When I first thought about the 2005 FIM Rally in Tartu, Estonia the opportunity to achieve several ambitions became a possibility: circle the Baltic, visit Joey Dunlop's Memorial in Tallinn, re-visit Helsinki and Peenemunde, visit St Petersburg, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Kaliningrad, Masurian Lakes and Malbork in Poland on a motorcycle. It would take me months, studying the social history, but Linda wouldn't let me away for so long. So my wife and I compromised, and went for a holiday, with options, and not an endurance ride (women!).
I took my 1999 BMW R1100RT, an Austrian import with kilometer clocks useful for continental crusin'. Typical speeds 100-130 km, fuel consumption about 5-6 litres per 100k allowed a range of about 350k (c.200 miles) between fuel stops depending on speed, load and road. View the Baltic Photographs in the Photo Centre as you read this essay (access from the DMTC page.)
The MTV Jackass "Gumball Rally" and BBC "The Lost Riders" films were carefully studied. Double Entry Visas were purchased for Russia and Kaliningrad. Double rooms in St Petersburg & Riga booked. Ferries out booked for me, flight to Riga for Linda, and ferry home.
Saturday 9th July - 11am Depart on Dun Laoghaire Fast Ferry to Holyhead - the plan was a leisurely ride across England in the direction of Harwich & find B&B on the way. That 1) the Formula One circus would be near Northhampton; 2) with a "Battle of Britain Weekend" in East Anglia; and 3) after the London Tube bombings many Londoners wanted a weekend away, didn't worry me until I went looking for a B&B or hotel. At dusk I was hit by a pigeon flying out of a hedge knocking off the left-side mirror - no damage & mirror retrieved from roadside. Fuel @ BP Leicester M1 €26.66. Saturday night was spent in the DFDS Terminal in Harwich.
Sunday 10th - Fortunately a warm night & I was early for the 5.00pm ferry to Esberg. Meet up with the Goldwing guys & gals from Limerick & Cork, who were doing my original Baltic Tour but skipping the FIM in Tartu. They had left Dublin at 6.50am on the fast-ferry, arrived in Harwich about 4pm and at midnight were still keeping the bar staff working!
Monday 11th - Arrived in Esberg & cleared emigration with no delay. Headed east along E20, refueling near Vissenbjerg €17.39, crossed great bridges along the way, waved through Swedish customs at their end of the toll bridge from Denmark. Reached the motel on the E22 at Ekerodsrasten, near Horby about 8pm DB&B=€60-. A long ride on a very hot day!
Tuesday 12th Only 100k to ferry, so no hurry. Scenery reminds me of west coast Canada - tall pines, wooden houses, snatched sea views. Refuel near Moerrum after 350k €23.58 at unmanned station - enter credit card & code, remove card, select pump & octane, fill & go. Find ferry terminal; join queue; go to office; produce passport, pre-payment note & vehicle registration document (RF101) to collect pre-purchased ticket; rejoin queue; talk with a Swede visiting his Latvian cousins his parents left behind in 1944. The lanes of cars slowly merge towards a single booth on quay side before splitting for the ferries to Laipaja and Klaipéda. Again show ticket, passport & RF101. Ferry is about 200m long but has only 2 vehicle and 2 passenger decks. All driven vehicles go up a steep ramp to upper deck where the passenger lift is. Ferry was designed to carry rail wagons on both decks, maybe loaded on the lower & empty on the upper? Boat full of a lot of young Letts traveling with cars and vans heading home on holidays, but not crowded and comfortable.
Wednesday 13th - Watch as ferry sails into Klaipéda port past lines of marine workshops and berths on northern quay while Curonian Spit & south quay seems to be parkland. While I let the excitable guys disembark, a crewman distributes signed, personal & dated receipt slips to vehicle drivers. I collect mine and stuff it into the map-holder. Driving onshore into a seemingly apolyptic scene of crumbling concrete, rusting steel and rail-tracks, under a heavy steel & concrete ramp carrying rail tracks to the upper deck. It seems so Russian to invest in obsolete freight handling when the rest of the world was switching to containerized units LOLO/RORO. Maybe they exported new rail vehicles but where do they unload the upper deck? In all my travels through ferry ports, I have yet to see a two-level ramp for rail-traffic! Some of the guys who got off so quickly are heading back to the boat to collect their receipts, while I meander slowly between the car & truck queues, show my ferry receipt, passport & RF101 to a nice blonde who says "Have a nice day!" At the port exit another uniform takes the ferry receipt. Nothing in Klaipéda encourages me to stop so I ride north through the town centre along the coast to the quiet Latvian border, where after producing passport & RF101 I continue along the coast beyond Liepaja where I get Latvian cash from an ATM.
These two ports have big rail depots and I can imagine in Russian days these ice-free ports being of strategic importance for the export & import of freight with railroads stretching thousands of miles into the Russian interior. But silent now! A beautiful day, heavy traffic in towns but very little traffic and few people outside towns, big empty fields with little tillage or livestock, a few isolated houses, a few villages off the main road but most the side-roads are paved with a sand & gravel. No hotels or motels, but campsites signposted down lanes into the pine forests which cover most of the Baltic countries. Stopped at a seaside cafe where I met an Englishman riding an identical, but German-registered, RT1100. We talked about the region, he was heading north towards Finland & Karelia, he recommended visiting the Curonian Spit; as for the cafe - ice-cream & bottled drinks OK, but not a quick service restaurant. Refueled at Ventspils, a 10-unit Latvian note bought about 20 litres @ 70 cents per litre and continued east to Riga. Coming into Riga on a 3-lane dual carriageway the standard of driving was hairy. I headed for Riga City Camping, and felt much better after a hot shower, a beer & pizza. But then locked myself out of my mobile phone!Thursday 14th - Plan was to pack tent, find my pre-booked hotel & explore city. Bike felt sluggish but I thought soft sand on campsite. Ten minutes down road guy calls "you gotta puncture". Drive onto kerb. Centre stand. Shiny metal spot in rear tyre. Decide to move luggage by taxi to hotel, then sort puncture. 90 minutes later in hotel I ring Carol Nash Insurance in London. 10 minutes later their agent in Riga calls back to say it will be a couple of hours before he gets a tow-truck. At 3.30 tow truck arrives at hotel, I point out on map where I think I left bike. Fortunately I guessed right, we load bike onto truck, strap it down and head off. The agent rings to confirm pick-up with driver and tells me the BMW-dealer is not bike-friendly and recommends a Suzuki-Harley Davidson dealer on the opposite edge of town. We get there by 4.45 and the guys are beginning to wrap-up and say tomorrow. Another guy says 10 minutes and by 5.05 I am navigating back into city centre. Riga has mainly a grid-iron street pattern with streets running one-way alternate directions but it took about an hour to find the hotel and then find the street to the rear car park. Another shower and then's it's into Riga's nightlife before Linda arrives!
Friday 15th - 7.30am taxi drops Linda off at hotel after the 3 hour flight + 2 hour time difference from Dublin. Then breakfast, hectic tour of some beautiful city parks, memorials to fatalities during the 1990 Revolution against the Russian government, Orthodox churches, modern shops, lunch, trams, culture, dinner and hotel. One thing we missed was the Museum of Occupation 1939*1990.
Saturday 16th - Repack RT to accommodate Linda and leave about 10.30. The city streets give way to a newly built dual carriageway where we refuel, then a single carriageway country road, into Estonia (no border posts) for a few miles on a newly laid tar & chips surface before a massive queue leading to the Estonian-Russian border. We tootled to the head where there were 3 lanes - EU cars, trucks, & non-EU. The non-EU, i.e. Russians, cleared almost without stopping. Near the head of the EU queue we spoke English to a Dutch couple who had arrived at 8am and it was now 2.00pm. One Estonian car towing a trailer had arrived 8am the previous day but was turned back by the Russians as the trailer lacked registration papers. Now with papers the driver was not about to be passed by anyone, but the queue moved only as fast as the Russian post cleared travelers.
Apparently there is a local rule that pedestrians and push/pedal cyclists with visas can cross the border with minimum queuing. We pushed the RT a bit across the Estonian border and rode up the hill towards the Russian side but were stopped at a shorter queue at a light controlled gate. At about 3.30 we were admitted to the main customs post. Buying the mandatory 3rd Party insurance and waiting for that and the temporary vehicle immigration(?) forms to be typed & checked probably took an hour! So in future, don't cross borders at the weekend & buy insurance beforehand. By 6pm Moscow time (an hour lost by crossing the border) we were in Russia on the E95/M20 on MY motorcycle. I bought 10 litres of 98 octane juice at 15 roubles a litre (about 50c per litre). Sometime in the next 15 minutes Linda dropped her sleeping bag, we retraced our route without luck, and then rode 278 KM to St Petersburg. Any police on the road were more interested in checking loaded lorries and we were ignored. The road surface consisted of long stretches of perfect tarmac mixed with stretches of weather-damaged road with shallow potholes about 1" deep, 6" wide and 18" long all over the road reducing speed, followed by stretches of cold plaining, no potholes just bumps. The road was worst in towns. The RT has pop-on mirrors and the right mirror popped off three times, the trucks overtaken all overtook when as we stopped. (Memo: cable tie units to fairing). The sun dropped below the horizon about 10.30 but the twilight lasted almost 2 hours.
Arriving in St Petersburg at 12.30am a street map was bought in a petrol station. Linda had the hotel address and to our surprise the attendant, who spoke no English, added 5 arrows to 5 junctions on the map. We were outside Hotel Prin by 1am. 16 floors in a tree-lined street with guarded parking! The hotel staff checked us in quickly and as we moved luggage a Lada police car with 4 khaki-clad guys pulled up, whether they were following us or got a tip I don't know. They spoke to a hotel person and as they left the guy with the machine-pistol gave me the thumbs-up!Sunday 17th - Beautiful morning, 15th floor in the sky, overlooking the dock lands to the west and the city to the north and east surrounded by old factories and residential blocks sitting above 14 floors of business suites. We'd no roubles and the hotel reception didn't change money, but the receptionist gave us four 10-rouble notes to buy two metro tickets to go into town & if we couldn't change money, then we could buy two metro tickets to return to the hotel. The metro station was 200 metres south of the hotel. The platforms were about 100 metres below connected by a fast escalator. As a vertigo sufferer it wasn't great. But we got to Nevsky Prospect in about 20 minutes. Changing a €50 note into roubles usually requires a passport, still back at hotel reception, but a driving licence was adequate! Time for coffee & cake at a side-walk cafe to watch the slim, trim & daring Russian style. A Hare Krishna band passed. A Bentley Continental parked outside a casino was first prize. A mirror-world - everything was so normal & and yet so different. Walking up Nevsky to the Hermitage was just like any major European city, historic buildings, people relaxed, sightseeing, having fun, doing business, busking. The sights are worth seeing. As our guide the next day said, "the city was built to please the Czars, even the army barracks look like palaces from the outside. That's why the Revolution started here."
Monday & Tuesday: We'd only two days so we prioritized - On Monday we joined a guided English language tour to the Catherine Palace in Pushkin, tickets bought from a booth on the Nevsky and bus left at 2pm and returned by 6pm on time. On Tuesday we took a 25-minute hydrofoil ride from the Hermitage across the bay to Peterhof, a fountain paradise. Photographs do more justice than words. See the Photo Centre!
Afterwards we went for a meal at the 5* Grand Hotel Europe in their side-walk cafe, the menu was priced in $$$! We were sitting on the street side when 4 casually dressed, rings & chains, middle-aged men walked in, sat between us and the wall and ordered 4 bottles of water. I guessed they were chauffeurs waiting. Uniformed hotel security was watching the sidewalk cafe and two plain-clothes guys with wires in their ears wearing loose clothing stood on the sidewalk backs to our table. We reckoned Mr Putin was in town. Then the four guys stood up to leave, the minion on the sidewalk flashed a note to pay. The two plain-clothes guys escorted one of them, a "Tom Jones" lookalike, complete with heavy gold chain and hairy chest, to a parked Bentley Continental where "Tom Jones" got into the driver's seat. Meanwhile the other 3 guys had gone over to a Nissan Pathfinder with smoked windows. The Nissan pulled out to block a traffic lane. As the Bentley moved in front of the Nissan and accelerated away, the two minders sprinted to the Nissan whose driver swerved to discourage overtaking traffic as he raced after the Bentley. A practiced maneuver.
The hotel returned to normal as a dude drove a spotless Harley Davidson into the the space vacated by the Bentley. No messy chains or locks when you have hotel security watching. He & his slim, trim & daring pillion just walked into the cafe, sat down & ordered food. Linda says we could have been shot by the Russian Mafia in a drive-by. I prefer to think "Tom Jones". Life goes on!Wednesday 20th: Last breakfast in the avant-garde-retro-styled restaurant 'Soviet Union' - a blending of the Beatles 'Back in the USSR' with icons from 80 years of Russian popular history. Then pack everything into panniers, tank-bag and back-pack. SPb has 4.5 million people, avenues 10k long, and 4 metro lines in a space seemingly smaller than County Dublin ! And we only saw a tiny bit of it. Apart from the border crossings we were never stopped by the police or hassled by anyone - in fact at times we felt ignored, no one ever made small talk or asked where we were from? Cafes, cash machines, etc came with Russian/English menus. I spent 10 weeks learing Russian and being able read road signs helped, but that was about it. Two muggers might have been setting us up in a Metro station but I stumbled into one of them & they disappeared. So it was a great 3 days - apart from the mosquitoes! We left the hotel about 10.30am, found the E20/M11 easily and headed for border crossing at Narva. Bought another 300 roubles (10 euro-19.5 litres) of petrol (the tank could have taken another 2 or 3 litres but its hard to judge with the "pay first" method), and met 4 silent Finnish riders on 2 BMWs when we stopped for coffee at another filling station. Crossing the border out of Russia took less than an hour but getting into Estonia was a chore. Four days earlier the Russians had seemed welcoming and helpful despite the rules compared to the Estonian guards who acted like 'Keystone Cops' & did everything by the book: showing passports & RF101, helmets off, open the panniers, even checking the chassis number against the RF101. Seemed that if we said boo, we'd be back in the USSR. Do stolen European & Russian bikes end up in Estonia? Are Irish travellers & Irish papers suspect? This view seems to concur with the views of the Goldwing group when they went by ferry from Helsinki to Tallinn. Gerard says: 'the customs in Helsinki were very intense in checking the bikes, one of our group had only a photo copy of his vehicle registration. They let him on the ferry with the group but he was stopped in Estonia until the Irish embassy sorted him out. At the border, we met more Irish bikers going to the FIM but some got no further as they had no paper work at all.' Nobody ever asked us about licences, tax discs or insurance, but the Vehicle Licensing Cert RF101 with the Irish Harp embossed in gold was the esential piece of paper for travelling in the Baltic states! We were back in Estonia by 3pm Russian/2pm local time. Leaving the border at Narva, the weather changed to cool, showery weather. The well-surfaced road to Tartu was through forest and scrub, the occasional homestead with fields of grass, with a few more homes alongside Lake Pepsi. After the miles of no & low population Tartu appeared a very large town with its industry, high-rise appartments, tree-lined avenues and coffee shops. We got to the FIM Rally site in Tartu by about 5pm to be met by Paddy Murphy & Graham Butler for a very relaxing beer.
