Next morning we're alone in this parking lot but the cafe down road has one big truck and a fleet of about 20 Lada Niva 4x4's parked beside it. We see a few Nivas in Canada and they don't sell well there but they seem to be popular here. We make coffee, then head out on the worst paved road I have ever seen in my life.
We're on the desert and the road stretches to the horizon with a center ridge six or eight inches high between the ruts, and huge potholes. If the road were dirt or gravel they could grade it but it's paved, and the pavement is ridged and potholed.
At one point we pass a Kamaz straight truck stopped with the hood up and a puddle of oil on the road under it. The center ridge here is so high that it knocked a hole in his oil pan. Mike comments that our oil pan hangs lower than our front axle, and he peers anxiously at the road.
Then the pavement gives out and the road dissolves into a mess of sand, gravel and deep ruts. Fortunately the mud is frozen because we can see how it was chewed up before, and where trucks got stuck. We will not get stuck, but sometimes it feels as though our truck will be torn apart.
Our trailers have three axles each and at one point I take a picture of Mick driving through a pothole. In the picture the two front axles of the trailer are hanging into the pothole, but the front wheel has not yet touched the bottom.
Dave loses one tire on his trailer but with no load he doesn't need it much. To protect the tire he should raise that axle with the air lift, but the axle is stuck so he just drives on.
We pass a tandem straight truck that has rolled over in one of the ruts and dumped it's load of bagged produce and big jars full of something that looks like strawberries. The ruts are very deep but they are full of water and covered by ice, and I guess this one looked safe until the ice broke. The rut and the water under it are about four feet deep. With a wry smile Mike says he will avoid the ice from now on.
A half dozen men are sorting and stacking the load from the wrecked truck. Most of the jars are broken, but some are not.
The road is terrible but the desert lies flat and even on either side. We can drive only 20 and 30 kph but cars and light trucks that have taken to the desert are zipping past us at highway speed. They have even worn their own road there.
We could drive fast too, on the desert, but to reach it we would have to drive through a deep ditch. Smaller vehicles can cross easily and there are a few spots where we might make it, but it's not worth the risk.
Too many times the road on the desert crosses dry washes or ice-covered puddles. Small vehicles can cross some of these obstacles and when they can't cross they can always get back to the road, but we would be stuck. Some places we might have to back up five or ten miles to get back to the road, and we would often be tempted to take chances on dangerous ice or crossings.
further on the pavement is long gone and now the road is just mud. Gravel would be better but we are on the steppes here, and it might be hundreds of miles to the nearest gravel pit. It would cost a fortune to improve the road, and Kazakhstan has other uses for the money. When I check my notes I find that the really bad road lasts only two hours, but it seems longer at the time. Considering that this country is so empty that we pass only one small town and a couple of villages in a day's drive, it's understandable.
The very bad section was where the land was fine loess soil. The ground is sandy here, and the road is better.
We pass a village where Dave thought Mick could get fuel, but the gas station has no diesel. At the far side of town the road is blocked by a swinging barrier. We stop and wait.
A building off to the side may be a store and I go to check it out. It's not a store -- I can't tell what it is -- and by the time I get back to the truck a cop is sitting in the passenger seat, sorting through Mike's audio cassettes. I climb in, over the cop, and sit on the bunk.
The cop sorts out a couple of cassettes and shows them to Mike. He wants them, but Mike says no. The cop shrugs, and climbs out of the truck. He wants a ride too, but with two of us here he's reluctant to bluster. He lifts the barrier and we drive on into a sand desert with patches thin bristly dry grass.
About an hour into the desert we cross over a stretch of low dunes covered with scrub brush. Among the dunes we see a man wearing a blue jean jacket and black balaclava, with his hand out and the thumb pointing down. We stop, and he dips buckets of fuel from drums and pours them through a big funnel into Mick's truck while Mick watches.
In some ways this is better than fueling from a tanker because Mick can see exactly how many buckets of fuel he gets, and how clean the fuel is. I am sure we get a lot of dirt with our fuel but Mike says he never has problems. These trucks must have good fuel filters.
The next town is 70 km ahead, the one after is another 100 km and the Russian border is another 400 km beyond that. Every 100 miles or so we pass a parking spot by the road, with a pair of concrete ramps so people can work under broken-down vehicles. Beside the road we pass old construction trailers, some parked trucks and a few yurts.
In some areas, mud brick houses have stockades or corrals of piled and woven brush around them. We pass from sand desert to dry plains and back to sand desert with no vegetation and sand drifting over the road. A few hours later we are in dry grass again.
This is easy for us and it's hard to imagine what it was like in the old days. At 60 mph we cross the sand stretches in a few hours but caravans moved at walking speed -- about three miles an hour at best, and slower in sand -- and they would have taken several days for every hour we spend on the trail. When you figure they had to carry food and water for that time, you can appreciate the difficulty of their travel.
According to some accounts the worst desert was the Dasht E Kavir, or great salt desert, south of the Caspian Sea in Northern Persia, now Iran.
Huge areas of the desert are covered with salt, not sand, and in some areas a crust of dried salt covers a thick paste of salt and mud. Whole caravans were lost when the crust of salt broke, and men and animals drowned in the brine. By day the desert is so hot that caravans sometimes had to stop and take shelter in tents, but the earth loses heat so fast through the clear air of the desert that by night it can be freezing cold.
Depending on the route a caravan might take a month or more to cross the 350 miles or so of the great salt, and might pass only one or two fresh-waters oases on the way. When they did they would wash, drink fresh water for a change, and probably rest a day or so before filling their leather water bags and heading out to the desert again.
A second candidate for worst desert on the route is the Taklamakan, just south of the Tien Shan mountains that we followed to Tashkent. The name is a Uigar word that means "if you go in, you won't come out. The Taklamakan is bigger and more remote than the Sahara, and it offers you a choice of deaths. In summer it gets hotter than the Sahara, but in winter you could freeze to death.
But the Taklamakan is most famous for it's spirits. Scientists say the sounds are caused by sand rubbing together as it shifts in the wind, but travelers say that you can sometimes hear someone calling your name, or the sounds of a passing caravan. There are some patches of grass and the desert and there is even some water, but there are also huge tracts of sand and barren rock.
We are on the Kirghiz Steppe, passing south of the Ural Mountains, and we have sand and some grass but no rock. We're about 49 degrees north latitude -- roughly level with the border between western Canada and the United States, and about mid November the temperature hovers around freezing. It's dark by about 5:30pm but the road is good here and we cruise about 60 mph. In the dark the sand dunes beside the road look like snowdrifts.
By 8pm we have covered 512 km in about 13 hours. In a town called Xpontay now we pull in to what looks like a truck stop where a dozen or so wagons that look like gypsy caravans are parked by a cafe and a store. The cafe is closed, and we park beside an empty kiosk on the far side of the lot.
We make dinner of two cans of spaghetti and half a loaf of Russian bread that Dave picked up somewhere. Most nights we try to get together for dinner but tonight it's too cold to go back and forth, so we all eat in our own trucks. As we prepare to bed down for the night a group of about 20 new Ladas pull in and park on the other side of the lot. We don't see many private cars on the highway here but there are fleets of new cars, and foreign used cars being delivered.
Next morning we wake to a snow covered prairie that reminds me of the Canadian west. Dave makes coffee, and I gnaw a slice of bread for breakfast.
There are two police posts down the road and Mick says he was wakened twice last night by policemen. One of them wanted diesel fuel, the other wanted cigarettes.
While we drink our coffee a man comes to demand money for the parking. Mike says Dave is the boss, and sends him to Dave's truck. They're playing a game and Dave double talks the man for a few minutes, but then he agrees to pay $2 per truck. Mike says $2 is nothing, if you get to wake up in the morning.
The road we're on goes to Orenburg, in Russia, and Mike says it's very bad north of the Russian border. Dave agrees, but he says if we turn at Oktyabr'sk, a few miles away, we can head due north on a secondary road to Orsk, then turn again to Samara.
I'm continually amazed by the drivers' memory for roads. The knowledge of roads thousands of miles from home is a valuable asset and, in the days of the Silk Road, a man who knew the route could make a good living just by offering advice to travelers.
In the days of sailing exploration pilots kept notebooks, called "rutters" in which they noted all the details of their trips through uncharted waters. The information might be shared with other pilots working for the same merchants, but was otherwise considered secret.
We have maps of the road to Tashkent but they are not very good. Mike has learned to read his Russian atlas but it's not accurate. Even the atlas must be a new development, because Russians tend to think maps should be kept secret.
Years ago I drove a couple of members of a Russian diary delegation from Belleville to Toronto, Ontario. They were amazed when I showed them our route on a map and nearly incredulous when they found they could get free maps from service stations. They collected several maps each and, from the way they acted, I think they planned to turn them over to some military intelligence agency when they got home.
Here we navigate mostly on Mike's and Dave's personal knowledge, and their knowledge of Russian roads will be worth a fortune as trade develops.
We come to our turn and head north. Mike thinks the road ahead will be bad but Dave came down this way, and he says it's okay. We are heading toward to a range of low hills.
The road is icy and there's a truck broken down on the first hill. It looks like it rolled back and it's angled across the road, but we have room to pass. Later Mike tells me he was worried about that hill, and that he will not come this way again.
On top of the hill a sign says there is 3.5 meters clearance under the power lines. We're 4 meters high, but someone has already torn out the bottom line so we're okay.
The Russian city of Orsk is a collection of smokestacks and a black haze lies over the country around it. This is a mining\industrial area, and I guess the stacks are refineries.
The Kazak border post is an old fuel tank with doors and windows cut into it. The tank was cylindrical, about ten feet in diameter and twenty feet long, and I assume it has a flat wooden floor. A few miles beyond it the Russian customs post has two new octagonal buildings surrounded by a decorative fence of welded steel rebar -- the kind of ribbed bar used to reinforce concrete. They have a drive-through inspection shed for trucks, with a catwalk so guards can look at the top of a truck and a pit so they can check the bottom. The guards wave us through the shed, and they don't bother to look at our truck.
The gate lifts like a railway barrier, but not high enough to let us pass. A soldier gives it an extra push, so we can get under. Past the barrier we have to weave around a couple of barricades that look like tank traps. The ground around here is flat and it looks as thought tanks or even trucks could easily bypass the post, but the fields around us could be mined.
In Orsk we stop at a gas station so Mick can fuel up. While we're there a red Niva carrying three men and one woman pulls up beside us. The driver rolls down his window and asks me a question, and I shrug my shoulders to indicate that I don't speak Russian.
Then the woman gets out. She's tall and good looking and she wears glasses, a white knitted hat and a green fur coat that looks strange but is obviously expensive. She questions Mike in stumbling English. Mike says we are going to Moscow, and we're empty. She gets back into the car and they drive off.
We wonder what they wanted. Are they hijackers, scouting a target, or were they black marketeers looking for someone to haul a load for them? Whatever, we don't want to take a chance on them and we keep an eye out for their car for the next few hours.
Smugglers are a real problem for international truckers because it's easy for one man to hide something on a truck, and for another to collect it later. When the police find drugs in a truck they're not interested in who put them there or who is going to collect them -- they have the driver and that's good enough for them. One English trucking magazine figures that because of smuggling and other problems there are now about 3,000 English truckers in European jails.
Some truckers have gone to jail for goods they didn't carry. When Turkish inspectors made a detailed inspection of one of Ralph Davies' trucks more than a year ago they found some of the boxes that were supposed to contain shirts were in fact empty.
It turns out that Turkey subsidizes shirts made for export, and the manufacturer was claiming subsidy on more shirts than he made. The truck driver had nothing to do with the scam, but he spent a couple of weeks in a Turkish jail before Davies could get him out. Davies had nothing to do with it either, but more than a year later Turkish customs was still holding his trailer, as evidence.
Mick Fenn of Livestock Sales Transport Ltd. once told me how he got hooked for big bucks over international politics.
Spanish traffic police stopped one of his trucks the Friday before Christmas. Because the driver's tach card showed only one half-hour break in the previous nine hours, instead of the 45 minutes Spanish regulations call for, they fined him 1,080 English pounds or about $2,000.
And the fine had to be paid in cash before the truck could go on. Mick arranged to have an agent deliver the money to traffic police headquarters in Madrid, but they had a bomb-scare the building had been evacuated. By the time they got that cleared up, office hours were over and they wouldn't accept the money.
So the truck was tied up until Monday, Dec. 24 and it would be two or three days' run back to England. Rather than leave a driver out over Christmas Mick had to pay 400 pounds to fly him home for Christmas and back to the truck after.
The total cost to Mick was about 1,500 pounds or about $3,000 but Mick doesn't blame the driver for his mistake. He figures the problem was international politics.
"It was just tit for tat," he said. "The English police fined a couple of Spanish trucks that were overweight at Newhaven last week, and the Spaniards had to get back at an English truck."
On the way out of Orsk a policeman flags us down but Mike doesn't notice and he doesn't stop. I expect the cop to chase us, but he doesn't, and he doesn't even flag the others. Mike says one time when he didn't stop they chased him with a car and fined him 5,000 rubles. At that price -- a bit more than $1 American, it makes sense to drive on and take your chances.
We see a lot of Iranian trucks on this road. Mike says this is main route from Iran to Moscow and north Europe. On a map the route to the west of the Caspian sea looks shorter but it passes through Azerbaijan, Georgia and Chechnia. Miles are not problem for truckers, but bullets are.
There are gravestones beside the road, and some of them have steering wheels on them. Mike says people who are killed in car crashes around here are buried on the spot, and we assume the steering wheels are from the cars they were killed in. Maybe the wheel indicates that they were the driver.
About sunset we approach Orenburg. The area has been reforested right up to a huge mass of apartment buildings.
There are big gas fields near here, and at least one giant petrochemical plant in the city. We also see a lot of power lines and, as it gets dark, we see a lot of refinery flares around us. As we pass out of town we see a railway yard that must contain hundreds of tank cars.
A half hour later we pass the gas station where Dave got robbed on the way down. He is not willing to stop there again because the men who robbed him were caught, but their friends may be looking for revenge.
We go on, and on. About 10pm we finally find a TIR park in a small village. We've gone 870 km in 12.25 hours elapsed time, and 8.25 hours without a break. Mike is tired and Mick invites me to his truck for dinner, while Mike eats with Dave. As we eat Mick tells me he saw a TIR park in a town we passed through a couple of hours ago, but Mike was leading and he didn't stop when Dave flashed his lights. This was one time when a CB radio would have helped.
Next morning Dave is up early. As usual he makes coffee, but this morning we get only a half cup because Dave is low on drinking water. He will have to buy some the next chance he gets.
The road is covered with light film of mud and water, and Mike says it's very greasy. In less than an hour we pass a blue Lada in the ditch, with all the windows broken. A car and a truck are parked on the road, a woman is sitting on the bank and two men are trying to push the car, but they are not getting anywhere. Before noon we pass a head-on accident, with a police car parked nearby.
We are approaching Samara but we don't have to go through the city. A sign at an interchange says Samara lies straight ahead, Moscow to the right. We go right, and around the city.
We pass a tanker parked by the road and Mike almost stops. Then he looks at the long line of trucks waiting, and we go on.
But the others are not so choosy, and they stop. By this time we are beside a good looking roadside cafe, and we stop too.
As we walk to the cafe a couple of gypsy women offer us black leather jackets. They look good, but we don't need any. A half dozen trucks are parked behind a chain link fence behind the restaurant.
Inside, the restaurant looks nice with a sort of black forest feel. The walls are white with dark wood strapping and the wooden booths are home made but they look nice, painted black with red plastic upholstery. The paper napkins are tiny triangles about four inches across the base and about two inches high.
In one corner is a small altar on a rock base, nearly covered with wax from candles. A couple of candles burn in front of the altar, and two icons and a crucifix hag on the wall.
Two good-looking teen-age girls in flouncy black skirts and white blouses tend the counter. All they can offer is a big bowl of soup and a small plate of beef and rice with some kind of meat sauce, but it's good. They also offer a full selection of liquor, of course.
There is no washroom here so I cross the road and walk into the woods -- then realize that most of this area is literally covered in shit. There are a few paths, but I can't find a place off the path big enough to shit on without standing in shit myself. Eventually I give up and walk back to the truck -- and find that I have stepped in shit anyway. I clean my shoe as best I can.
I get back to the restaurant just as Dave and Mick arrive. Dave got 200 liters of fuel but while he was filling up four men climbed out of a car and demanded money. When Dave didn't give it to them they mimed cutting his throat, and shooting him. Other Russians around them did nothing, and Dave thinks they were afraid to interfere. Even the man who was filling Dave's truck ignored the incident.
One man tried to get into Mick's truck, but Mick had the engine going. He shoved it into reverse and accelerated backward, then slammed on the brakes. The man fell off and the door slammed closed. The men got into their car and drove off but Mick left without getting any fuel, because he said it would have taken too long.
But Mike has good memories of this area. About a year and a half ago he skidded off the road and into a ditch filled with snow. His trailer would have dumped, but the snow supported it.
A Russian police car stopped, and one of the policemen stayed with him to guard against bandits.
A few hours later the other policeman came back with a big truck carrying two crawler tractors. One used a tow line to keep the trailer from dumping, while the second one pulled the truck through the ditch. Then both tractors in tandem pulled him in a loop through the field, back through and ditch and back to the road.
Mike was going to offer the dozer operators $50 but the policemen said $20 would be enough. They didn't want pay themselves, but they each accepted an American $1 bill as a souvenir.
"And I gave them a packet of cigarettes each and they were over the moon" Mike said. "They were away! They make about $40 a month, and I guess that was good money to them."
Now we're on a dual track road with an unpaved median and mud shoulder, with forest both sides. There are some shish kebab stands on beside the road, and the remains of two wrecked buses in the ditch. Some side-roads lead into the bush.
About mid afternoon we have somehow got ahead of the others and we stop in a small town to wait for them. As we park in front of a kiosk that sells liquor and cigarettes some kids offer to wash our truck. They speak English and German and they say they will take English pounds, German marks or American dollars.
After about 20 minutes Mike wonders where the others are, and we drive back about 15 km to find them. Dave had ran out of diesel and had to stop so he could switch to another tank. That didn't take long but because he ran right out of fuel his engine sucked air, and they had to prime the engine again to get it started.
As we pass the kiosk where Mike and I waited the kids are washing a Lada car.
The road is slippery here and we pass another car in the ditch. On a long icy hill all traffic is stopped behind a truck that spins it's wheels on a patch of ice.
Other traffic passes when it can, and we follow a bus. As it pulls in we meet a Russian truck coming the other way. The driver had assumed that no-one was behind the bus, and now he is coming right at us.
We dive back into our lane, and he heads for the shoulder. Later Mick and Dave tells us that he went off, and was nose-down in the ditch when they passed.
Hours later we pull into a TIR park. There's a nice-looking restaurant here but at 6pm, it's closed. Why is it that anything that looks good in Russia is always closed?
In this case it's our good luck because we walk around back to a small wooden shack. It's hard walking because there's a layer of slime over the lot and some big puddles but, when we get there, we find a big shish-kebab cooker blazing. Instead of the usual shish kebabs they are cooking whole thick pork chops.
Inside we sit on wooden benches at a wooden table and order big cans of Danish beer and thick barbecued pork chops. Mike eats two chops and I have three, and I'm over-full, but happy. The meal cost us 55,000 rubles each -- about $12.50 American -- but we don't mind.
The gate-keeper at the park has a big dog that barks as we approach but doesn't bother anyone inside the park. As we come back from dinner we see it chase a man away from the gate but later that night we see the same man inside the park selling -- and trying to buy -- tapes.
There's a motel behind the cafe and quite a few cars parked in the TIR park, but there are people sleeping in at least some of the cars.
Next morning Mike has to slog through mud to the cafe building to pay 50,000 rubles for each truck for the parking. That's a rip off and Mike is angry -- for that price at least they could open the cafe and sell us some coffee.
But while Mike is slogging through the mud I'm admiring an almost picture-book Russian village across the road. The wood houses have bright-painted woodwork around the windows.
Then a tired-looking old man stops beside the truck. He must be 65 or 70 years old, he has no teeth and he has a ragged gray beard. He wears a cap with ear flaps, a belted gray-brown canvas jacket, brown pants and rubber boots and a dirty brown coat. I can't understand a word he says but I can understand his tone of voice, and the pathetic way he rubs his stomach. He is hungry.
All I have is a $1,000 and a $50,000 ruble note. I give him the 1 000 because it was nothing to me, but it will buy him a shish kebab. I would hate to be hungry and helpless among these people.
As we leave the lot people are setting up a display of bikes for sale. I guess that's what they make in at least one local factory.
By 10am the on-coming trucks have snow on them and an hour later we are driving through wet, sticky snow. The road is slippery and at one point we pass a truck and trailer in the ditch. The trailer is leaning at about 45 degrees and it looks about ready to fall over, but someone has driven an iron stake into the ground and tied the high side of truck down.
Our windshield washer is frozen. Now when the windshield gets dirty Mike stops and I jump out and throw snowballs at it. At one point we are held up about 20 minutes in a line of traffic. When we move on we see the remains of a tractor on one side of the road and a trailer upside down in the ditch on the other. Mike says this is the same spot where we saw a trailer that had come loose on the way down. We've seen so many accidents this trip that I can't remember them all.
Later in the afternoon we are hung up on another icy hill, behind a couple of Russian trucks that can't make it. Mike locks his differential, pulls out of the line and goes around, but Mick does not follow. Down the road we wait a half hour 'till he arrives.
When he catches up with us he says his differential lock would not work. He could have got out anyway if he could have backed up a couple of feet but the cars behind him would not back up to give him space. Mick was hung up about half an hour, and so were the cars behind him.
If there's any one thing that most people around here seem to have in common it's bull-headed inertia and lack of co-operation. If there's no one there to tell them to do something, they do nothing.
We wait for Mick, then start off again with Dave in the lead. We enter Moscow about 6:30 and they have a real rush hour here, but we're going against the traffic and we miss most of it. Some of the road signs are in English, and in some areas the streets are lined with tractor trailers parked for the night on both sides.
Mike tells me that big trucks are not allowed into the center of Moscow now unless they're delivering but the outskirts are full of them. Hundreds of trucks park on the streets rather than pay the $12 each it costs to park in a TIR park.
I'm surprised at the number of trucks until I realize that Moscow is one of the very few major cities of the world that have no seaport. That's a real problem because a city needs a lot of freight to survive and ships are the all-time champion freight movers.
So Moscow has a lot of trucks, but the world champion city for congested traffic has to be Mexico. The world's biggest city with more than 20 million people -- no one knows the exact count, even to the nearest million -- Mexico has no seaport and not many rail lines. Most of the freight travels by truck, and the result is some of the most incredible traffic jams in the world.
It's so bad that some vehicles are barred from the road on weekdays. Signs at the edge of the city warn out-of-town drivers that on Monday vehicles licensed in some states are not allowed in the city, on Tuesday others are barred, and so forth. Local vehicles with licences ending in the digits one and two are barred Monday, two and three are barred Tuesday, and so-forth.
But for all the traffic most of the trucks that serve Mexico are Mexican, and at night they park in company yards. Most of the trucks that serve Moscow are foreign, and at night they park on the street or in a TIR park. We go to a park.
We turn off the highway and down a main street, then wait in line to turn into a TIR park. Lines of trucks block the traffic on both sides of the street but each one has to pay before it enters the park. You'd think the gate keeper could make notes as we come in and collect the money later but, as Mike says, this is Russia.
We circle the park a couple of times, and finally settle on a spot by the back wall, under a light. We're parked by 7:30, and we have covered 576 km in ten hours.
There must be hundreds of trucks in this park, many of them with four or five men in the cab. They have their cab lights on and we can see them eating, talking and playing cards. Other trucks are empty and some cabs are curtained off. Whores patrol the lines, and pose hopefully in front of the trucks full of men.
This may be the most cosmopolitan TIR park I've ever been in. Looking down the row I see an International cabover that was made in the U.S.A., several Mercedes from Germany, Russian Kamaz, Swedish Volvo, German Man, French Renault, Swedish Scania, American Kenworth cabover, Czechoslovakian Liaz, Italian Iveco, English Leyland and Dutch Daf trucks, with licences and international call signs from almost every country in Europe and the Middle East.
This is more than a TIR park, it's also a social event. Some of groups of men who share trucks may have been travelling together, but there are probably also some friends from different countries and even different continents who may meet only in Moscow. Most other TIR parks we have been in are quiet but this one buzzes, like the giant encampment it is. I guess it must have been like this when two or three big caravans, each with dozens of men and hundreds of animals, met at a major oasis.
I follow Mike and Mick across the yard and down a flight of icy steps to the truckers club, and the first toilets since Tashkent. They have no seats, but they are clean and in private stalls.
Further on the bar is clean and well lighted and they have German beer on tap for 20 000 rubles, or nearly $5 a stein. A chicken dinner is 28 000 rubles. As Mike says, Moscow is now one very expensive city.
And this part of it is busy. The bar has room for about a hundred customers, and it's packed. Four and five truckers sit around each small table with plates of food and steins of beer. Some watch the color TV but most are talking in perhaps a dozen different languages, while waitresses circulate.
We get a table to ourselves to start, but when they hear us speaking English other English-speaking truckers join us, to drink a few beers and talk about life on the road. I've sat with truckers in hundreds of truck stops around most of Europe and North America, but this is somehow different.
Perhaps because of the mix of nationalities, perhaps because there are no locals and almost every trucker in this room is a long way from home, this place feels more like an international caravan stop than like an ordinary truckstop. We talk and drink beer for a couple of hours, then go to bed in our trucks.