The Amur Hellway
March 31, 2010 by admin
Filed under Linger Longer
Linger Longer: Driving the Trans-Siberian
Chapter 20: The Amur Hellway
The road ahead is blocked. A sign with an arrow pointing
to the left diverts us down a narrow dirt track leading into
the dark forest. We have absolutely no idea where we’re
going. We just have to hope the diversion will take us up
and around the road works and back onto the main road
under construction. Si insists we play it safe, so we wait
half-an-hour for a guardian angel to pass by. Seeing the
lone car swing around the corner, we feel confident we’re
heading in the right direction. Potholes are our main problem
here, as the exhaust pipe underneath the Sierra takes
a pounding every few metres. We cringe with every scrape,
but it doesn’t seem to make any difference how slow we
go or how hard we try to avoid the potholes, the Sierra is
just too low to the ground. With no option, other than to
turn around and head back to Chita, we’re forced to grit
our teeth and hope for the best as we push deeper and
deeper into the thick forest.
After thirty miles of careful driving, we’re brought to a
sudden halt by a deep river … a deep river without a
bridge.
‘I hope you’ve brought your arm bands?’ Si laughs.
I reverse the car and rev the engine.
He drops his smile. ‘You’re not seriously going to drive
through that, are ya?’
I nod. ‘Course I am. What else are we going to do – wait
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for the frigging water to evaporate?’
‘Well, shouldn’t we check to see how deep it is first?’
‘It can’t be that deep.’
Si frowns. ‘How do you know?’
‘I don’t…’
Slamming my foot on the accelerator pedal, the front
wheels spin as the Sierra speeds towards the river.
‘Hold onto your bollocks, Hippie boy!’
‘Holy shit!’ Si yells, sinking his fingernails into the
dashboard.
With a gigantic splash the car nosedives into the river.
The water hits the window screen with a loud thud and
sprays dramatically into the air. The buzz is unbelievable
as the car burns through the water and flies out onto the
other side of the bank.
‘Fucking hell!’ Si screams. ‘Let’s do it again!’
The Sierra sparkles bright white. It’s never looked so
clean. With huge smiles, we high-five and continue to follow
the road as it winds through the forest.
After sometime we find ourselves on a relatively flat
stretch of road. It carries us through a tiny deserted village
and beneath a bridge supporting the Trans-Siberian train
line. It’s surreal to see signs of civilization out here in the
remote wilderness, and following the train tracks for a few
miles we stumble across a pretty little house and café at a
bend in the road. We’re in serious need of some refreshments,
so we decide to check it out. Walking through a
small yellow gate into the back garden, we find a few
wooden tables and chairs dotted around on a patch of
freshly cut grass. A Chinese woman looks over at us as she
rocks a baby in her arms inside the doorway to the house.
We sit down at a table and smile in her direction. She
stares vacantly at us and continues to rock her baby gently
in her arms. On the other side of the garden, a man
wearing a camouflage jacket drives a wooden post into the
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ground with a sledgehammer.
‘Are you sure this is a café?’ Si whispers.
‘Yeah, I think so.’
‘Maybe we should leave? I think we’ve just walked into
someone’s back garden.’
The woman calls over to the guy building the fence. He
drops his sledgehammer to the ground and marches over
to us. He sweats profusely as he dusts himself down. With
dark features and thick stubble, he looks more Italian than
Russian. We order two bowls of borshch, the refreshing
beetroot soup, and some coffee (kof-yeh). He smiles and
disappears into the house.
‘This is mad!’ Si smiles. ‘Who’d have thought there’d be
people living all the way out here?’
‘I know. These little unsurfaced roads must connect
places all the way along the route.’
‘So what was that potholed track we were just on, then?’
I look down at the map. ‘It must be one of these grey dotted
lines, seasonal roads and paths. Some of these places
must be completely cut off in the winter. What an insane
place to live.’
After our little feed, the man walks over and points to
our map. He seems to take interest in where we are from.
Si points to England and the man points to Azerbaijan.
‘Caspian Sea,’ I beam.
The man nods vigorously. ‘Da, Caspian!’
He points past the house and over at the train tracks.
‘Chita?’ he grins.
Si frowns. ‘Chita?’
The guy points to us both. ‘Chita?’
‘No, no,’ Si replies. ‘Vladivostok.’
He looks surprised.
I try to ask the guy which direction Vladivostok is in,
just to be sure we’re heading in the right direction, and he
encourages us to follow him across the garden. He swings
open the garden gate and waves us over. We follow him
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across the dirt road and through knee length grass onto the
railway tracks. Two train lines run parallel to each other,
one going east to Moscow and the other going west to
Vladivostok. With caution we stand on the wooden sleepers.
The guy points up the line towards the eastern horizon.
‘Vladivostok,’ he smiles.
The train tracks stretch out into the distance, and I look
with excitement in the direction of a city we’ve been driving
continually towards now for over five weeks. The man
slaps Si on the back and smiles before returning to the café.
I take one last look around and savour this incredible
opportunity to stand with my feet on the legendary Trans-
Siberian railway line. Returning to the café, we pay the
bill and shake the guy by the hand. We head over to the
car, and just as I’m about to jump inside I suddenly hear
the roaring sound of an approaching train.
‘It’s the Trans-Siberian!’ Si grins.
We sprint as fast as we can back through the long grass
and stand at the side of the tracks. The guy from the café
runs to the garden gate and points in its direction.
‘Vladivostok!’ he cries.
A huge dark green train approaches. My heart pounds
inside my chest as the train grows bigger and bigger until
it thunders past us at great speed, whipping Si’s hair
across his face. We jump in the air and dance around like
excited kids at a fun fair, as each carriage zooms by one by
one. A western guy with long hair peers out of the window.
We think he might be a tourist, so we wave madly at him.
‘Helloooo!’ Si screams. ‘We’re from England!’
The guy does a double take as he zips past. Out of breath,
we watch the last carriage disappear into the distance.
As we continue on through the forest the road suddenly
becomes incredibly narrow and steep, and we’re forced to
use the whole road in order to maneuver the Sierra over
craters that are literally the size of the car. This tends to be
a disruption for the guardian angels driving down the hill
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in the opposite direction, as they have to wait for us to
pass by. It occurs to me that we must be the first people
ever to cause a traffic jam in deepest Siberia. From the
state of the road, it’s clear this track has been heavily used
for quite some time. The potholes are worn away more
steeply on the far side, making it nearly impossible for us
to pull the car out of the pothole without scraping the
exhaust pipe along the ground. This becomes a major
problem, and we can’t drive for more than a few meters
without getting stuck. Forced to drive into one particularly
deep crater, Si revs the engine and accelerates up the
steep side of the pothole. There’s a loud crunch. Jumping
out, we run around to the back and examine the damage.
The exhaust pipe hangs in two pieces beneath the car, the
join in the middle has been completely torn apart.
‘Bollocks!’ Si yells. ‘Now what do we do?’
‘Chill the fuck out, will ya! We’ll just have to fix it!’
‘Easier said than done, you idiot. It’s broken in the middle!’
‘We can plug it back together. At least everything’s still
attached to the car.’
Si grabs the ariel and jabs the piece of metal into the
boot lock. It springs open and he quickly gathers together
the equipment. I lay a mat on the dry earth and slide
underneath the car. Within a jiffy I’ve connected the two
pipes together, sealed them with exhaust paste and
wrapped kitchen foil and wire around them for extra
strength.
It takes us four hours to reach the summit of this treacherous
climb – covering a total distance of about six miles.
I quickly gulp down a litre of water and fall out of the car.
Si turns off the engine and leans back. He looks physically
and mentally drained. On the bushes all around us
there are colourful pieces of ribbon, socks and strips of
plastic tied to the branches. They dangle like Christmas
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decorations, and examining them closer we notice one or
two have messages scribbled on them in Russian.
‘This must be the halfway point,’ I beam. ‘Everyone who
has reached the top has tied something to the tree.’
‘Hey, I’ve read about this!’ Si cries. ‘They’re called wishing
trees. It’s a bit similar to prayer flags of Tibetan Buddhism,
the religion of most Buryats.’
‘Buryats?’
‘Yeah, you know, the Mongol people we saw around Lake
Baikal. The ancestors of that warlord dude, Genghis Khan.’
‘Wishing trees … cool! We should make a wish.’
Si smiles. ‘What shall we wish for?’
‘That a car full of sexy girls pulls up.’
‘Nah … something realistic.’
‘OK, how about we wish for world peace?’
‘Chris, I said something realistic, you prick.’
‘A four day working week?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Free chocolate and tampons?’
‘Tampons?’
‘I’m thinking of the ladies here…’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Ah-ha, hold the frigging phones!’ I cry. ‘How about we
wish for a safe journey to Vladivostok?’
‘Perfect!’ Si grins.
Grabbing a carrier bag from the boot, I cut one of the
handles off with my blunt penknife and flatten it out on
the bonnet.
‘All righty, what shall we write?’ Si mumbles, chewing
on the end of a permanent marker.
‘How about “Yippeeeeeee! We’re in Siberia …
yippeeeeeee!”’
Si shakes his head. ‘Uh … no.’
‘OK, how about “UK to Vladivostok – The Raven
Brothers, June 2003?”’
‘Like it!’
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Scribbling down the message, Si loops the plastic around
a branch and ties it firmly to the tree.
We stand back and admire it as though it were a piece of
artwork.
I turn away and look down the other side of the hill.
‘Right, then, brother – now all we have to do is get down!’
* * *
Reaching a remote village at the bottom of the mountain,
a couple of guardian angels stand by their vehicles and
prepare for the climb. You can tell by the worried expression
on their faces that this section of the road is notorious,
and having barely survived it ourselves we throw
them a wave and wish them luck. We drive past a derelict
building and see three dirty little faces appear over the
rubble. The hostile looking savages, who can’t be older
than five or six, are stripped to the waist and scramble ratlike
towards the car. I wave at them out of the window, but
they respond by hurling bricks and concrete at us. One
jagged piece of slate scuffs across the bonnet of the car and
Chris sounds the horn and accelerates away.
The village is perfectly simple, and it’s clear it has been
completely locked away from the outside world until
now. It feels like we’ve travelled back in time a hundred
years, and I wonder what they make of all these futuristic
vehicles suddenly descending on their world and ruining
their tranquility. An old man staggers out of his garden
gate and flags us down. He grips onto the side of the car
and rants and rages at us. Chris tries to ask him which
direction we need to go for Vladivostok, but looking confused
he blinks at us – quite understandably really as
Vladivostok is still a few thousand miles away. He won’t
let go of the door and continues to shout at us as we try to
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explain to him that we don’t speak Russian. Chris points
to England on the map, and this is all too much for a man
who has probably spent his entire life in the remote
wilderness. He looks about eighty-years-old, and it suddenly
occurs to me that he was a young boy of about ten
when the Gulags (labour camps) were put into operation.
As part of Stalin’s grand plan to turn the USSR into an
industrial power in 1929, he forced collectivisation of
agriculture with the aim of getting peasants to fulfill production
quotas, which would feed the growing cities and
provide food exports to pay for imported heavy machinery.
Farmers who resisted were either killed or deported
to labour camps in there millions and it occurs to me that
this guy must have lived through that entire period.
Looking into his pale grey eyes, I wonder what stories he
has to tell about that time. He seems pretty upset by this
sudden invasion to his world, and I can only assume his
life must be pretty OK for him to stay out here after the
collapse of communism. He finally loses his grip on the
door and throws up his hands in despair. I feel guilty as
we pull away. I guess he has spent his whole life out here
building a new life in a community that had been up-routed
and forced to work for the good of the nation. In his
mind perhaps, especially in his old age, he felt at least he
should be given the right to enjoy peace and quiet in a
place his family had been forced to call home. We leave
the town and head back through the countryside towards
the new highway, and studying the map I console myself
with the thought that before long the Amur Highway will
be complete and this village will be returned to the
wilderness once more.
We eventually find our way back onto the highway. We
cruise at 20mph along a stony, but relatively good section
of the road until it gets dark. Pulling up close to the
impenetrable forest, we pass out exhausted from nearly
sixteen hours on the road.
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Chris crawls under the Sierra and patches up the torn
kitchen foil wrapped around the exhaust. He does a pretty
good job, and putting some air in the tyres with the
squeaky foot pump, we feel confident to head back on the
road. We drive through the morning until we reach a
stretch of the highway that is in full construction.
Enormous diggers shovel tons of earth as they clear a path
for the road. Volvo dumper trucks tower over the Sierra as
they transport rocks and stones along never ending
stretches of the highway. We feel nervous as we crawl
beneath their huge wheels and weave along tracks that tail
off into deep canyons. We battle against the road works
from dawn until dusk, at an average speed of roughly five
miles an hour. Sections of the road force us to drive up
steep hills at a frightening angle of 45 degrees, and we
approach each turn cautiously for fear of colliding with a
digger or one of the many guardian angels travelling in the
opposite direction. Reversing and shunting, we carefully
manoeuvre the car along the edge of sheer drops and
around huge boulders. At one point we nearly tip sideways
down a twenty foot drop. It takes incredible concentration,
and pounding the underneath of the car against
sharp rocks and smashing the bumper into the ground, we
curse out of anger and laugh out of insanity with every
knock and scrape. Desperately trying to stay sane, we
head slowly towards the never-ending horizon.
We pass through the small town of “HeBep” around noon
the next day. The place feels like a city after more than
three days on the Amur Hellway, and we grin with excitement
at making it this far without any major setbacks.
That said, the car looks like shit. The front bumper hangs
close to the ground and is held in place by little more than
some electrical tape and a fist full of rubber bands. The
bodywork is caked in mud and blue exhaust fumes leak
from under the car. To make matters worse there appears
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to be something wrong with the starter motor, because
when we turn off the ignition the car rattles and shakes for
about thirty seconds before the engine stalls. We fill up
with petrol, grab more supplies from a small shop and try
to find our way out of the town. We quickly become lost
and find ourselves heading up a road, which Chris thinks
might be the M56 to Yakutsk and Magadan. In 1932, Stalin
sent thousands of prisoners to Magadan to build docks
and piers, so they could transport gold found in the
Kolyma region. It became a major marshalling point for
the prisoners who were sent there to work in the mines.
Being sent to Magadan was a death sentence. Of over the
estimated 20 million people who were either shot,
starved, beaten, tortured or worked to death in Stalin’s
Gulag camps, an estimated one fifth died in camps around
the Kolyma region. The road to Magadan is even called
the Road of Bones because of the thousands of prisoners
who died building it.
‘We’re on the M56, for fuck’s sake,’ Chris yells. ‘We’re
going the wrong way!’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Course I’m sure!’
Suddenly, we see an orange vehicle heading towards us.
‘Oh my God!’ I cry. ‘It’s the Germans!’
‘No way,’ Chris laughs. ‘Let’s flag them down.’
We flash our lights and stick our arms out of the windows.
They pull over close to the grass verge on the opposite
side of the road. Chris switches off the ignition, but
the engine continues to rattle beneath the bonnet and the
car shakes vigorously from side-to-side before cutting out.
We meet the driver at the front of his massive truck.
The German dude stares at the Sierra, and frowns. ‘You
drive from England in this?’
Chris nods. ‘Yeah. Hard to believe, isn’t it?’
‘It’s kaput, ya?’
‘Nah … it’s just temporarily fucked,’ I reply.
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‘If we ignore it, hopefully it’ll go away?’ Chris grins.
The German dude looks confused. He’s a fairly young
guy in his early thirties with rectangular metal-framed
glasses, and a ridiculous bright green scarf tied around his
neck. He looks like a nerdy accountant or a rich city boy,
who has sold up and spent all of his money on this amazing
adventure. His girlfriend stays in the truck and glares
at us sulkily through the huge window screen.
‘So, we meet at last!’ Chris smiles.
‘Ya, hallo,’ the guy replies. ‘We are on the wrong road.
This road goes to Magadan.’
‘I told you,’ Chris beams proudly.
‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’
‘Where are you going?’ the German guy asks.
‘Vladivostok,’ I reply.
He sighs. ‘Ya, we go there, too.’
‘Really?’ I beam, trying to look surprised. ‘That’s great!’
‘You’ve got an amazing truck,’ Chris interrupts, resting
his hand on the bodywork.
The German guy freezes and watches him grope the side
panel with his grubby fingers.
‘Do you want to swap?’ Chris jokingly smiles. ‘How
about we swap vehicles, we’ll take this and you can have
our Sierra?’
The guy shakes his head vigorously. ‘Nein. This is not
possible. I do not want to.’
‘I’m only joking,’ Chris laughs, patting him firmly on the
back.
The German guy looks extremely uncomfortable.
‘Sorry about my brother, he’s slightly retarded.’
‘It is fine,’ the guy replies, trying desperately to crack a
smile.
‘So you’ve driven from Germany?’ I ask.
‘Ya, from Munich.’
‘Ooh … the Oktoberfest,’ Chris beams. ‘I’ve never been,
but I’d love to go!’
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‘Ya, it is very good.’ The German guy looks over at the
Sierra and shakes his head. ‘Your car will not make it, I
think.’
‘Yeah it will,’ I reply.
‘You sleep in this car?’ he asks.
‘Uh-huh, it’s really uncomfortable. I’ll bet it’s nice inside
your truck, isn’t it?’
‘Ya, we have a bed and a shower. You have GPS?’
‘No, but we’ve got a map!’ Chris laughs.
The German guy doesn’t look impressed.
‘I think we are the first Europeans to drive this road,’ he
suddenly smiles.
‘Do you think so?’ I reply.
He nods. ‘Ya. A Russian man in Irkutsk told us it was not
possible last year. We are the first westerners to drive on
this road to Vladivostok.’
‘Really?’
We both grin with excitement. The German guy slowly
begins to back away.
‘We are the first,’ he continues. ‘The first!’
‘Who would’ve thought it,’ Chris smiles.
The guy edges his way around the truck.
‘How long have you been on the road?’ I ask.
He swings open the driver’s door. ‘We have been on the
road for two months. We are going to ship our truck to
Australia from Vladivostok.’
‘Wow,’ Chris smiles. ‘What a mad adventure.’
‘Ya,’ the guy nods, climbing inside the truck. ‘We are the
first ones to drive this road.’
I consider asking the guy if they’d like to join us for a
cup of tea, but he seems in a hurry to leave and suddenly
strikes the engine. Smiling falsely, he bids us farewell and
accelerates away at great speed without so much as a toot.
We stand in the middle of the road for a few seconds, a little
confused by their hasty departure.
‘What the fuck!’ Chris yells. ‘What’s he doing?’
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‘Quick, get in the car!’ I shout.
‘Why?’
I slide across the bonnet. ‘It looks like the race is on!’
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