Sankt-Peterburg

St-Peterburg

From Pskov I headed for St-Peterburg. I had some good roads, some bad roads and some really bad roads. The main road between Pskov and St-Peterburg and from St-Peterburg to Moscow is a very busy road. You can call it a highway, but not in the same sense as highways in Belgium, more like Canada. It will go through the middle of a town. There you should reduce your speed to 60, but this is rarely done unless somebody spots the DPS or militsia. I think the DPS is something like highway patrol. While the militsia is the general police. They will be hiding out somewhere with a speedgun and jump on the road to stop you if they catch you speeding.

I spent the night in a field just outside of Gatshina, a city close to St-Peterburg. The nights indeed are not completely dark here.

St-Peterburg is totally different from the Russia I have seen so far. This city is clean, has wide street, a lot of new developments are going on. The militsia even had brand new fancy Mercedes cars. This is probably all because of a booming tourism industry. And it was a welcome change. Traffic was great: I drove through the center of town with ease. It was not congested and drivers seem to stick more to the rules here. I dropped by the local Ural dealer only to find that he could not help me with any parts for the new Ural. He even checked out my bike as if he had never seen one before. After some more pictures of the city I headed for Moscow.

One more thing about the roads: there is a lot of construction going on. The old bumpy Russian highway might even soon be a thing of the past. You still have the occasional 15 km stretch of bad potholed asphalt, but I have driven on some new smooth surfaces too.

Not long after leaving the city of St-Peterburg traffic just came to a stop. Apparently a truck with trailer coming from the opposite direction smashed through the divider and blocked our path. This was a major traffic jam, several kilometres long as I was stuck in there for about 3 hours. You haven’t lived until you have been in a Russian traffic jam. A two lane highway is instantly converted into one with 3 lanes. An additional lane also forms on the shoulder and people will try to drive on any available surface. Total chaos. How the emergency services are supposed to come through here is a mystery. It was taking too long for some drivers and they started driving either forwards or backwards on the opposite side of the highway. Of course with their four-way flashers on … for safety. It was a sight to see. But everybody just took the entire event with ease, nobody lost his cool. Traffic wasn’t moving so you just wait and move forward whenever you can. People come out of their cars and start chatting or walk up and down the line of cars. I even spotted a Safmarine container. For those that do not know, Safmarine is the company I work for.

Traffic eventually started moving again. Since I lost some time here I stayed in a gastinitsa in Novgorod, not so far from St-Peterburg. The administrator spoke perfect English and could easily become the mother of my children. Russian women are beautiful. No internet café in Novgorod.