have killed several people and several cars have stopped, but there are no police there as we pass.
About 200 km east of Moscow we turn off on a side road and, a hundred yards from the corner, turn in to a TIR park.
There are only a couple of other trucks here now and one is a Russian Kamaz cabover with a smashed cab.
The front left corner of the cab has been mashed in and then pulled out again, and the metal is torn and the windshield is missing. The inside is a mess, and there are suspicious red smears on the upholstery. The truck has obviously been in a very bad accident and the driver was apparently injured or killed, but the truck still runs and now it's being ferried back for repairs.
Mick and Mike park side by side at the edge of the lot, and we cross a narrow wooden bridge over a drainage ditch to a concrete building they say is a hotel.
Mick and Mike head for the cafeteria while I search for a washroom. When I find it, upstairs, I understand why the others didn't bother. Except in Tashkent, where we use washrooms in the head office of the national bank and in the Intourist Hotel Tashkent, we will use the side of the road until we get back to Moscow, more than three weeks from now.
I've been carrying a wad of toilet paper in my pocket since Minsk, but there is another problem. Millions of Russians also use the side of the road, and in busy areas you have to walk very carefully.
The cafeteria is finished in sickly green tiles, with high windows on one side. The trestle-type tables are lined up side-by side, so we can watch cartoons on TV as we eat.
One film is about a little ant that gets lost and has various adventures before it gets back to the nest. The cartoon itself is not bad but I find it fascinating that this ant wants nothing more than to get back to the nest and rejoin the mass. The film was obviously made while the Communists ruled, and membership in a collective was the ideal. It's the idealized antithesis to Woody Allen's cartoon film AntZ, about one ant that wanted to be an individual.
The cartoons are fun, and less violent than American cartoons, but the food is lousy. At a hole in the wall we pick up bowls of gritty ravioli -- apparently the meal of the day here and at several other Russian restaurants we eat at later.
But the price is right. I get three bottles of Dutch beer, a bottle of champagne, two servings of ravioli and two pieces of cake with milk chocolate icing for 45,000 rubles, about $10 American.
Mike's chair is falling apart. When a Russian trucker sees me kicking it back together he offers Mike another chair. On the other side of the room someone else is mixing beer and vodka, and getting very drunk doing it. He talks a lot, but eventually his friends convince him to leave. There are some rooms upstairs, and they may be staying there.
We will sleep in the trucks, of course. When we get back to the parking lot it's nearly full. We spend most of the evening in Mick's truck eating Cornish pastry, drinking beer and talking.
A few hundred years ago, perhaps, we would have sat around a campfire, telling tales while camels chewed their cuds.
I like to think of the caravans but I'm not sure I would have wanted to travel with one. We will make a round trip from England to Tashkent in five weeks, and by taking a different turn we could have gone to China in about the same time. The old time traders took 12 to 15 months each way, from Europe to China and back.
Italian writer Francesco Pegolotti never went to China himself but he collected information from merchants and in 1340 he published a trade manual that described a typical trip, starting from the town of Tana on the Sea of Azov -- which is a big bay on the north shore of the Black Sea.
From Tana it's 25 days by ox-cart to the town of Gitarchan, (now Astrakhan), on the Caspian Sea. From there it's one day by boat to Sarai, at the mouth of the Volga River and eight days upstream by river boat to Saracando, (Saraichik, in the Ural mountains). Travelers with no freight can take this trip overland, but it's cheaper to move goods by boat.
But either way the next leg is overland, 20 days in carts drawn by camels to Organci (Urgench) on the Amu Darya river, south of the Aral sea. From there it's 35 days by camel cart to Oltrarre, northwest of Tashkent.
Pegolotti's informants used pack asses for the 45-day run from there Amalecco, and again for the 70-day trip on to Campicion. From there it's 45 days on horseback to Quinsay, and another 30 days beyond that to the city of Khanbalik, now known as Beijing.
That's 279 days of travel time, and you could probably count on at least a week's waiting time between each leg of the trip, and possibly a few weeks delay due to sickness.
We will take about five weeks for our round trip. I'm glad that I'm travelling by truck.