Moose on the Move!

Tuesday (27th June) we left Holbaek early and drove south to join the ferry from Gedser, to Rostock in Germany. We all took up our jobs again, driving, giving directions and so on. As it turns out some of us were better at our jobs than others - I somehow got us onto the right road going in the wrong direction and we had to go through (and pay) a toll twice!

We finally got going in the right direction and followed the coast to an area called Usedom. The campsite we stayed in streched 5 kilometers along the coast and provided beaches for everyone (those with family, those with dogs and those wishing to bath nude). The mosquitoes were horrendous but did abate slightly once we'd lathered ourselves in repellent and the sun went down. That night we watched the football on a huge screen set up near the entrance to the park for the locals.

Over breakfast the next morning I offered around the OJ but was the only one to really have a big glassful. It had been travelling with us from home and for part of the previous week was unrefridgerated, but I had a good sniff and it seemed ok.

I was wrong. Half an hour later I started feeling a bit off and as we made our way off I started to feel quite queasy. To make a long story short, I was quite sick that day. In fact I was sick four times and succeded in startling a few people in both Germany and Poland. I saw very little of Poland, except for the few small areas of ground that I got a very good look at as I knelt there feeling like rubbish.

Not long after leaving the campsite we passed out of Germany and into Poland - a first for all of us. The border crossing was a little more involved than the previous ones, in that we had to stop and get our passports stamped. Yay! One disadvantage of the EU is that you can travel through loads of different countries and never get a stamp...ok, maybe I was the only one in the car really excited about getting border stamps, but people know I'm a collector (Chris would say 'hoarder').

We drove inland towards the city of Torun but stopped before we got there and found a roadside hotel so I could sleep. While I spent the rest of the afternoon resting my eyes and my stomach, the other three went downstairs to try and decifer the Polish dinner menu. There was, by all accounts, much laughing as the owners of the place drew pictures and brought various ingredients from the kitchen. The whole affair was watched over by the numerous stuffed and mounted deer heads on the walls.

On Thursday, stomachs all feeling fine, we made it to the Polish city of Torun. It is a really lovely city with a huge central square and is the birth place of Nicolaus Copernicus. Being summer, the resaurants lining the square all had tables set out in the fresh air. We had a bit of lunch and followed mum's instructions for a walking tour around the city, looking at various sights.

That night we stayed as close to the Polish/Russian border as we could with the aim of crossing early the next morning. The town where we stayed, Frombork, was right on the Baltic sea and we watched a huge flock of swallows dip and flow along the coast as the sun went down. Before leaving home we'd read that border crossings in Russia can take a long time and the guy on the desk confirmed this by telling us it would probably take several hours to get through to Mamonovo in the morning. Infact it took just two hours between 8am and 10am.

Now that Russia has opened it's borders, almost anyone can go for a visit or for business. Lots of Germans, in a similar situation to Papa, have made the trip 'home' in the last decade, most of them go on an organised bus tour from Germany. It's not as simple to get in if you want to drive yourself there. You need to get invited in order to be able to apply for a visa to visit Russia! How do you get invited to a coutry where you don't know anyone? You go through an agency, of course. Then you need to work out what kind of visa you need (tourist, transit, business, single entry or multiple). Someone told us we needed a visa for the car. Someone else told us we did't. Eventually we got all the right info and were able to get our invitations and then our visas, hooray! Our names in cyrillic script look quite odd.

So, inside Russia, we headed off for Kaliningrad (previously Konigsberg - where Papa was born). Alarmingly, one of the first things we saw once we crossed the border was a man get out of his parked van and shoot a dog that was lying on the ground, twice, with a rifle or shotgun. The dog was trying to push itself up as we passed by. It made us wonder if we really did want to be here.

Navigating in Russia where the signs are almost intirely in cyrillic script is tricky. We soon gave up trying to decifer and pronounce the names of towns and instead started giving directions like "We need to head towards the town that goes K-A-backwards Pi-backwards N-H-backwards N-H-upside down L-P-A-square boxy A, ok?" That spells Kalilingrad by the way. Other fabulous letters we encountered included - '3', 'six-legged spider', 'backwards R', 'little b' and the ever popular 'squashed 6'.

Apparently, before WW2 Kaliningrad was considered the jewel-in-the-crown of Eastern Europe; it was an educational and cultural centre and considered quite beautiful. Alas this is no longer the case. Now, Kaliningrad is insane! Our impression of the city was that it is busy, hot, dirty and ugly. Perhaps there is a softer side to be discovered if you scratch a little deeper, but when we arrived we had neither the time nor the inclination to do much scratching. The traffic was intense and it took all of us working together to navigate around the city and not get run into by other motorists - as it was we got bumped slightly from behind (no damage done though). After a mad dash past several important sights we decided we'd had enough and made a bee-line for the edge of the city.

This part of Russia, called Kaliningrad Oblast (and NOT East Prussia like I had been calling it) is an interesting but depressing kind of place. The area was German for hundreds of years before WW2 when it was invaded by Russian troops and all the German inhabitants were either chased out or killed. Since then, with communism first and now no communism it has fallen into a state of disrepair. There is evidence in many places that it used to be a delevoped and affluent area but now, old German homes stand crumbling and rotting, there are bomb damaged buildings and bridges in many places and a lot of horrible grey housing blocks built by the Soviets after the war. The people are mostly quite poor and there is a general sense of wariness; very few people would make eye-contact or smile at us in the street.

We based ourselves in the tourist town of Svetlogorsk and over the next three days we explored the area. Svetlogorsk is a little like any tourist town you might know from elsewhere except that the tourists were not international, they were almost all from Russia, many from Kaliningrad. Very few people spoke English, which of course they are entitled not to do, so we got by on a mixture of a few English words, a few German words and a lot of pointing.

Pointing is how we ended up with non-alcoholic beer one night. We had infact tried to learn a few Russian words and phrases before going there. We learnt, 'spa`sibo' - thank you, 'dosvi`daniya' - goodbye and 'zd`rravstvuite' - hello. At least, we figured, if we each learnt one word we'd be able to go into a shop, Mum could say 'hello', Chris could point at what we wanted, I could say 'thank you' and Papa could say 'goodbye', and we'd survive!

The impetus for this mad foray into Russia was to see if we could find the farm where my father's family bred Trakehner horses before the war. Papa had been able to find the old house using Google Earth (ah, modern technology) and was fairly sure we'd be able to find it. When we went back to the farm where Papa spent the first year and a half of his life we found that it looked very different to the photos taken in 1943. All things change over time, that's inevitable, but this house too was in the same state of disrepair as the rest of the Oblast.

Papa had scripted a few sentences in Russian to try and explain who he was and what we wanted to do. The welcome we received was less than warm but the woman we got 'speaking' to let us look around the property and even let us in to see her two rooms in the house. There were three separate people living in the one house now; the woman we talked to, a man who looked very displeased to see us didn't want to know anything about us and a second woman who arrived later carrying a big bunch of yellow flowers and laughed a lot and was very excited about us being from Australia. They were a funny mix.

Papa had brought with him a regular black film canister containing a very special cargo; some of my Opa's ashes. He died in 1997, never having returned to his homeland. It was special to know that a little bit of him made it back and is now resting as the base of one of the old trees in front of the house.

We found out later, talking to an elderly woman who used to teach German, that most people in the area do not own the homes they live in. They are allocated a house (or part of) by the state but have no rights to stay there. What happens increasingly is that weathly individuals from Moscow come and can decide to simply buy a property that they take a liking to from the state. The occupants are forced to leave. This could well explain why we were almost ignored when we initally arrived at the house.

This region is well know for it's amber and there is a large mine near Yantary. We visited a shop where they prepare the amber from raw and produce lots of different pices of jewellery and so on. We bought lots of amber and looked at even more.

The roads in Russia are atrocious! Pot holes abound and roads are poorly repaired. We managed to avoid an uncovered manhole in Svetlogorsk and dodged many small dips and rips in the roads all over. Road works are scare and when they do occur they are not signposted like they are in other places in the world. An operation that in England or Australia would close a lane, promt a dozen warning signs and the use of bright orange bollards here receives no mention what so ever as you pelt along the highway. The only indication that bits of the road might be missing somewhere ahead of you is the erratic swerving and weaving of the drivers in front of you - of course, they may just be drunk.

There is a long spit, half of it belongs to Russia and the other half to Lithuania, and it separates the Baltic from the lagoon. We decided on one of the days we were there to drive up and have a swim in the Baltic. Unfortuantely there was one nasty pothot that leapt at us on our way up the spit. It was a deep, sharp-edged one, lurking menacingly in the shadows. We hit it full on and heard a frightening thump and whop-whop sound. Pulling over at the first opportunity we discovered that, while we had not burst the front tyre, we had seriously bent the inside and outside of the rim. You could see exactly where the edge of the pothole had made contact with the metal. The impact had caused the seal to break and all the air to escape so we definitely had a flat. Out came the warning triangle and car-jack and in the few minutes following our accident four other cars pulled over to check their tyres after hitting the very same pothole. You could almost hear it chuckling at us all from back down the road.

Eventually we worked out how to get past the security bolt on the wheel and where to put the jack on our silly sport-model car and got the trye changed. We were on our way again. We visited the Dancing Forest and climbed the dunes to get a view of the Baltic and the lagoon at the same time. The beach where we chose to swim was stunning, mostly empty and quite warm on the sand. The water, however, could not be described as warm and although we all made it in at least up to our necks we didn't stay in too long. I'm sure I saw an iceberg floating past on the horizon...

On our last day in Russia we left Svetlogorsk and visited a new Trakehner horse stud. It was a very impressive set up and Papa was delighted to see the horses. Apparently the whole thing was basically kept running by a weathly man who did it as a hobby. There were hundreds of horses and they reguarly host big horse shows.

We made our way to the border dodging, as best we could, potholes that seemed to have been cut into the road with the specific aim of causing accidents.

At the border we were expecting that it might take a couple of hours to get out - like it had done to get in. We realised soon that we had made a seriously underestimation. We pulled up at the end of a kilometer long line of cars, three lanes wide. Slightly unsure but still optimistic we sat in the car, engine running. Our suspicions that all was not well were raised when we noticed that the people arriving behind us were parking their cars, getting out, locking the doors and walking away. Obviously they knew somthing we didn't. Papa and Chris went off to investigate what was happinging at the front of the line while Mum and I guarded the car.

They returned having seen a man in a tour bus show a small piece of paper to the guard further down the line and being waved through to the short lane. We left the queue and went back along the road a few kilometers to get a piece of paper for the 'schnell' line. We were getting excited as we drove past all the other waiting cars, waved our piece of paper and joined the line just ten cars long! Hooray!

The excitement didn't take long to fade as we realised that we were still in for a very very very long wait. Off to our right was the route that most people had to take, it was packed four cars across literally bumper to bumper, we counted 200 cars just in that section. Once you were in that area there was no way out. Many of the cars closer to the border had flattened cardboard boxes in the windows to shield those inside from the sun. At one point, several hours after arriving at the border Papa tried to sneak us in behind a couple of tour buses but we were turned away at the gate by a very young looking guard in an enormous hat. As the evening wore on and more and more people turned in for the night in their cars we started to get quite worried. One of the young guys in the car in front of us said in all seriousenss that we'd all be there until morning. Luckily for us at around 11pm Chris got speaking to a Polish truck driver who knew a few words of English and suggested that because we were tourists we should take our passports down to the border guards and tell them we had to go.

That's exactly what Papa did, telling them a tiny white lie (that we all had to catch a flight from Heathrow in a week) we were eventually ushered though and could begin the process of actually leaving the country. While our passports were being checked and stamped and our car export papers sorted out a Russian guard had a good grope around in the back of our car. We were loaded fairly high and he stuck his hand into every space it would go. We figure the only thing he could have been searching for, given that he didn't actually look at anything, was people. Luckily for us we hadn't tried to smuggle anyone out and were allowed to pass.

At the Polish border they were checking all the cars very very thoroughly, tapping on every surface, looking under the cars with mirrors, opening everything they could. We figured that with all the gear we had in the back we would be there until dawn. As it happened the guard opened the back and took a look at all our stuff. Pointing to the fridge, he asked "What's that?", to which Chris answered "A fridge". The guard said "OK", closed the back and let us go. I think most of Poland heard us whooping with joy as we finally made it out at around 12:30 in the morning, six hours after we'd arrived at the Russian border.

While it was an interesting and exciting place to visit I think it will be a while before we go back to Russia. And I don't think we'd drive ourselves there again.