The border was pretty straightforward - for a Russian border.

Leaving Estonia and thereby the European Union was easy. The border follows the Narva River and you cross it via this bridge (Russia being on the right bank):


(Image source: Wiki Commons)

On the other side of the bridge, there was a closed barrier - a шлагбаум ('shlagbaum') in Russian, though it's an exact copy of the German word Schlagbaum.

The barrier was closed and so we waited on the bridge for a while. Behind us was a serious looking guy. Suit, shades and the typical Slavic serious face. For the whole 20 minutes he waited behind us he let the engine run. When he finished reading his newspaper he got out, shouted a few words at the guards and they began letting people through.

That was the first "Only in Russia" moment of many to come.

After the usual bureaucratic forms, tactical wait times and fetching stamps here and there we entered Russia on our three months visa.



First, we wanted to take a look at the old Krasnaya Gorka fort, a coastal artillery fortress 70km west of St. Petersburg. It was used to defend Petrograd during Russian Civil War and Leningrad during WW2, which is now known as St. Petersburg.

The most important piece of machinery is this huge railroad gun.



Of course we had to climb it!













View of the Gulf of Finland





Somewhere in the woods we found a small hut with an old Stalin (?) bust. The cats liked him, especially as their place of urination.

I think that's Kalinin... definitely not Stalin... but nice find anyway

__________________
4.5 years around Eurasia in a Toyota Hilux|http://eurasiaoverland.wordpress.com/
Pictures Here|https://picasaweb.google.com/113619413612674951960

Thanks for pointing out - I didn't know him. So I googled Mikhail Kalinin, and apparently he was a Bolshevik revolutionary and head of state from 1919 to 1946. Still to this day, the city of Kaliningrad (a Russian enclave between Poland and Lithuania at the Baltic Sea) is still named after him (whereas Stalingrad and Leningrad have been renamed after the fall of the USSR).

Anyway, after this short excursion we made our way towards St. Petersburg. The ride was very refreshing; the roads were in perfect condition. It felt great being in Russia again. A few cars honked and waved at us on the highway. It’s funny how incredibly cool a bike looks with off-road tires packed on top of the luggage, even when it’s immensely impractical. :lol3 Later, without the tires on the back, nobody honked at us anymore.

mbravo, an ADVrider from St. Petersburg gave me a few addresses of cheap hotels and we were riding towards one. Strangely, we couldn’t find it, even with the GPS, so we decided to head to the bike shop where we wanted to work on the bikes. As it was still early afternoon, we’d look for an accommodation later on.

I found a bike garage/shop in the city center (near Nevskij Prospekt) on bikepost.ru, so we went there. The guys were very welcoming and gave us a small room where we could change our tires and prepare the bikes.

Outside of the shop in an old industrial area.



We got to work and changed our tires from the old road tires to a combination of Michelin T-63 rear and Desert front.





Since my chain was still too good to trash in Switzerland, I carried a spare kit and had it changed by the guys.



They had some cool stuff inside of their garage. The lower image says: Can’t ride a motorcycle in the crisis? We’ve got an idea!

Before – After



This one says:

You have to ride an uncomfortable car due to long repairs? We will repair fast!

Before – After



Outside, there were some old cars with funny stickers on them. Red on yellow says: Do you think it's easier to fly on a broomstick?

The one on the window I can’t decipher anymore, only the last word saying Schumacher.



Note the Mercedes sticker



Around the corner there was a hostel that is run by friends of the shop, the Mozaika hostel. We stayed there for a few nights and met another biker, a guy from far-eastern Vladivostok on a trip to his native Belarus. This was his bike.



So, for anybody looking for a cheap and good place to stay in St. Petersburg (and work on the bike), here’s how to find it:

You can only enter the industrial are from point A at Ligovskij Prospekt. It’s about 200m towards Moscow Train Station (Московский вокзал) from Hotel Ibis, you can see the small entry here on Google Streetview. HOWEVER, the gate is closed for vehicles during the night, so you have to arrive by day.

Mozaika Hostel is at B, and you can choose from different rooms ranging from 500 Rubles (10€/14$) to 2000 Rubles (41€/57$) a night. It is probably advisable not to park the bike out front but to ask Moto-M (point C on the map below) if you can park your bike with them. It’s a 30 seconds footwalk away.

Click on the map to have it open in Google Maps for better browsing.



We roamed through St. Petersburg a bit and I found these funny souvenirs in a small shop - US dollars as toilet papers and Russian rubles as napkins. What are they trying to convey? :confused1:



I went to look for a barber shop to get my hair cut and eventually got my new Russian style haircut.

Funny side note about the Russian language: A barber shop in Russian is called a парикмахер (parikmakher), which stems from the German Perückenmacher. It literally means Wig maker, which is how barber shops were called in Germany a few hundred years ago, when the Russians imported the word into their language. Similarly, a sandwich is called a Бутерброд (Buterbrod) which comes from the German word Butterbrot, literally Butter bread. In Russian, though, it now refers to all kind of sandwiches, no matter what’s on top.

On my way back, I came upon a car crash and will post the pictures to reinforce the stereotype: :evil





The big Russian cities have quite a problem with parking spaces and wild parking. Often, at the side of the road, one or even two lanes are fully blocked by cars parking for a few minutes. It was only once we saw a concerted effort to remove parking violators.



Another (hopefully) interesting side note: In Moscow there is a youth organization called СтопХам (stopkham, meaning something like “stop the dork”), which hunts illegally parked cars, urges the drivers to remove them immediately or they put a huge sticker on the windshield, saying “I don’t care at all – I park where I want”. A few people react quite irate and for our entertainment, they upload some of the stuff to YouTube with English captions. It’s an immense amount of fun:

<object height="480" width="853"><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/p_QKfjX4N7Q?hl=de_DE&version=3" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="480" width="853"></object>

Here’s the rest of the videos (some with English subs): StopXAM on YouTube


Well, enough of the cultural excursions. In the evening, we met up with Lenny, whom I met two years earlier when I was in St. Petersburg the first time and went for a drink.



It was a lot of fun hanging out with him again and getting to know him better. He told some interesting stories from his army times in Arkhangelsk, a city 1300km north-east of Piter. The contents of the discussions are a bit dim in my memory, not only due to the many months that since have passed.



After a lot of Vodka, Beer and a Shawarma (some variation of Kebab) we went back home to the Hostel. In the summer months, it never gets completely dark in St. Petersburg, due to the proximity of the Arctic Circle –called white nights.





After another day of rest and a bit of sight-seeing we picked up our bikes at the shop. Nikita on the left figured out what the electrical problem was – there was a short-circuit on the side-stand switch that shut off the engine when it wrongly thought the side-stand was down. We were very thankful for his help, though he only charged a minimal amount for the few hours he put into troubleshooting.



After our fare-well with the guys we packed our stuff, did a photo op with an Indian traveller and went on our way.



St. Petersburg – thanks for having us. We’ll be back someday.

A few kilometers outside of St. Petersburg, traffic died down fast. While there was a lot of road work going on two years earlier, now they seemed to have finished this section and, again, it’s a very smooth ride. Though with the off-road tires now, the noise at high speeds was considerably louder.

The reverse graffiti on the left truck says: 100km without car wash on the road.



Behind the gas station I noticed that the small bistro I stopped two years earlier looked a bit different than it did back then.

2013:



2011:



Eventually, we left the main road onto a small dirt road into the woods to look for a nice place to camp. We rode down a two-track road that had some rather deep ruts and loose ground. The track ended at a nice place with some makeshift tables and benches. The whole place was a mosquito-hell due to there being a small lake next to it so we decided to look further.



It was easy to get some branches stuck under the fender.



While I re-adjusted some loose luggage Andi took off back towards the main road. When I arrived at the crossroad I met Andi with pain on his face. On his way back, he got caught in one of the tire tracks and there was a soil-covered rock protruding over the track which he didn’t see.

At a speed of about 25km/h (15mp/h) his right foot got smashed in-between the rock and the bike frame. Judging from his pain it had to be serious. It was about 11PM and we didn’t want to take the boot off, since it could mean he won’t be able to ride anymore.

We were still a good 150 km (90 miles) away from the next big town, Petrozavodsk. We decided to ride towards the next petrol station and look for help there. Andi was able to put his foot onto the crash bars which relieved some of the pain. In a lucky turn of events, after only a few minutes of riding we saw a sign indicating a hospital in about 20 km (12 miles). There was a turn in the road and we followed it on a bumpy road towards the city of Olonets. To my surprise, the GPS had a vague POI only called “Bolnitsa” – hospital.

When we arrived at the waypoint, an old soviet military hospital, we saw a few UAZ ambulances standing outside and looked for the entry. By now it was about midnight but still quite bright. We eventually found an open door with the night watch and a security guy.



After a few minutes of presenting documents and trying to explain what happened, a doctor arrived and took Andi with him. I suggested joining in to translate a little bit. He shouted at me and sent me back.

While Andi was gone, I overheard the night watch and the security guard putting the information into the computer and laughing at our strangely foreign names. The security guy tried to be funny and pointed at our Azerbaijani and Kazakh visa and told me that’s not going to happen anymore. Thanks.

I was a bit afraid how to pay the hospital – they didn’t ask for us to pay up front, but will they let us go without paying? How much will it cost? To our huge surprise, they only wanted to see the European Health Insurance Cards and that was it.

After a while Andi came back, sitting in a wheelchair. They made an x-ray which showed that his biggest and second biggest toe have been broken.



Andi’s foot was in a cast and we had to look for a place to stay, since there was no reason we could stay at the hospital. When Andi was being processed, I chatted a bit with the security guard whose mood lightened. I bribed him with a bottle of Latvian Vodka in the hopes he could help us out.



It was the right choice of bribery – he was now even willing to have his picture taken. He suggested he’d drive Andi to the nearest hotel with me riding behind him.

On the way back from the hotel to pick up Andi’s bike the bottle of Vodka was already open. When we arrived back at the hospital he asked me if I have the bike’s documents with me and what happened if the police stopped me. I told him I didn’t have them and that this trip was supposed to be an adventure. I got quite a chuckle out of him.



At the hotel, I was delighted to discover that he had sweet-talked the lady at the reception to give us a discount. In the meantime, Andi made friends with a local who went and picked up a much-needed pack of cigarettes for him. Next to the hotel, there was a huge party going on. Since there was no secure parking, he suggested to spend his night next to the bikes for 100 Rubles (3€/4$). And so he did.

When I talked to the receptionist, she told me that we could have a room on “the first floor” for ease of access. It seemed strange to me but so I went to the staircase. She laughed and told me to go down the hallway on the left. I later realized what fool I am – in Russia, the first floor is the ground floor, while in most of Europe it’s one level above ground.

Finally in the room, we held a crisis meeting on what happens now. Andi was definitely not able to ride his bike; he couldn’t even properly walk and had no crutches. We decided it would be best to organize a transport for him and the bike back to St. Petersburg and he will decide there if he goes home or not. Our careful planning and packing was now useless. We had packed only one set of tools, spares and cooking utensils to save weight, so it was quite a challenge to pack everything into my bags now.



The bikes were still there in the morning and so I went to the reception to ask if they knew of any logistic company or local with a truck who could help us.



The nice lady made a few calls and told us to wait for half an hour. I used the time to pack the bikes again and talked with some locals who were very interested in the bikes.



Since he had to walk without any crutches we packed his foot into a plastic bag and waited for our driver to arrive. Understandably, Andi wasn’t in the best of moods, but we decided to stay in contact and maybe meet up later in the trip when his foot’s better.



An old Ford Transit arrived and we loaded the bike into it. There weren’t enough straps to secure it upright, so we had to lay her down and fix her that way.

Andi paid, if I remember correctly, about 5000 Rubles (100€/140$) for the 300 km (185 miles) trip to St. Petersburg. As he told me later, it was quite uncomfortable because he couldn’t put his feet up for pain relief.



It was painful to see Andi go, so much misfortune so early in the trip.



Now I was alone and will try to make the best of it.

With Andi now on his way back to St. Petersburg, I checked out of the hotel. With the farewell, the receptionist suggested to have a look at a nice monastery a bit south of Olonets.

Here’s an overview so you guys know where we are in Russia:



Point A: Olonets with the hospital and hotel
Point B: The monastery
Point C: Kondopoga
Distance A through C – about 250 km or 155 miles

After a short ride I arrived at the Alexander-Svirsky Monastery which was founded in 1487.





There is something incredibly beautiful about the Eastern Orthodox architecture, I’m in love with the onion domes.



I hit the road again and tried to think what lay ahead of me and what I have to make different now that I am alone. The trip was always planned to happen with Andi and by this point I wasn’t yet sure if I could do everything I expected of the trip alone. Specifically long off-road sections through the wilderness are something entirely different if you're alone.

Long straight roads through impressive boreal forests gave me a good back drop to figure that out.



There was this huge truck at the side of the road – does anybody have an idea about its purpose?





Eventually, I reached Kondopoga, which was announced by this monument along the road.





500 years Kondopoga



I stopped at another church to have a break.



The view in the other direction.



After a while, some youngsters approached me and wanted to know everything about the bike and tried out how my gear fit them.



They all couldn’t wait to sit on the bike and push every button.



This fellow was pretty smart and wanted to know where I’m from, how fast my bike goes and was generally amused by my clunky Russian. When I said my good-bye he wanted to know how we said good-bye in Switzerland. He wasn’t satisfied with me telling him “Tschau/Ciao” and said no, that’s Italian!



When their parents walked by he announced excitedly that I was a foreigner visiting Russia, though they couldn’t have cared less.



Satisfied with my good deed of converting young boys to future motorcycle riders I went on my way out of town.