Day 21 – Chelyabinsk (Russia) to Kazakhstan

High Point – Can I have 3? Hearing the first stamp on our Carnet from the Russians, finally realising that the Kazak customs official didn’t want an actual souvenir from me and, of course, our first sunset drive in Kazakhstan!!Low Point – Falling asleep next to “smelly” Steve Moore on the floor of the Russian Customs Hall.

No Point – Angry birds on the i phone makes us all (especially Dave orders) Really Angry!!!

Authors Comments

Everyone knows the rules… they say never work with children or animals and also NEVER try to cross into or out of Russia in a fire engine. Well, in my case, on Saturday I had to do all three; children = Steve, animals = Dave Orders and fire engine = Martha, let the fun begin . . .

The drive to the border was eerily quiet for Russian roads, no worries about 40 tonne lorries coming straight for you. It lead me to think that we might just “pop” across in a couple of hours; how silly of me. Although the queue to leave Russia wasn’t big it also wasn’t moving, patience would be the key word of the day, along with “Ja ne Ponimaiu” or “I don’t understand” in English.

Thanks to some good work from Steve we managed to stay in the queue for Cars leaving Russia, saving ourselves hours of waiting around with Russia’s finest Lunatic Lorry Drivers. We were then asked by the customs officials to join the “Big Car” queue and we remembered that it was at this point that the wheels began to fall off for the stage 1 crew originally crossing into Russia from Latvia. With our Carnet now translated into Russian we hoped for a smoother transition this time. Steve and myself (the teams’ nominated Russian Speakers) headed to the customs hall full of hope (and if hope fails we now have Risk on the i phone to while away the hours!)

You didn’t need to be fluent in Russian to understand that our “type” of carnet was a complete mystery to the customs officials here. A quick phone call to Tadas our actual Russian Fixer confirmed what we thought, they had never seen one like this before and they were going to have to think about how they could process this properly – after lunch and a couple of cigarette breaks of course!

In fairness to the officials they were as friendly and as helpful to us as two different sets of people who couldn’t understand each other at all could be. Luckily, Steve seems to have a face that transcends language barriers and his insistence on using the word “ouchen” (very) at every available opportunity seemed to be actually working to build a relationship with the steel faced customs guards.

3 hours later (or 2 games of Risk for those on crew time) we had our first action of the day!! Whoop whoop!! Armed with a camera a guard asked us (pointed) to unload all the storage boxes off Martha and open them up so he could take some pictures of them. Steve asked Ross to watch how the official took photos because for his previous 2 attempts as official photo-taker for FTFE Ross had produced one and a half useable shots.

Then it was back to the customs hall where we were told to wait… Angry birds on the i phone kept us going this time. When I heard the sound of the official stamping our carnet it was like music to my ears! 30 minutes later (they love to stamp anything and everything) we were given our carnet and told we could proceed … we were heading into no mans land!!

Here was another 2 hour queue in which the most exciting thing that happened was Steve stalling Martha twice and blaming it on “low idle speed”… ahemm…

 We picked up our visas and thought we were heading into Kazakhstan only to be stopped at the Kazak customs and asked for our “Machina Passport” this turned out to be our carnet, cue more confused looks and more customs hall waiting. The biggest problem is that no one seems to understand why we were going around the world and why we were doing it to raise money. Even with the help of our translated flyers (which are amazing!) no one here comprehends the concept of charity let alone driving a fire engine around the world in the name of charity!!

It took the Kazak officials only one hour to stamp our Carnet into their country (it was near home time I think) and we were again on our way – for another 20 metres! This time it was a young border guard who asked us if we had any souvenirs for him, I said no, he than asked about narcotics and I said certainly not. It turns out that Souvenirs = Bribes and Narcotics = Cigarettes / Bribes… How stupid I was!! Steve tried the subtle $20 dollar hand shake but that was turned down in favour of 2 FTFE  t-shirts (he insisted he didn’t want ones that had been worn!!)

So ultimately that’s all it took; a few smiles, a lot of confused pointing, a couple of t-shirts and a lot of patience!!

We were now officially in Kazakhstan!!! The drive from the border to our first stop more than made up for all of the waiting at the border; the land was big, the sky was big and the tunes were big!! There was finally horizon surrounding us as far as the eye could see and I think we all felt a sense that we had moved to another continent!! Day 1 of Asia had truly began!!

James

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