Russia in express

Russia in express
It could have been a title for a book or maybe a travel essay: "Russia in express", or what about "Across Russia in 14 days". For some reason we have to have a Russian insurance for the bus which expires after 14 days. Getting it extended or getting a longer one will take months or we might not even get it: Welcome to Russia's bureaucracy. This means that we have to drive fast across Russia, but fast is of course not possible taking the road conditions into consideration. From Murmansk to the border of Kazakhstan there are approximately 3500 km which means we from now on have to drive around 400 km per day. We have already made the route and messured the distances between the places we are going to stay at night; Russia has become a long road to Kazakhstan. To save time we are not driving into St Petersburgh or Moscow, the Russia we will get to know, will be the back courts of Russia. St Petersburgh and Moscow are cities we can visit another time by plane, but Russias back roads are not places one can easily get to on foot.

Our route has been as following: We started out in Murmansk the 18th of August where we spent one and a half day at a hotel to recover from one night's lack of sleep. The 19th we continued to the sleeping village, Chupa where we spent a night by the sea surrounded by beautiful but aged wooden houses. At one o'clock in the morning the 21st, we arrived at a 24-hours-open supertmarket (hyper markt) in Petrozavodsk where we met Maxim, a hitch hiker we had picked up on our way to Tromsø in Norway. We spent two nights at the parking space and were guided round the city by Maxim and his girl friend, Tanya. The 22nd we drove to a beautiful city, Tichvin were we slept outside a convent by a small lake. The time is now elleven at night and we are approaching Vologda where we will spend the night. Todays 400 km are soon behind us. Tomorrow we will continue to the ancient city, Yaroslavl, then Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan; the capital of the tatars and the port to central-Asia, and then Chelyabinsk before we cross the border, hopefully without any problems, to Kazakhstan.