Early next morning we are cruising about 80 km/hour on a beat-up two-lane road. Suddenly we hear a thump and the truck comes to a screeching stop. Mike opens his door and jumps out.
By the time I get out Mike is under the truck. He comes out slowly, dragging a piece of steel. Part of a helper spring, he says. He shows me the rust around the break -- it must have been cracked for months.
Mickey has stopped behind us -- just barely -- and Mike apologizes for the sudden stop. The broken spring tore an air line as we ran over it and the emergency brakes came on automatically.
Mike and Mickey crawl under the truck to check the damage and I look around. On both sides of the road a swamp, frozen solid at this time of year, stretches away to birch forests about 500 meters to one side and farther on the other. Aside from the trucks and the road, there is no sign of humanity.
When Mike and Mickey crawl out they look worried. We can drive without the spring but it has torn a valve right out of our main air tank. If we could get it back in the valve would work, but the threads that should hold it are stripped.
Without the valve the brakes are locked and we can't go anywhere.
And we can't hope for help. We are in Siberia, about 3,000 kilometers past Moscow and probably several thousand kilometers from any shop that would have parts for a Volvo truck. Aside from Mickey and ourselves -- and Dave who as already left England and is coming by another route -- it might be months before another English truck comes this way. We can't expect help from the locals, but we can expect to be robbed if we stop here overnight.
A Czech truck stops but the driver speaks little English. When he sees that Mike and Mick know what they are doing, he drives on.
Mike and Mickey inspect the damaged valve. Most of the threads are stripped but the two or three turns farthest from the nose of the valve are undamaged. The valve has a round nose that fits into a socket to make a airtight seal, and when the valve is in place these threads were probably not in use. The valve is made of brass and the tank of steel, so the threads in the tank are probably good.
If they cut the nose off the valve it won't seal properly and will no longer be airtight, but the few good threads that are left could screw into the tank and hold it. With a hacksaw Mick cuts most of the nose of the valve off. Mike screws it in tight and it leaks badly for the rest of the trip, but it holds.
"We don't always get it right", Mike says, "but we always get it done. We haven't messed up yet, and that's why they give us the long runs."
Mike and Mick got through this time because they are experienced, and because they are willing to improvise. They are both experienced as drivers and as mechanics, they can talk circles around the average bureaucrat without blowing their cool and they know exactly how far they can push any given situation without getting into real trouble.
In days gone by their ancient counterparts knew how to patch a skin boat, doctor a sick camel or perhaps lash up a jury-rig sail on a schooner. The techniques change but the basic skill has been the same for thousands of years -- you handle the problems, whatever they are, and deliver the goods.
This repair takes about two hours and we are on our way again by 9am. Mike says the truck handles the same as before, but the air valve leaks so now it takes several minutes to build up air pressure each morning.
As we approach the Russian border Mike warns me not to take any pictures. The guard posts are a couple of steel shacks that look like the bridge of a ship. An old man wearing a fur hat and a black jacket squats outside the door. He does not even glance up as Mike takes our papers into the shack.
The next post has a gate and an armed guard on duty but he waves us on. The guards at the first post told Mike it is about 10 km to the Kazakhstan guard post, but we drive 24 km through a frozen swamp and fields rimmed with birch trees. Some of the fields are plowed, and we see roads leading from the fields into the forest.
Then we come to a T junction, with a guard post and a big parking lot. The lot is covered with a light film of slimy mud and there are a couple of big puddles. A half-dozen kids surround us as we park. They will wash our truck whether we like it or not, Mike says.
While they start to work Mike goes to the guardhouse to buy a permit to drive in Kazakhstan. The permit costs $260 and it's good for seven days, but Mike says that's not long enough to get us to Tashkent and back -- or even to the Kazak capital of Alma Ata and back. We will have to buy another permit for the return trip so each truck will have to pay $520 for the round trip. If we try to go through without a permit we will be fined $500, and we will still have to buy a permit.
In theory I should get a visa too, but Mike says I don't have to worry. If we were going to the national capital at Alma Ata I would have to, but no one around here is going to check my papers. The road we are on now just dips into Kazakhstan and then turns back to Russia, and the Kazak guards assume that most of the Russian traffic they see is headed east to Omsk and Novosibirsk.
And we don't pay anything right now because the man who has to approve the permits is not here. The guards say he will arrive in a couple of hours.
But this is not a bad place to wait. The kids who had washed our truck did a lousy job, but Mike pays them anyway. The weather is warm and a couple of goldfinches sit on our mirrors and sing.
Some of the kids around us look Asiatic, others middle eastern. North and east of here most people are Mongols, to the west they are mostly European and to the south they are mostly Turkic.
There's a small wooden building at the end of the lot, and a shish-kebab stand outside it. The building is a restaurant.
The door is at the end, under a peaked roof. Inside is a very short entry hall, then a beaded curtain. Through the curtain is a room with a short counter to our left, and a sofa with a flowered cover on our right. There are two windows with lace curtains at the end of the room, and plastic flowers around the walls. The main body of the room contains three big wooden tables with plastic flower-pattern tablecloths and wooden chairs. A second counter across the back cuts the kitchen off from the seating area.
Lunch is meat balls, pasta and black tea. Mike pays 450 Kazak Tenge, worth about $7 US, for the three meals and a half-dozen cans of cherry cola. The drink is mostly sweet without much cherry or much cola, but it's not bad.
About 4pm Mike checks the guard station and comes back with the word -- no permits today. Maybe tomorrow. Lucky we still have a good stock of books to read, and Mick has his own stock so we can trade back and forth. During the afternoon a Russian named Alex offers to buy or sell English CDs and cassettes, but we're not interested. A couple of girls stop by to talk and Mike says they're whores. They don't get any business from us, but Mick gives them each a can of Cola. Mike gives them a chocolate bar.
"They'll be over the moon with that", he says.
That afternoon Mike reads while I walk to a nearby village, perhaps a mile away on a side-road. It not as nice a walk as I expect because the road is soft mud, and I don't see much because houses in the village are set back behind high fences. Perhaps I would see more from one of the village streets but I stay on the road.
Dinner in the restaurant that night is two kinds of salad with pasta and a hard-boiled egg cooked inside a coating of meat and some kind of grain meal. Mick calls it a scotch egg, and it's good. We drink tea and brandy, and the three meals cost $15. The woman at the cash register doesn't want the American $20 bill Mike offers, because it is dated before 1993, but Mick has a newer one. There are phony American $100 bills circulating around here, but I've never heard of a bad $20.
There's a railway line about a half mile off and every couple of hours another long train passes. The locomotives are electric and some of the trains carry passengers but others have boxcars, tankers and flat cars. Mike says they're going from Alma Ata to Russia.
That night we finish two bottles of Hungarian brandy between us. Mike and Mick both get drunk, and Mick sends rude messages back to Ralph Davies on Mike's satellite link. Some of the messages are very rude, but there will be no repercussions because Mike and Mick would be very hard to replace.
Breakfast in the cafe next morning is a cup of cold strong tea topped up with hot water. When we get back to the trucks we have company -- A Volvo F12 owned by Rynart Trading of Klundert, Holland.
Mike says about half of all the foreign trucks he meets in Russia are Dutch. Most of the rest are English and that's no surprise, because the Dutch and the English have been competing for foreign trade for hundreds of years.
The competition began near the end of the middle ages, when Dutch merchants developed a very efficient freight ship called a flyte and virtually took over European coastal shipping.
Dutch traders took over most of the far East trade after the massacre of Amboina in 1623, when traders working for the Dutch East India Company tortured and killed 10 traders working for the English East India Company. After the massacre, the English East India Company stopped trying to trade with Japan, Siam and the Spice Islands.
In 1652 the competition broke into open war after Britain barred Dutch traders from British colonies. For a while the Dutch controlled the English channel.
In 1653 English sailors broke the blockade and won the war but Dutch traders continued to challenge the British. Eventually the British took the American Dutch colonies of New Amsterdam and New Netherlands -- now New York and New Jersey -- but because of trouble at home the British had to make peace with the Treaty of Breda.
There is no war now but Dutch and English truckers know that a land route to Asia will be worth a fortune in the years to come, and they are all working hard to claim their share.
Mike says that if there are 500 Western trucks in Moscow at any given time, probably 300 of them are Dutch. He says the Dutch drivers have a saying that no matter how far they go they find that an English driver has got there first -- but that he has no papers, or has run out of money or has some other problem.
This Dutch driver is Jaan Vahtra, of Parnu, Estonia. He's been driving truck for 30 years but until he went to work for the Dutch company, about a year ago, he drove only in Estonia with occasional trips to Sweden and Russia.
Now he drives across Europe and into Asia, but he spends most of his time in the East. Mike says lot of western companies use eastern employees, because most people from the former Communist world speak Russian.
Jaan tells us he took three days to drive from Estonia to Holland, loaded there Oct. 26 and took 11 days to drive from Holland to here. He's been on the road 14 days now and it will be at least another three weeks before he gets home. We have been on the road 12 days, including two days in Minsk, and I will be out another three weeks. Mike will be out even longer.
Jaan doesn't say what he's carrying but Mike says Rynart carries a lot of electric and electronic products for Phillips. Jaan is going to Tashkent, and after he unloads there he will go to Alma Ata for a load of fish to take back to Holland.
For a while I wonder why he would haul fish from Central Asia, which contains some of the biggest and driest deserts of the world to Holland, which is on the sea. Later I learn that Central Asia also has some of the biggest lakes in the world -- comparable to the Great Lakes of North America -- and a major fishing industry.
Jaan is an Estonian driving for a Dutch company but, for practical purposes, there are only two nationalities on the road -- local and long distance. As a long-distance trucker -- especially a long-distance trucker working for a western company -- Jaan is considered a friend and an ally and it goes without saying that he will travel with us.
It was probably the same on the old silk road. Traders from Venice and Genoa were rivals and the two cities were often at war -- Marco Polo began writing about his travels while he was a prisoner of war in Genoa -- but when a Venentian and a Genovese trader met in Central Asia, they had more common ground than differences.
Jaan speaks Russian, and he translates for Mike at the guard shack. It turns out the hassle with our permit is that Mike has to go to an official cashier to pay for it, and yesterday the office was closed. The officer in charge of the guard post takes Mike, Mick and Jaan to town in his Russian jeep, and three hours later they come back with the permits.
When they come back Mike tells me it took a while because the office was full of local people paying bills. The office could not make change and they would accept only German or American money from foreigners, but they would not accept American bills dated before 1990.
We are on our way before noon, with Jaan leading. The temperature is just above freezing and our road is about like a secondary road across the Canadian prairies, except that at some points we pass through forests of birch trees. The road is mostly clear, but it has occasional patches of ice.
Kazakhstan is mostly steppes -- the Asian version of prairies -- and some of the driving is like parts of western Canada and the U.S.A. The difference is that national highways in Kazakhstan are like county roads in North America, and sometimes worse.
Most of them have been paved at one time but in some places the ruts are so deep that we saw one Russian Kamaz truck stopped because a ridge in the paved road punched a hole in the engine sump. At another spot we saw a tandem straight truck that had rolled over after driving into a rut.
In some places the pavement has rippled in washboard up to about six inches deep, and in others it has broken up completely. When the sun is low in the sky, some of the bumps in the pavement cast shadows.
In a few places the road is just a mud track that must be a hopeless quagmire when it rains. We won't have much trouble this trip but later we will pass a stretch of road with huge ruts and potholes that is passable only because the ground is frozen.
As we leave the Russian border our road is mostly straight and the pavement is not too bad.
They have police posts here but they are not well manned. Mike says the last time he went to Alma Ata he crossed the country without being checked, then was checked three times on the outskirts of the city. We get pulled over a couple of times, with no major hassles.
We see some cattle wandering loose on the steppes and sometime on the road. At one point we pass a big herd of mixed cattle, sheep and goats together, watched by a man on a shaggy pony wearing a bulky coat and a fur hat.
Kazakhstan is a huge country with about one million square miles of land but only 18 million people. Imagine the population of Texas in a land area bigger than Texas, Alaska and California combined; or the whole of the Eastern United States from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River with the population of New York State.
I think it's because of the state farms that this area looks so desolate. We pass miles and miles of cultivated fields with no houses or buildings. In Canada or the States these would be individual farms and even where farms are biggest we would see houses every few miles, but nobody lives on these farms. The workers live in villages and come to work by bus, and the land looks empty.
In one stretch of 650 km we see two towns, three villages and perhaps 12 isolated houses.
The road allowance cuts a swathe at least 100 yards wide through villages, so we don't see many houses close-up. Most are in big yards surrounded by high fences of vertical sticks. On the edge of one village we see boys playing hockey on a frozen pond.
Some big towns have ring roads but they are often in lousy condition. We circle one town at 10 kph on a dirt track with potholes a foot deep, and at some points we abandon the road completely and drive off the shoulder into a field.
On the edge of one town we see a monument with the dates 1936 and 1986. Kazakhstan was taken over by Russia in 1920, but became republic of the USSR in 1936. I guess the monument celebrates 50 years of "friendship".
Finding our way is a major problem. Mike has a Russian road atlas with place names in Cyrillic script, the same as on signs, but it's still a guessing game because the names on the map don't always match the names on the signs, and the roads on the map don't always match the roads on the ground. Mike is good at finding his way and most times he chooses right, but not always.
At one roundabout there is no sign and Mike guesses, but drives slowly and watches in his mirror. Jaan, behind us, stops and waits a few minutes for a car to come by, and asks the driver.
Then Jaan heads off on another road, and we turn around and follow.
Mick is low on fuel and we look for a station. The first one we pass has no diesel, the second is not open.
But there are lots of roadside vendors with their thumbs pointed down. We stop and buy 374 liters of diesel fuel at $17/100 liters. Jaan needs fuel too, but he says he can find it cheaper down the road.
Jaan is allowed $25 American for 100 liters of fuel, and if he can buy it cheaper he can pocket the difference. That could be hundreds of American dollars on a two or three week trip, and the money he can save on fuel alone would be a good salary in most of the former Communist countries. Mike says Jaan is paid big money for Estonia but not as much as the same company would pay a Dutch trucker.
Is that unfair? Maybe -- but Jaan lives in Estonia where the money will go further than it would in Holland. If the Dutch company had to pay Dutch wages to all their drivers, would they hire outside Holland? In a couple of hours we catch up with Jaan at another tank truck, but he's not buying. He says it's too expensive, and he will keep looking.
Jaan has a 1,000-liter belly tank under his trailer but he can't run his engine directly on his trailer tank. Like most truckers who carry belly tanks he uses air from his brake system to pressurize the tank, and blow fuel forward to fill his tractor tanks.
Mike says some Greek truckers have electric pumps on their trucks, and carry 40 feet of hose. They can use the pump and the hose to pump fuel from their belly tanks, but they can also use it to pump fuel from other trucks. At night, he says, he won't park close to one of them.
A couple of hours later Jaan pulls over in a patch of woods and buys 300 liters of diesel for $30 from a bulldozer working on the roadside.
At the time I assume that the bulldozer operator is ripping off his employer, but there may be another explanation. The dozer operator probably works for a state farm and he may sell fuel to raise hard cash for the farm. Kazakhstan has lots of oil, and the farm may even have its own oil well. Some wells in the Fox Creek area of Alberta produce crude so light you can burn it as diesel fuel, and they may also have light crude here.
The bulldozer operator is not alone, and there is a motorcycle with sidecar parked by the road.
The sun is setting as Jaan fills up and we continue driving after dark. I am half dozing when Mike suddenly swerves, and I hear a loud crash as something hits the truck.
At the last minute Mike saw that part of the load of an approaching truck stuck several feet out to the side. If he hadn't swerved it would have taken out our windscreen, and even with the swerve it smashed our mirror.
It was warm during the day but the temperature drops fast in the desert night. Desert air is so clear that the day's heat radiates to outer space after sunset, and the drop in temperature is so great that ancient Egyptians learned to make ice in pans that were insulated from the ground, but exposed to the night sky.
Finally we pull up to a police post covered with pretty decorative tiles, and pay $10 per truck for protection. We are parked in front of a gypsy-style caravan trailer.
It's 8pm, we have covered 614 km in eight hours running time. and we have about 1,400 km to go.
Later Mike tells me the cop on duty threatened to charge him for driving with a broken windscreen if Mike did not give him a present. If it is illegal to drive with a broken windscreen we are in trouble, because it could take weeks to get a replacement.
While we cook and eat dinner four more trucks including one German and two Czecks, join us at the police post. By the time the cops wake us at 5:30am to get started, there are several more trucks and a few cars parked here.