Since little stirs through the dark days of February - especially in lockdown - I thought I would try to cheer things up a bit with another travel tale (much as I did early last year), this time from about ten years ago. The journey was in deepest Russia. The mode of transport was a motorcycle and sidecar - a combination generally known to enthusiasts as a “combo” or “outfit”. It is, in my opinion, the great but sadly forgotten means of transport: it combines all the exhilaration of a motorcycle with the luggage-carrying capacity of a small car. Since Russia is a country which fascinates me, putting the two together seemed to be a masterstroke. I wrote the article up on return and it was duly published in a motorcycle mag. I have amended it for this blog to miss out matters of interest only to dyed in the wool petrolheads.

PILGRIMAGE

WARNING:  Due to the nature of the tour certain everyday words used in this article have a specialised meaning which I ought to explain.  They are as follows: 

Day: a length of time between periods of sleep not measured in hours and bearing no relationship at all to dawn, dusk, planetary cycles or any other cosmic phenomena whatsoever; 

Road: a generally consistent direction across the earth’s surface varying from a hideously dangerous four-lane highway to the vaguest hint of a track disappearing into trees; 

Tent: an expanse of tarpaulin anchored to the ground by at least three corners which is apparently designed to accelerate the momentum of falling rain; 

Meal: anything from a mouthful of chocolate to a stomach-straining sequence of courses; 

Route:  a week’s generally circular direction, largely made up from hour to hour;   

Guide:  Sergei; 

Sergei:  the guy with the map;

Map:  that crumpled piece of paper Sergei has in his hand;

 Here is the story.  Mrs Barker and I fancied an adventure.  Being keen motorcyclists and thinking, as we were, about getting back into sidecarring, we decided to go on the annual Pilgrimage to Irbit.  This is a week’s tour of backroads Russia organised by the West European importer of Ural motorcycles which are the only present-day purpose-built motorcycle and sidecar outfits.  They are mechanically very simple, or primitive some might say, versions of pre-war BMWs.  The design plans for them were either supplied by the Nazis under the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact; or simply the result of the Russians buying one, taking it apart and copying it.  Like so many things in Russia - No One Really Knows.  Irbit, a town of some 40,000 souls in Sverdlovsk oblast, is the site of the factory which makes these outfits. Hence the idea of “Pilgrimage”.

 So we paid our money, we got our visas and we turned up in Prague airport on the appointed day.  We had very little idea of what would fill the next week other than that it would be in Russia and would involve Ural outfits, a  museum and factory visit, a rally and some touring.  We had both been to Russia a number of times before and can speak conversational Russian.  So we thought we knew roughly what to expect. 

I suppose that, even without explicit directions, our party were all bound to bump into one another eventually at the airport since we were getting on the same plane to Ekaterinburg.  There were ten of us: eight British and two French.   Birgit, our Austrian minder and ace sidecar pilot, sketched out the plan for the first day: four hour flight to Ekaterinburg, breakfast (bodytime midnight), a coach tour of the city, four-hour drive to Irbit, hotel check-in, tour of the Irbit Motorcycle Museum,  tour of the Ural factory; pick up the outfits, dinner.  Then we could go to bed.  For those who had flown direct from the UK rather than taking a day or two in Prague that was a good 24 hours non-stop. 

The coach tour of Ekaterinburg was memorable largely for a visit to the site where the Russian imperial family was shot in 1917 and a glimpse of Boris Yeltsin’s old office when he was party boss in the 1980’s.  We then careered on to Irbit – a city unremarkable for anything really other than motorcycle production.   At the motorcycle museum those new to Russia learnt an important lesson right away.  This was that the answer to any question you ask of officialdom may depend entirely on the wording of the question. 

“Could we” we asked “take photos in the museum?”.

 “Nyet!  You have to buy a permit to do that!”  Very high price mentioned. 

We retreated to confer and then returned.  “Could we buy a group permit?” 

“Nyet!  These do not exist!” 

Another retreat and return. “Okay.  Where would we buy this permit?” 

“The permit seller is having her break!” 

Retreat.  Bright spark.  Return.  

“Could we buy the permits at the end of the tour?” 

Some thought.  “Da!” 

So we all snapped away and of course nothing more was ever said about permits.  This is an Important Russian Lesson:  when you meet with a “Nyet!” it’s probably your fault for asking the question in the wrong way. 

As you might expect, the museum was full of old Soviet motorcycles – some not entirely innocent of dust.  Our guide was at pains to point out however that it had recently been taken over by the government and was now an official State Museum.  “Just like the Hermitage in St Petersburg” he said  - which I felt was overstating the case a little.   

The factory was just down the road from the museum. In its heyday it consisted of 12 huge production sheds going full tilt and employing some 12000 workers. 

Now they are down to one shed and 400 employees.  In the yards, weeds grow up through cracked concrete and buildings are boarded up.  I didn’t actually see any tumbleweed blowing through these alleys nor hear any banjo twanging desolately but they didn’t seem far away.  So I stood there, closed my eyes and imagined the industrial clamour when the factory was first moved east during the war to keep it safe from the advancing German forces.  I conjured up mental pictures of hero workers toiling day and night on the soviet war effort.  In those days, we had been told at the museum, if a worker was ten minutes late for a shift they lost their half-kilo daily bread allowance.  If they were twenty minutes late they got ten years in the Gulag. 

But it’s easy to get nostalgic over such straightforward management techniques so I opened my eyes again and stepped with the group into the one functioning shed.  

It was spellbinding.  I love old industrial sites: the machinery, the smells, the shafts of sunlight falling on the dust of forgotten corners.  The workers themselves seemed redolent of another era with those strong features and bulging muscles that stared out from old Soviet posters as yet another production target was exceeded.  I saw one chap hump a huge lump of engine block from one bench to another.  In his trainers.  Health and Safety would have freaked out. 

 Eight brand new Ural outfits had been prepped for us so we hopped onto these and rode back to the hotel in downtown Irbit.  It was a gloriously unreconstructed Soviet era pile. These places are not luxurious but are always clean and basic in my experience.  We had just got into our room and unpacked when a plumber arrived to work on the shower turning off the water on a stiflingly hot day.  This could have been a negative experience but, then again, how often do you get to talk to a Russian plumber about cold solder?

 After that one last comfy night in a proper bed we headed off the next day for the Irbit Rally – one of Russia’s biggest and best.

 Part way through the day a great parade of bikes ran through town.  Crowds lined the streets as we rode through the heat and the dust, stopping to pay respect at the war memorial, jinking from side to side to miss the potholes, gawping at the crumbling infrastructure.  This is the country that was the first to send a man into space,  yet during the parade my eye was drawn to an old woman bent over a street corner standpipe collecting her domestic water…….. 

I still had to pinch myself.  For most of my life towns like this were closed to foreigners.  This was the enemy.  Now here I was waving and smiling at them as they cheered us on our way. 

The entertainment  at the show was a characteristically Russian fantasy.  First up on stage was a traditional small Russian choir and dance group, followed by young children reciting poetry – Russian is a very beautiful language and you don’t need to understand the poetry to appreciate its rhythms and cadences.  Then, as the night wore on, out came the inevitable heavy rock bands.  Campfires glowed in the dark and the Russians were producing wonderful dishes on blackened and battered pots and pans over campfires.  None of your namby-pamby camping stoves here. 

Next morning, many of the revellers had departed and quiet had descended by the time a loud banging, rattling and revving split the Sunday peace and a battered red Mercedes van bounced into view spluttering to a stop beside our tents.  Inside were our Support Team: burly Sergei, ex-all Russia sidecar motocross champ; lugubrious Sasha his sidekick; and their wives Svetlana and Olga.  They had spent the morning victualling up and a little after midday our column set out.  For some it was to be all about the miles but for me – I just wanted to go looking for Russia.

I found Russia at very close quarters some several minutes later.  Despite ten years experience of riding an outfit – admittedly not a Ural – I was disconcerted to find that at the first right-hand bend of any significance my machine simply went straight on.   We shot over the opposite (thankfully empty) carriageway and verge and ploughed through a hedgerow, fortunately avoiding any trees.  Exactly the same thing had happened to one of us the day before and he had come to rest unscathed in a field.  Unfortunately for us, on the far side of the hedgerow was not a field, but a lake.  And in we went.  You might say, of course, that if you are going to hit something in such circumstances then several feet of water and soft mud are not to be sneezed at. 

We were unhurt though soaked.  The outfit had to be pulled out with a towrope and the motorcycle and engine were submerged for about half an hour while that was done by Sergei and Sasha and assorted bystanders.  I assumed that my three-wheeled adventure had ended then and there.  No bike – no tour.  Oh ye of little faith.   In a nearby field they drained the oils, dried off the spark plugs and emptied out the carburettor float bowls.  Then they towed it round the field and we watched the pistons pump the water out of the cylinder heads in a sparkling sunlit parabola.  Back in with the plugs, filled up with oil and, mirabile dictu, it started first time.  I could hardly believe my eyes.  Since it tried to repeat its going-straight-on trick again at the next bend I handed it over to a more experienced Uralist to check who pointed out that the steering damper was tightened right up.  Once adjusted the handling reverted to nearer normal. 

We spent the next four days on tour.  There was plenty of on-road and plenty of off-road and plenty of something in between – the rough dirt roads that service the villages and farmsteads in the Russian countryside. 

If you changed the people back into traditional Russian clothing much of what we saw as we rolled through these villages in the summer light could have come straight out of nineteenth-century landscape painting: Aivazovsky, Levitan, Shishkin and, my favourite, Arkip Kuindzhy.  Ducks and geese wandered at will.  Many of the traditional wooden houses were well-cared for with lovely vegetable gardens.  Others were tumbledown and had clearly been abandoned in the flight to the cities.  Out in the fields there were some modern tractors but also horse-driven ploughing.  Yet what looked like fairly up-to-date agricultural machinery could at times be seen rusting in compounds around the villages.  Unlike England, much of the landscape seems untouched by mankind, just rolling acres of forest and plain to the horizon.  I loved every moment of it. 

We really got to poke around behind the scenes in backwoods Russia.  The sense of adventure was heightened by the fact that we seemed to spend most of our time either partly or completely lost.  At one point, I had the distinct impression of going through the same village three times in one afternoon.  One of my abiding memories of the tour will be of Sergei skidding to a halt, leaping out of the van onto some passing local, stabbing a forefinger at the map, waving an arm to the four points of the compass, shouting incomprehensibly then leaping back into the van and roaring off, leaving the passerby in a haze of diesel fumes and staring in bewilderment at our passing cavalcade. 

 Campsites were pretty wild and very picturesque.  The camping gear was adequate though if the weather had been very rough I am not sure how well it would have coped.  Although the daytime weather was beautifully sunny and warm there was a lot of rain at night and our tent leaked as did others.

Cooking was done by Svetlana and Olga and was delicious.  All they had was a calor gas stove somewhere in the depths of the red van but everything was fresh, hot, nutritious and smothered in delicious dill.  They even put dill on the breakfast fried eggs (now a standard serving procedure in the Barker household).  Meals were, um, irregular: it was best to eat whenever you could since you were never sure when the next opportunity would arise.  But every evening we would gather round the campfire, split a few beers and munch on some wonderful Svetlana/Olga production.  

Our route described a 500km rough arc from Irbit back to Ekaterinburg.  The mileage may not seem great but you have to remember that some half of it was spent off-road.  Once or twice the going got so tough that we needed to find a tractor to tow the Mercedes through and then four or five of us had to haul each machine over ruts about two or three feet deep.  

 Our second night stop was just outside the village of Glinskoye.  Here we were scheduled to have a free day so that we could do a little touring on our own.  However, we were told that Sergei was off to do ‘a little shopping’ and we could go with him if we liked.  Most of us did and we were not disappointed as the day developed in traditional Russian style.  We did indeed call in at a village shop – and very well-stocked it was too.  Next we rumbled to a halt outside an imposing pair of double gates by a beautiful house with carved decorations.  In we went to find the owner, Nikolai - not surprisingly a woodcarver by trade – who had a rather good banya (a traditional Russian steam bath) to one side of his yard.  After some banter we were all invited back later in the afternoon for some samogon (home-distilled liquor) and a good steam.  We trundled off through the village backstreets to another house into which Sergei disappeared; out came the owner who turned out to be the mayor of the commune.  He took us off to his market garden where we picked all the vegetables – carrots, onions, leeks, beetroot, tomatoes, for our meal later.  Did we want a cup of tea next, asked Sergei.  Yes!  This day was building up a momentum all of its own.  He took us to a ‘stolovaya’ a Russian workers’ canteen which serviced the factory over the road.  The factory was once in collective farm ownership but had metamorphosed into what the mayor, Pavel, called a cooperative producing milk and meat.   

In the stolovaya the serving ladies were disappointed that we had come all the way from England and were not eating their food.  Sergei took up their cause.  Three times he pressed us and in the end we could not refuse any longer.  Pelmeni (a kind of Russian ravioli) were served up for the meateaters and lovely crunchy salad with stewed vegetables for the non-carnivores.  National honour satisfied Sergei and the ladies beamed proudly at us. 

Back at the campsite we delivered the vegetables and another meal was served up mid-afternoon.  At five o’ clock we were back at Nikolai’s for the banya and beautiful pizza-like savoury pastries followed by sweet plum and apple ones all freshly baked by his wife.  This was washed down by his samogon (grain, water and yeast and nothing else, Nikolai told us) and a delicious non-alcoholic strawberry compote.  

The banya (naked – the Russians will hear of nothing else) was about as hot as I could bear.  But Sergei was a hard man and threw more water on the coals. Then he started the rub-down with ‘venniki’ - the bundles of birch leaves which had been soaking and which Russians claim are the cure for virtually all ills.  At the end I was so jiggered that when Sergei said ‘Get up’ I thought that he said ‘Stay there’ and lay motionless.  After two attempts he obviously concluded that I was possibly dead and started heaving me off the table for resuscitation.  Served him right, I thought darkly. 

It was past eight by the time we got back to the campsite well-scrubbed and steamed to find Pavel the mayor and Larissa his wife who had come to pay us all an official visit.  They are keen to encourage tourism to the area they explained.  It turned out that there had been two hundred campers on this site a few days ago and a he had arranged a special clean-up for the foreign visitors.  They were a very pleasant couple and we chatted as night fell and Svetlana and Olga served up yet another meal.  Speeches were made, medals awarded, presents exchanged and vows of friendship made. 

As I lay in my sleeping bag that night I ruminated that when a Russian asks you if you want to go for a little shopping it is wise to tag along for the ride.  I suddenly realised too that I had eaten five full meals that day.  Which kind of made up for the day before when for reasons I never quite fathomed all we ate was two doughnuts until the evening.  Russia – it’s feast or famine. 

The days slid past and our itinerary seemed to slip into a very Russian dream state. They even have a word for it: ‘mechta’.  This is often translated as ‘dream’ but it is really a daydream, a kind of sleepwalking state applied to all functions.  It is truly maddening when you are trying to organise anything but deeply relaxing when you are on a tour such as this.  All you have to do is lie back, stop asking questions and appreciate each moment as it passes. The weather continued to be fabulous – warm sunshine and a cooling breeze – and the bikes rumbled along taking everything in their stride.

 At the end of our final day we found ourselves in the village of Bingy a few miles from the larger town of Nevyansk.  We rolled to a stop outside a seemingly ordinary wooden house, its double gates were opened and we guided the combos into the yard and parked up.  Then the owners, Steffan, a German and his Russian wife Olga took us for a tour of their home.  In this country you really never know what is round the corner.  This was a kind of eco-guesthouse.  So along with the solar showers and the compost toilets there was an extension to the house built by traditional methods.  This appeared to mean that despite the river at the bottom of the garden it was not set on a concrete raft and so tended to expand and contract according to the atmospheric humidity.  Rare is the day, Steffan told us, that you can open both the door and the windows.  It tends to be one or the other…….  Best of all though were the four yurts in the garden – a real bed for the night!   

Before dinner a Russian Orthodox priest came to bless us and the bikes.  He stayed to eat and it turned out that before the priesthood he was lead guitarist in a punk rock band.  And so it was that I found myself in a small village somewhere east of the Urals having a vodka-fuelled in-depth discussion with this priest about Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.  It was that dreamstate again.

 The final morning was tough.  We took to a motorway to get back to Ekaterinburg and this became a kind of endurance test.  Russian main roads and motorways are dangerous.  There is little of the highway engineering we are used to in the west, the surfaces are poor, and the traffic fast.  This doubtless accounts for the accident statistics – which are horrific. So we hung on grimly.  Levels of concentration were not helped by the fact that this seemed to be a famine day.  One fried egg for breakfast and that appeared to be it.  After about sixty kilometres we turned off and headed for the continental divide – where Europe meets Asia.  This is not apparently a notional line but was scientifically validated by Vasily Tatischev in the 18th century.  We lined the outfits up, shook hands across the two continents, ate lunch (a small bar of chocolate) and then, as the skies darkened for the first time on our trip, we headed off to a compound where we parked the bikes up and took a coach back into Ekaterinburg through a cloudburst.  How satisfying to have missed it on the combos by minutes…..

 Next morning, there was a last-minute scramble for the plane back to Prague and we only just made it.  As I watched Ekaterinburg disappear below I reflected on the whole experience from the time we decided to go to that very moment. 

The trip did not come cheap.  The basic price for one was 1900 euros and for two was 3700 – which included the flight to Ekaterinburg.  Say about £3000.  Then there is the flight to Prague which cost us £160 and the visa fees which also came to £160.  It is strongly recommended that you have a number of immunisations two of which are not available on the NHS and these cost a whopping £200 per person.  So that’s another £400.  All that adds up to not far off £4000 for the trip for two.  Against that you spend very little on the trip itself since all the food is free and so is most of the alcohol.  All the same, £4000 for a two-person one-week holiday is, in my book, expensive.  If you were simply to take off with your combo from the UK you could get a long way for that sum and doubtless have many adventures on the way. 

I’d like to say that the whole thing was well-organised but, hand on heart, I cannot.  For me that is part of its attraction.  If you want an adventure then you have to accept that it can get messy.  That is the nature of adventures.  Otherwise you would book a holiday with one of those firms that pretends to be extreme but in which every minute of every day is very safely accounted for.  And you still pay a fortune. 

But the trip wildly exceeded our expectations.  We just loved the whole thing.  We made some good friends; we got to see parts of Russia that were really off the beaten track; we were able to immerse ourselves in Uralling; and each day was filled with incident and interest.  We had a real adventure and what more can you ask for?

I’m afraid that I can’t attribute any of the photos above. I myself didn’t bring many images back because my camera got soaked in the lake. So most of these photos were taken by the others on the trip but I can’t for the life of me remember who took what. I’m sure they won’t mind.