Well this is it. Welcome to the end of any shred of adventure left in these blogs, for today is the day, the day we leave Asia and stumble triumphantly back into Europe. Nothing interesting has ever happened in Europe, ever. If we break down here we could probably just walk home or arrange for the AA to come fetch us. Impartiality Notice: There are alternative breakdown services available which may equally meet or exceed your needs and preferences. No longer will we have to trade money on the black market, or camp by the roadside in squalor. Yes the days of adventuring are over, we are well and truly on the home stretch of fully tarmacked roads. So, why are you still reading this?

 

The first step of preparing to leave Russia is always the same regardless of the purpose of the visit: Adventuring, Business, Leisure, Birthday, Christening, and Alcoholic Anonymous Meeting. Step 1. Buy a metric-shitload of vodka. So that was what we did, we set off from the hotel away from city centre Moscow looking for any supermarket on the way out of the country. Effectively merging the first two steps of leaving Russia into one mega-step.  The second step of course being “leave Russia”. We would recommend completing step 2 prior to your expiry date of your visa, I’ve heard the Russians don’t take kindly to that. Lucky for us, I mean well planned of us, we have 4 days left to flee the country, so unless something goes drastically wrong we should make it the 388 miles with 3.5 days to spare. 

 

By all accounts the first step was a complete loss as we left Moscow. For a Russian city there is a distinct lack of vodka salesmen hanging around on street corners. The search continued as we left the city streets and joined one of the many radial motorways. The district of skyscrapers by which we flew on the elevated bypass were unlikely to be harbouring any off-licences. Although the corridors were probably lined with vodka coolers which the office workers congregate around to discuss last night’s episode of EastEnders. This left us with a worryingly low amount of vodka as we headed to the border, I’m not even sure they would allow us to complete step 2 without fulfilling our first step requirements. We did however have an extraordinarily large collection of bottles occupying the space under our seats courtesy of our courier service for Matt of the Mongoliers. If the Russian border guards were going to search our car for vodka they’d sure find it, tick it off their checklist and let us leave.

 

At the Russian border they hadn’t even attempted to make our last border crossing a celebration of the weird and wonderful procedures of the 20 previous borders. There wasn’t so much as a single solitary balloon or banner to welcome us. There were no doctors or black market dealers. It didn’t take 12 hours, not a single truck came crashing through the barrier, and no bribes were facilitated. None of the usual border shenanigans: no quizzes, contraband treasure hunts, games of stamp based hide-and-seek, or staring contests. Chris didn’t even get his traditional border crossing cavity search. The one saving grace of the last non-European, the border shed and the loving embrace of shed-man. As if he knew the importance of his role in our last border crossing experience he took his sweet time perusing our passports, but the checking of faces didn’t lapse into the staring contest. At the vehicle checkpoint the guard did his job properly which was disappointing. It wasn’t disappointing because he found the kilo of heroin in our boot, but disappointing because he was making no effort to be the half-assed guards we had become accustomed to. He even spoke fluent English, which is basically the linguistic equivalent of taking a crap on our adventurers’ border crossing parade. The only glimpse of hope for half-assedness in his professionalism was when he happened upon our horn. I could see it in his eyes he knew he shouldn’t but there was no way he could not resist the urge to honk that bitch and honk he did. As the last whisp of breath escaped from the bowels of the horn, a look of shame took over his face. He was so ashamed at himself he banished us to Europe never to return without the appropriate visa.

 

Between the borders was a shed with words on it that suggested it might be harboring an assemblage of Russian treats – “Duty Free”. We parked up in the hope that we might be able to find some vodka before we enter Europe. Imagine if you will, our surprise when there was not a single drop of Russian vodka in the store. They had Scottish whisky, Latvian vodka, French Wine, English gin, Mexican tequila, they probably even had some fermented mares milk kicking around in the back somewhere. So that was that, we would be entering Europe empty handed – apart from the entire car full of the stuff, but that was not for us.  

 

At the Latvian border we waited in a queue of vehicles for half an hour and noticed an obvious omission in the guard’s preparation this morning. They had their holsters attached to their belts, but they seemed to have mistaken their guns for stamps. Puny pathetic stamps. At the head of the queue the border crossers were clearly intimidated by their ability to not require weapons because they were following every instruction given. When we arrived at the inspection point we too had the fear and attempted to hand over every document the small woman asked for. She had asked for the passport, driver’s license and V5, so we gave her our international permits and the V5 out of habit. She was not impressed and tossed the permits at our faces with the vigor of a woman who might choose a stamp over a gun. When we gave her our passports and driver’s licenses she demanded the V5 as well. We laughed a hearty laugh and pointed at the V5 tucked under her arm. We continued to laugh so she chimed in with an “It’s funny” in a tone which conveyed that she didn’t get the joke, the joke was that she was stupid. We chose to cease our laughter instead of suffering the wrath of the stamp wielder. She took our documents to her building, no sheds at this border, this is Europe. Once she returned she had a riffle through our belongings and sent us on our way without a welcome home hug for the returning European explorers.

 

Now we’re back in Europe the GPS took its place on our dashboard to ruin any chance of getting lost again, yet another nail in the coffin of our adventure - I wouldn’t bother continuing reading this. The motorways in Latvia were mostly toll roads so we chose to skip them and sneak through the backcountry roads to Lithuania. Clearly the tarmac in Latvia is for paying customers only because the back roads were mostly gravel and dirt roads through small villages. Maybe the adventure could be saved by northern Europe after all, but then again the petrol station we stopped at in the middle of nowhere came with an English speaking shopkeeper and took visa card. It was getting dark as we approached the border with Lithuania so we began looking for a place to set up camp. We passed through a town so we sampled the European petrol station sausage rolls for dinner, they were fine but not the delectable affair the Russian petrol station exhibited. Then we searched high and low along the final roads of Latvia for a place to camp but every track into the fields had houses at the end of them. Even when we pulled over so I could follow a track into a forest I found a lovely Latvian house lurking in there. We were so preoccupied with finding a place to camp we didn’t even notice when we crossed into Lithuania – mainly because there are no border crossings to navigate in Europe. The Lithuanian countryside offered a more bountiful spread of camping opportunities. As the clock ticked over to 11:30ish we pulled into the first field we found, but didn’t bother with the whole annoyance of tent assembling and curled up in the car instead.