Day 22: Thursday 3rd September

Another good night’s sleep in the quiet of ‘wild’ Russia. We’re ready in good time and go seeking the ‘Spermbank’ (as we have come to call one of the national banks that is actually called Sperbank). We want to change the rest of our dollars as they have proved useless in day-to-day transactions. The sign says it is 400m back up into the village so we walk through in the warm sunshine. Somehow, owing to the sign being obscured by trees and the building set back from the road, we manage to walk right by it and get to the edge of the village before realising we must have misunderstood something. Turning back and round the first corner there it is staring us in the face!

Changing the money takes forever: first the inevitable triple checking that the notes are genuine, but then ten minutes or more on the phone apparently to clarify the status of Jill’s visa and registration document (it is over a week since we obtained the registrations, in St Petersburg – perhaps the place of registration was the problem). Eventually she gets the green light from her boss at the other end and money changes hands, at the usual exchange rate.

The woman at the estate cash desk doesn’t have any English (and is busy chewing on sunflower seeds) nor do the six or seven local worthy ladies guarding the house. Nothing to be seen on the ground floor, apparently. Upstairs we have to wait while an over-large group of Russian tourists benefit from an over-long lecture in the main living room of the house – which we are eventually allowed to see once the doors have been opened and they have filed out and squeezed into the adjacent rooms where we’ve been whiling away the time. Next the library, but not before Harry has been shooed out once while the coven finish the dusting. And then – no more rooms to be seen, at least not by us. The favoured Russians are coming out of a series of rooms across the landing but the door is firmly locked behind them and despite Harry’s requests we get a firm ‘nyet’. Nothing for it but to head downstairs, take off the protective slippers, pick up the backpack and then wander round the rest of the estate. It was for all the world like being foreigners in Britain shown round Shakespeare’s house by members of the local WI, and xenophobic ones at that. Wonder if the eager little group of young Japanese we passed at the gate fared any better?

After doing the Tolstoy estate we set off for another long and bumpy ride across to the M6 – but we’ve got on to the P136 by following the Razan signs and it’s pretty poor. The only good thing about this stretch is that the countryside has begun to change with some hills and wooded valleys complete with rivers – a pleasant change from the rather plain views further north. When we do eventually hit the M6 it is no better and I fear this is a sign of things to come for the rest of the trip.

Perhaps it is appropriate here to mention that the designation ‘M’ does not equate to our use of M for motorways. The Russians use it as a designation for trunk roads but I don’t know what it stands for in Russian – it’s certainly not ‘motorway’! They’re only single carriageway and have dozens of police checkpoints, HGVs and slow movers to hold you back. At the boundary of each oblast (local authority) there is a major police post that pulls in vehicles for a thorough examination. The resulting congestion appears to bother nobody. At one point we pass an articulated HGV that has lost its trailer into a ditch, with the wheels on the trailer having completely separated from the rest of it. The driver was sitting by the truck looking dazed but the state of the vehicle suggests he ought to have expected something like this to happen.

There are good stretches too, well-tarmaced dual carriageways, and speeds can increase occasionally to between 80 kph and 110 kph. On one of these a chap decides to stop and do a U turn right in front of us!!! Brake hard and swerve into the nearside lane, phew!

Another oddity of Russia is the roadside vending that goes on. Not unusual, you might think, but the strange thing about Russia is the way that vendors selling identical goods gather together in their dozens. One often sees stall after stall selling the same farm produce – melons, mushrooms, potatoes, tomatoes, apples, etc., and we’ve also seen stalls selling tchai and snacks – but now we’ve come across stalls selling garden gnomes! Dozens of stalls side by side selling thousands of gnomes and other garden ornaments! How do they see the economics of this? Do they think punters will be attracted by the sheer scale of the displays? Or is it a cultural way of preventing price undercutting – everyone on show together? One would think they’d be better off having sales areas every few kilometres with a variety of stalls selling different produce and goods, wouldn’t they?

As we move further south the countryside changes again with gently billowing hills and wide open plains, largely put to wheat, with copses dotted around. This must be ‘black earth’ country for the soil is a rich dark colour with a fine tilth. Many combine harvesters are at work – three in formation going at it in one huge field. The temperature hits 30 degrees today and it’s a great pleasure to drive through this countryside in this weather with the windows open and air rushing in to keep us cool.

We pass Micurinsk before 7pm and look for a stopover spot. Usual form – pull off the road and potter along looking for a likely piece of land. We’re not far from the junction when we see an apparently unused field with some factories and houses about 250m away. We drive through the nearby village first to see if there’s anything better but there isn’t – and we seem to be attracting a bit of attention, not surprisingly, so we turn back as the road deteriorates badly and return to carefully roll down the steep and rutted slope into the field, pulling up under some trees, taking advantage of the slope.

To remove some of the anxiety I hail down a passing neighbour and in pidgin Russian ask if it is OK to stop here for the night – they say yes, no problem.

After dinner a child cycles up to visit. He asks to look inside so we invite him in and his eyes widen – ‘it’s beautiful’ he says (‘krassy’ in Russian) and he chatters away with us able to catch a few words here and there. We explain we are staying one night and he says ‘what about the militsia?’ I say ‘it’s OK, no problem’!

We expect him to return with some pals but he doesn’t so we settle down for our usual routine – Scrabble and cards, music and a glass of beer.