Europe @ 2.4 km/h (2 page)

My question, my quest, exactly.

Then again, I tell myself, maybe I’m missing the obvious point: aren’t Europeans all about activity (doing) while Asians are more contemplative (being)? I was contemplating just this point at Hong Kong International Airport before we boarded this flight when my meditation was interrupted by a young man ambling through the transit lounge, calling out to everyone in general and no one in particular, ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry’.

This struck me as odd, since no one could go anywhere until the clearance for boarding was given. But his clarion call became more urgent by the second until everyone was listening to him.

‘Hurry, hurry, hurry,’ he repeated.

‘
Hare, hare,
Krishna, Rama.
Hare, hare
.’

Europe this was not.

RUSSIA

Time spent: 28 days

Distance covered: 3102 km

Distance pushed: 136.8 km

Average speed: 2.399 km/h

Journey distance to date: 3102 km

Europe, we hardly know you. Yet we willingly fool ourselves into believing you are the most familiar of destinations. The mere sound of your name conjures up the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum, the highest of high culture. To many minds, you are a byword for civilisation itself. But how many cheers can you raise for a civilisation that unleashed the greatest bloodletting in the history of the planet, not once but twice in as many generations?

‘But,’ I hear you plead, ‘it’s not fair to judge me by my worst moments.’

OK, we can do better than that, refusing to judge you at all — at least until we’re better acquainted. So let’s get a proper look at you, see how well we recognise you at closer quarters. Never interested in sightseeing for its own sake, I will nevertheless visit many of your ‘unmissable’ landmarks. But through the experience of travelling in many lands I have found certain principles that are likely to make any journey more memorable. And the greatest of these is the value of the unexpected encounter, the unforeseen episode, the uncommon character. If you’re in it for the long haul, you have to be a voyager for all seasons, but there is bound to be more of the unknown lying in store if you go ‘out of season’.

Armchair viewers of Discovery channel and readers of
National
Geographic
think they know what this part of the world is like, because they’ve seen the pictures — and a Mediterranean beach in summer is one cliché among many. But try to picture what it’s like at latitude 70º N in summer, or imagine the Riviera in winter, and it’s not so obvious. Even in the ‘known world’ you can find many a road less travelled.

The unfamiliarity principle is why, it seems to me, many of the best moments in a journey take the form of pleasant surprises. Others, more precisely termed epiphanies — when everything seems right with the world and it’s beyond us to explain why — will also occur. If there’s one thing to be expected from the long haul, it’s the unexpected.

Since the beginning of May is the earliest time of year when you can go to Russia confident of not ending up icebound, it seems the most auspicious moment to embark on this crossing, which by the middle of December will have taken me across twelve countries.

Never staying long in one place, or in one type of place, is another defining feature of the way I travel. It is only half in jest that I tell inquirers this is a solo journey undertaken in the company of millions. This time out, I will spend just under two weeks in Amsterdam, and the same length of time in Paris, but at most halts just one or two nights. These 230 sleeps from May to December 2007 will nearly all be spent in 90 cities, towns or villages — not counting the nights spent on buses, trains or, literally, at sea — giving an average of less than two-and-a-half days per destination.

And where to lay my sorry head? Hostels (46 per cent of the time), hotels (38 per cent), guesthouses or private homes (13 per cent); and I will even get myself to the odd monastery or nunnery. It’s one way to be sure of meeting a greater variety of people. Among this cast of thousands, though I could never have guessed it in advance, will be a Portuguese Buddhist restaurateur, the Governor of Gibraltar, and family I never knew I had — almost of all them Europeans who answer to another name.

My onward flight is about to touch down in Tallinn, a copybook landing. But for all the research and preparation carried out beforehand I’m on a collision course with this oh-so-familiar Continent that is truly incognito. Civilised, advanced, arrogant, self-entranced: preconceptions exist to be modified, even shattered. The seatbelt sign is off. I’m ready for the adventure to begin.

This Baltic capital does its best to oblige. It is the evening of 27 April. Just a couple of hours ago, political tensions between Estonian Estonians and Russian Estonians erupted in the city streets. On my way into town I see every second plate-glass window smashed, where the wave of violence rolled out of town along the highway to Estonia’s favourite seaside resort, Parnu.

So, are the Europeans back to their bad old ways? For what will prove to be the only time this year Estonia is making world headlines, confronting this fresh arrival with a textbook example of what is possibly the core issue gripping Europe today (and for as long back in history as you care to go): identity. Asked where they come from, as I will discover, few people count themselves as Europeans first and last. This stands in stark contrast with the answers you would get if you asked the same question of Americans, Australians or, for that matter, Chinese.

As the currency-exchange officer at the airport explains, a Soviet worker-hero statue that had been at the centre of contention between the Russian and Estonian communities was removed this morning (by the Estonian Estonians), infuriating Russian youths who ‘trashed’ the town. As I near the city centre, a police helicopter overhead exemplifies the menace in the air — and a quiet night in the suburbs suddenly seems appealing. I hear later from the Russian side that what inflamed their ire more was the simultaneous transfer of the remains of the Soviet soldiers buried under it.

Ask a Russian ‘How are you?’ and you may well get the answer ‘
Normalno
’. Tomorrow, one day closer to my departure for Russia, I will see a sign in the window of a Tallinn restaurant that reads CELEBRATING FRIENDSHIP. But right now the window itself, along with such pious hopes, has been shattered.

Kilometre Zero

May Day is always a good time to visit Russia. The bus from Tallinn heading due east to St Petersburg begins rolling just a minute after 6 am. Right on cue, the sun rises in a cloudless sky. Now the shards of glass have been swept away, everything is back to ‘normal, no?’

On every budget trip I permit myself one small luxury. Last time it was a GPS device; this time round, the gadget of choice is a speedometer, supplied by a bicycle shop in faraway Melbourne. At any hour of the day or night, all I will have to do to know how far I have gone, and how fast I am going, is to glance at this technological marvel perched on the side of my wheelchair.

Speed = distance ÷ time. A diary divided into days will not do: what marks my progress from one side of the Continent to the other will be how many kilometres I propel myself with two determined hands.

Of course, on a train or bus, or when my wheels are stationary, the speedometer will not register progress. But how far those vehicles take me is something I can estimate later, consulting maps. When I look down, it’s the distance covered by my personal transport that captures my attention.

I look out the window at a white cloak of snow draped around the village of Aapsere. Half an hour down this road lies Russia, and just before 9 am this crisp, clean morning in the northern spring of 2007 I enter Churchill’s well-wrapped enigma for the first time since 1985, when it was part of the Soviet Union.

To discover Europeanness, it stands to reason, all I have to do is meet Europeans, and here in European Russia seems as good a place as any to start. That notion collides with reality right away. Can ‘my first Russian’ be a typical European? I wonder.

At the Russian border town of Ivangorod I am ‘greeted’ by a woman in a pale-yellow sweater and blue parka whose face is a picture of surpassing sorrow, as if she has just stared Death in the face. It is a face that raises so many questions but answers none. Instinctively, I present my passport to a colleague with a visage less grim, the first and last time I’ll need to do so, courtesy of the ‘European idea’ of integration, which clearly hasn’t reached this corner of the continent. I even manage to winkle polite laughter out of this colleague by wishing a ‘Happy May Day’. Luckily, he isn’t plunged in gloom by the irony of working on the workers’ holiday.

I didn’t really expect to see any reminders of the communist era still standing, but on the border a sign announces that here, 148 km from St Petersburg, we are entering the district of Leningradskaya. Suddenly I find myself in one country but two universes, and they are evidently not parallel.

1 km

Half an hour of pushing myself around St Petersburg is enough to remind me why this civic gem appeals to the Russian imagination in a way that leaves Moscow for dead. Red, white and blue flags rest in holders yoked to light poles like troikas.

Then, just as I’m reflecting on the power of Russian patriotism, I spot a Mongol face among the crowd swarming down Nevsky Prospekt, the city’s main boulevard, a vivid reminder that Russians are ethnically no ‘purer’ than that other glorious mongrel breed, the English. Students of English history know that the Danes and Norwegians invaded the Angles’ land towards the end of the first millennium. Less familiar is the fact that, ever since the sixth century, Vikings raided, traded, and invaded the lands of the Slavs, where from the ninth century onwards they founded a series of city states.

Historians suspect that the name of the Viking clan that founded the mini-state of Kyiv (from which the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, derives its name) was Rus, the great-granddaddy of what we call ‘Russia’.
²
In 1223 the fiefs that would form the core of today’s state, foremost among them Muscovy, were overrun by the Mongols. Today, on Nevsky Prospekt, a face in the crowd has reminded me of that fact.

2 km

St Petersburg International, one of the few youth hostels in this city of five million, has a surprise or two in store. All the rooms are on the fourth floor, and there is no lift access. But the manager, a lateral or rather vertical thinker, arranges to bring a bed down from on high to the staff ‘common room’, which is generously vacated for the six nights of my stay. And — a bonus, this — the TV there has more channels than I’ve ever seen available on one set (300) so I venture into the world outside only after surfing from a concert in Kurdistan to a debate in Milan via al-Jazeera.

3 km

Meet Ivan Baranov, principal doorman at the Nevsky Palace Hotel, a five-star establishment on the boulevard of broken flagstones. All gold braid and broad smile, he greets me with a disclaimer, ‘I am not from here. I come from a small town in Belarus, far to south’.

Introduction leads to revelation. ‘This is my duty, guarding the door, but in the deep of my soul I am happy to remain a peasant.’ And, once he learns where I am from, revelation extends to request. ‘I want to ask you about farming in Australia. Could I get work in your country fleecing the sheep? This is my dream.

‘From my early days I work on a farm. I know how to feed the pigs,’ he assures me with wide-eyed trust. At a loss to know what to advise, I suggest Ivan contact the Australian Embassy in Moscow but, several steps ahead of me, he proceeds to display an expert’s knowledge of Canberra’s immigration points system.

4 km

I see I’ve spent one hour 40 minutes pushing the chair, ‘progressing’ a dismal 4.1 km. This works out at 2.46 km/h: I don’t think I had any idea of how fast I would go, but this really is snail’s pace (if you can picture a snail on wheels).

18 km

Time to check those must-see lists. Paris? Eiffel Tower. Tick. The Louvre. Tick. Berlin? The Brandenburg Gate. Tick. Berlin Wall remnant. Tick. St Petersburg? The Hermitage. Tick.

To see the world-famous museum opposite is no problem. Housed in the tsars’ 250-year-old Winter Palace, it would be infinitely more difficult to avoid. But to see the Hermitage collection? Now that’s impossible, for two reasons. You would need to visit every day for a month to see the fraction that is on display, and even then most of the treasures are locked away in storerooms. Still, nothing would have kept me away from following up my previous visit to its great galleries one bitter day 23 Februaries ago. And then, just as this visit begins, I in turn am visited by a great stroke of luck.

While I wait for the stair lift to be lowered, and explore my wallet for the admittance fee of 350 roubles (about A$17.50), an attendant approaches, face beaming, and says, ‘Did you know that entrance is free on the first Thursday of every month?’ I do a single take, thinking: Gosh, today’s Thursday, and then a double: Hey, today’s the third of May!