Next morning we wake to light rain. The temperature is six degrees above freezing and most of the snow has melted. Mike digs his gas stove out of the luggage compartment and sets it up on the table between our seats.
The propane gas canister is so big I thought it was a spare oil filter for the truck when I saw it in the baggage compartment. It makes sense though because Mike is out for weeks at a time he uses the stove to cook most of his meals.
But this morning he just makes coffee, with a paper filter in a Thermos jug. We get one cup each, and there's still a bit left in the pot. Mike drinks his coffee before we leave, but I drink slow and I take some with me. No problem, because I have an insulated travel cup, which doesn't spill.
It's 710 km to Samara, Mike says, and he hopes to make it tonight.
The police post is at the junction of our road and the highway, and the policeman waves us over for inspection. It's just after eight o'clock in the morning, but he smells Mike's breath to see if he's been drinking.
Then they talk. Mike argues for a minute, then digs into his baggage compartment. He pulls out a couple of cans of beer, and hands them over. When he climbs back into the truck he is smiling.
"That didn't cost nothing", he says. Only two cans of beer. He wanted dollars too, but I said no.
A couple of years ago Mike was held up at a police station for three hours by policemen who said there was a "problem" with his passport. He wanted $50 but Mike refused to pay, and finally the policeman threw Mike's passport at him and told him to get out.
Near a bridge we pass a truck that has lost its trailer. The truck is upright on the road, the trailer dumped in the ditch. Mike says the road is slippery here -- the tar surface is slick and glossy -- and he assumes the Russian driver hit his brakes too hard.
We come to a bridge under repair. Traffic is one-way, with traffic lights, and Mike curses the driver ahead who stops when the light turns yellow. He's too close to the bridge and trucks coming the other way have to slow to walking speed to wriggle past him. That backs traffic up so much that on-coming traffic that comes on the bridge on their green light blocks the way when our light turns green, and the next wave of on-coming traffic gets another green before the bridge is clear. When the bridge does clear for a few seconds the driver in front of us is slow starting, and we still can't cross. We miss three greens before we can cross.
We pass several radar traps, but on-coming cars flash their lights to warn us of most of them. One cop stops us for going 63 kilometers an hour across a bridge. He says the limit on the bridge is 40 and it's not marked, but we should have known.
He wants to see the card from our recording tachometer, which would show how far and how fast we have driven today, but Mike says we have a computer not a recording tachometer. That's a lie -- like all European trucks the Volvo has a recording tachometer built into the speedometer -- but the Russian cop doesn't know that. He has no right to see the card because Russia has no hours of service regulations and he probably could not interpret the card if he saw it, but someone has told him about tach cards and he wants to see one. If he did see it he might tell us about some imaginary law we have broken and that we have to pay a fine for.
Mike doesn't like paying fines, but this is not really a fine because the policeman will not issue a ticket and the money will go straight into his own pocket. In this case the bite is 3,000 rubles, about 50 English pence or 75 cents American, and Mike pays with a smile.
We're about 350 km east of Moscow and definitely out in the sticks here. Horses pull two-wheeled carts beside the highway, and sometimes on it. The horses are small, patient-looking beasts and the harness includes a high wooden arch over their shoulders. Most of the carts are loaded with farm materials -- manure or hay or crops, but some carry families on what looks like a pleasure ride. Father drives and mother, wearing a head scarf, sits primly beside him while the kids sprawl in the back
We also see big four-wheel drive farm tractors pulling wagons on the highway. Some big farm tractors with fifth wheels pull highway trailers, and some light farm tractors have a small engine in the back and a truck-bed in front of the driver. They look strange but they must be useful in a poor farming area. I assume they are cheaper than a car or pickup, and several times we saw people driving them as transportation.
The houses around here look brighter and cleaner than houses near Moscow, and most of them have big piles of firewood in the front yards. The soil is rich and dark, and most of it looks like good farmland.
But I wonder how long that will last, and how much land has been ruined already. The state farms have enormous fields, literally miles long, and there are no windbreaks. Worse, they don't seem to know about contour plowing. Straight furrows go up hill and down for miles on end, and on one farm they go right through a small stream.
And the land looks desolate. Workers on state farms live in villages and commute to work by bus, and in farming areas we can drive for miles on end without seeing a house. Farmers would love this land, but it looks as though the people who work on state farms don't care.
A couple of times we pass fields full of parked combines and other farm machines. They look well used and they might be scrap yards, but there are no signs and they might also be parking areas for state farms.
This is the first week of November and the grass is green but the trees are bare.
The surface of the two lane road is reasonably good but there is no white center-line, no marked edges and no guard rails. At some points the shoulder looks solid and wide enough to stop on, but at others I would not trust it.
There are some hills but with 520 hp and a light load we barely notice them. On most of the hills there are piles of sand about every 50 meters beside the road, for use in winter. We don't need it now.
The mud around here is very bad. Where cars and jeeps run off the pavement they leave tracks about six inches deep. Mike says it's also very slippery and I believe him. I remember one mud road in northern Alberta, where I came on a wet patch and spun out. I've driven thousands of miles on ice, before and since, but that patch of wet mud was slipperier than most ice.
In villages and at some crossroads we see outdoor markets, and we pass a few big roadside markets with vendors selling farm produce and manufactured goods out of dozens of parked trucks and kiosks.
We see one strip development of kiosks and trailers with at least half an acre of glassware, chandeliers and cut glass.
We stop at another market to look around at kiosks that offer vodka, beer and cigarettes, but not much else. It's a hassle shopping here because very few Russians speak English. Some speak German, but most speak only Russian.
In one area the vendors all seem to have racks of socks for sale. I guess that some people who work in factories that make socks may get part of their pay in socks.
But with so many socks on the market around here I don't see how they can possibly sell them. They would obviously do much better if they could take them to an area where there is no surplus of socks -- and perhaps they could trade some of their socks for local goods that at in surplus in other areas -- but that implies transport they probably don't have. Someone with a light truck and a bit of ambition could probably clean up on this highway, and I have no doubt that someone is doing it.
They do in other areas. A few years ago I rode from Vancouver to Inuvik, in the Canadian arctic, with a trucker who buys a truckload of fresh fruit and vegetables in the south, and sells them in the North. Bill Rutherford made enough out of his business to buy a new Mack truck and reefer trailer, and a house, a warehouse, and shares in several restaurants in Inuvik.
Years earlier, on the winter road leading to Garden Lake in northern Manitoba, I met a merchant with a truckload of clothes.
Garden Lake is hundreds of miles from normal roads but in winter the provincial government opens an ice road, over frozen lakes and swamps, to Indian villages in the area. Prices in the northern villages are high, and this merchant bought a used truck and loaded it with new clothes, which he could sell out of the back of the truck for a good profit. He would then sell the truck, and fly back to Winnipeg.
He had come to Canada from Lebanon and he worked essentially the way small traders used to work on the Silk Road. Maybe some of his ancestors did work the Silk Road.
Miles from anywhere we cross a railway track. Beside the track is a tiny brick house, about ten feet square, with a smoking chimney. At a window in the house a middle-aged woman watches us pass. Apparently she's there to lower the gate, by hand, when a train comes by. There is no car by the little house, and we assume she comes to work by bus. Mike says the job is probably all right, if you like knitting.
There is no TV aerial on the shack, and there is probably no TV station within range.
We see a fair number of workers' buses on the road -- most of them are truck chassis with passenger boxes in place of the freight boxes. Many of them are Ural and Zil 6x6 Soviet army trucks, on huge tires. They're probably good for the state farms but more important they are also probably cheap, since the few army trucks we see are a newer model. Most of the black-market fuel trucks by the side of the road are army-surplus Urals.
Mike says lot of army surplus trucks are hauling freight in some former Soviet countries. He says a lot of English truckers started with war surplus trucks after WWII.
Some of the towns we pass through have huge pipes above ground level, arching over driveways, walks and cross roads. Some of them may be for central heating plants, or they could be bundles of water and sewer lines like the "utilidors" in Inuvik, in Canada's Northwest Territories. Some towns and some areas miles out of town have a forest of electric wires. They don't seem to be high tension lines, but there are a lot of them.
Some towns have log cabins, some of them new. Many houses have pigs, chickens, and geese in the yards. Most of the stores look like abandoned warehouses.
But some houses have ornate windows, and even new brick houses often have ornate patterns worked into bricks. This would be a very pretty area if they had money to spend on appearances.
Mike says Moscow has been ripping off the hinterland for years and this area was very poor, but with the collapse of communism the villages can now keep some of their earnings for their own use.
At Samara we turn to another highway -- M51 -- and continue. The roadside vendors here offer bicycles and electric drills.
A girl at a bus stop tries to flag us down. She forms the finger and thumb of one hand into a circle, and pushes the index finger of her other hand into it in an obvious offer of sex. A couple of trucks are parked nearby, one of them with the cab curtains closed. A couple could be having sex in there, or hijackers could be waiting for some sucker to stop.
About mid afternoon we stop at a gas station beside a patch of woods. Mick pays for 200 liters of fuel but the pump stops at 196. Mike buys 500 liters for diesel for 175 German marks, and the pump stops at 490. There's nothing you can do about it.
A band of teen-agers and watch us curiously. One young boy, perhaps ten years old, wants to help us fuel up but there isn't much he can do.
He may want money, but I think he is more interested in contact with this strange foreign truck, and the strangers who come from distant lands. That sounds hokey, but in fact we are strangers here, in a land where there are very few people from outside the former Communist world.
It's a strange feeling. We are civilized people going through a primitive country. Even though Russia has space ships the people in this area live on a technological level closer to the middle ages than to our own.
The silk road may have started that way too, and the people of Central Asia were once among the most savage nomads of the world.
But as the ideas of the world passed through them the oases became towns and the towns became the most advanced cities in the world.
Will these people lead the technological world some day? They may, as our western civilization winds down.
While we're stopped we decide to eat lunch. Mick makes sandwiches, while Mike makes coffee. He's lost his filter holder -- probably left it where we had coffee this morning, but I've been carrying my film in a nylon net bag, which holds a coffee filter reasonably well.
Overhead the clouds are breaking up, and Mick says going to be cold tonight.
A lot of the trucks we meet on the road have wheels and axles out of alignment, and when the truck is driving straight ahead the tracks of the rear wheels may be as much as three feet away from the tracks of the front wheels. North American truckers call this "dog tracking" but Mike says the English call it "crabbing".
A nice looking garage by the road has the name "Auto Stop" in English, on a sign.
One truck parked on the far side of the highway has a display of flashing lights, like a Christmas tree, in the front window. Mike says westerners don't dare park on the street in Russia, because someone would probably break into their trailer.
Our trailer would be hard to break into but many European truckers use curtain-side trailers that can be cut open with a knife.
We turn into a concrete-walled TIR park in a town with a name that looks like "CB13AHB" on the sign. Mike says it would be spelled Syzran in our alphabet. The town is on the Volga river, but we can't see the river yet.
There must be more than 100 trucks in compound and some cars, and there are a half-dozen whores working the park. A row of perhaps a dozen kiosks outside the gate offer liquor and cigarettes, but none offer food or coffee. Mike says that's normal, around here. If one person starts a business everybody else will offer exactly the same goods, and nobody will try anything different.
Mick parks beside us, and brings some big cans of strong English beer and couple of bags of potato chips -- "crisps" to the English, when he comes to visit. Later we cook and eat our own meal, in the trucks. That night I hear noises outside the truck. Wearing only underwear and shoes I step outside to look around, but see nothing.