Zilupe (LV) - Moscow (RU)

4:45 a.m. Sunrise. Blame the nearby time zone border and the northern latitudes we've drifted into. But not only that. By 5 Phil and I are already winking at each other out of our sleeping bags, bed to bed, both of us narrow, both of us on wheels. Breakfast from the aluminium plates: oats, milk, banana. Same as every day. Few words. Packing with well-rehearsed moves, then the glove fist-bump. What makes my heart beat faster on this 9.7.08 is the EU–Russia border. Central America flashes through my head for a second, with all its expensive, difficult, nerve-shredding borders. I push it aside.
The queue of trucks has been standing along the roadside for kilometres, in places two lanes wide. Oncoming traffic: zero. At the Latvian exit barrier there are 25 cars ahead of us. The drivers sit on folding chairs they've brought along, smoking, chatting. They've clearly done this before. After 10 minutes the light turns green and 10 cars may advance to the next barrier. Calm. Orderly. Almost. There are pushy people everywhere, and this time it's the woman behind us.
We make the third batch. Passport, vehicle papers, customs declaration, stamp. After the second barrier and only one hour: goodbye, EU!

Now comes the big one!
So, I thought. Here it comes. The hassle, the shakedown, the bossing around: bike over there, no, over here, closer, back, actually better over there. I had braced myself for it like for a dentist's appointment. And then? Nothing. One customs declaration each, in duplicate, and that was it. The pushy woman, who had meanwhile made it ahead of us, was sent back behind us by the customs officer in person. I could have hugged him. He didn't want to see the motorcycle insurance. No money, no opening the luggage, no moving the bikes. After an hour he slammed the last stamp onto the last piece of paper, beamed at us and said: “Welcome to Russia!” A customs officer who beams. We're in. I still only half believe it.

Riga, St. Petersburg or Moscow
A patched-up, wide road, forest on the left, forest on the right, heading for Moscow. For the first 500 km there seem to be only three directions: Riga, St. Petersburg or Moscow. Even I couldn't have got lost here.
First night: a motel in the first sizeable town after the border. Damp and cold, but expensive, a combination you otherwise only know from beach holidays. All around: derelict factories, rusting statues and monuments, vans each older than the last, bad roads, little corner shops with hardly any selection. Luckily we know a bit of Russian, script included. The shops look like sheds, you see. Only the sign above the ramshackle wooden door gives them away: “Produkti, Frukti, Owosche” (groceries, fruit, vegetables). Without the sign I'd never have guessed there was a shop there, let alone walked into one on a hunch.
Second night: a town where the main street and four or five big parallel and cross streets are paved. The rest is pot luck. The hotel was an old Soviet bunker, big and tall, the room small, toilet down the hall. I never found a shower. Not that I didn't look. On the plus side, the shops were bigger and better stocked. You take what you get.

The good old headlight flash and the police
In Russia, too, drivers flash their headlights to warn each other about the police. Motorist solidarity knows no borders. We were never pulled over, not even once, which strikes me as almost suspicious. The M9 bypasses every village and town, running dead straight towards Moscow.
For days it had looked like rain, and we never got wet. Until the day we rode into the Moscow sprawl. Torrential rain. It escorted us, and every truck and car in the world, into the suburbs.

Just don't lose Phil
Honestly, I couldn't see a thing. Not five metres ahead. Spray, rain and black clouds of exhaust blended into one thick fog. Five metres, that's exactly the distance to Phil's tail light. Phil, jam-trained by his daily commute along Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse, zipped between the nearly stationary vehicles. Left, right, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. And me? Eyes shut and go. The world had shrunk to one little red light, and that little light I must not lose, whatever happened. At some point Phil left the x-lane motorway for an x-lane feeder road into a suburb 20 km before Moscow. The traffic got thicker, Phil nimbler. Somehow we ended up going through a busy market into a pedestrian zone and out again. After two hours of tail-light chasing in pouring rain: a hotel. I was so wet that I gave my clothes weeks to dry. The hotel was good, so was the neighbourhood. We stayed until Sunday, hoping the traffic would take a day of rest too.
A coincidence of the bigger kind: still in the suburb, in the middle of rain, jam and crush, Phil spotted a motorcycle shop with a KTM logo among all the Cyrillic lettering along the roadside. And dropped a pin in the GPS while riding. In that time I accomplished exactly one thing: not drowning. Finding the dealer again on Saturday was therefore actually quite easy. Actually. Because when I ask someone here for directions, say the young woman in front of the kafe, she flees. Into the kafe. Away from me. What on earth did I just let out in Russian? I'd rather not know.

A week in Moscow
Sunday. 30 degrees, lots of sun, little traffic. Now that I can see again: the feeder road has three lanes, the motorway five, and a ring road of about 140 km encircles the centre. We had booked online in advance and zoomed in right on target. Weaving and shoving in sunshine? Almost fun. Past 11 reactor cooling towers, sharp left. We found the street. Nobody knew number 7, and the hotel even less. Don't give up, Jasmin. Just ask a child. And voilà: number 7. In the middle of a district of high-rise blocks where thousands of people must live. The note said: ring at apt. 52. We ring. Moments later we're standing in a flat with 3 rooms, kitchen, shower, toilet, internet, washing machine, 2 young Frenchmen and two Englishwomen. The landlady? Never seen her to this day. Never mind, it'll work out. I love it, Phil does too, we're staying a week. I fire up the stove straight away and commandeer the washing machine. Anyone who finds a washing machine after two hours of torrential rain doesn't give it up again.