Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Andrei and his family were immediately different to any Russians I had met.
True to form, they fed us a second dinner (it was midnight by this stage), but in-
credibly, and to our immense relief, there was no vodka. They asked us intelligent
questions and listened to our replies. The conversation ranged and as they slowly
became more comfortable with us, they started to crack jokes, laughing uproari-
ously, then patiently explaining the naughty punchlines and puns that we'd com-
pletely failed to understand.
They told us briefly of their religion. They were devout Jehovah's Witnesses. It
became very clear that their religion pervaded their entire way of living and think-
ing. We talked, laughed and listened into the small hours of the morning before
finally being ushered towards the beds that had already been made up for us. I lay
there in a happy, exhausted daze, staring at the ceiling, still softly illuminated by
the faint moonlight creeping gently around the curtains.
That morning I'd woken in a dirty tent with a broken bike. I'd spent the day
fighting to keep hope alive against the growing realisation that my hub was fun-
damentally stuffed and now, twenty hours later, I was lying in a bed in a wooden
cottage nestled in a clearing somewhere in the middle of the Siberian taiga forest.
What a day! This is what it's all about - the basic addictiveness of travel. Wake
up with a broken bike, go to sleep with new friends and a whole village to get to
know. Our journey had opened wide the wildly unpredictable door of surprise. The
hub was still busted, but as I drifted off to sleep, I was quietly confident that some-
how, a solution would be found in the morning.
Miraculously, it was! Andrei, his two brothers and his brother-in-law were all
tradesmen - welders, woodworkers and mechanics. The next morning they took
a quick look at my hub, held a brief conference, then loaded the wheel into the
back of Andrei's little car. Together, we drove to the other side of the town to the
workshop of the village school. Inside stood a home-built lathe, made out of an
old diesel-powered truck engine. Pasha was the expert on this machine, and after
making a few precise measurements, he was able to slot a chunk of old steel into
the lathe. Half an hour later, he handed me a piece of engineering that was perfect.
I stripped out the broken cone, hammered in the new device, and the whole thing
was as good as new.
We returned to the house for a sumptuous lunch prepared by Andrei's mother,
Clara. Afterwards, they hitched up their stately old horse to a wooden cart, and we
all trundled off to a nearby field. The village tractor had broken down irreparably
a few years before, and so they were slashing hay with scythes. We spent the af-
