Monday, July 12, 2010

K'grad pt. 2 and the long way home

The money spent for the Russian visa was truly not wasted. Everyone else was, though.
The Friday night in Rockotheque in Kuri Bambuk turned into early morning bowling which turned our plans of Saturday return upside down.
Pasha did good job in keeping us from paying for almost anything, which I hope can be paid back later in Finland.
But since we didn't ride on Saturday, that meant a 720 km ride for Sunday.
Which is all well and ok, but for the heat, and the speed limit of 70kmh on Kaliningrad's mile-wide motorways, enforced every few kilometers by the ever-eager Russian police.
There is hope of better future, though, since the government doesn't have the money to keep the police school in K'Grad running anymore. So maybe in a few years the police/resident ratio will become something more sane.
Extra credits for vigilance and hospitality goes to the Russian customs officer, who had us fill the customs declarations three times over. Mind you, the forms were naturally only in Russian, so it is no wonder we got one check-mark in the wrong box.
After this, there was something wrong with writing date as "july" instead of 7, and the final rewrite had to be done because the hand-writing was not clear enough.
They had no interest if the bikes we were riding were ours, or if the bikes matched the documents at all.
So the 10 minute border crossing took more than an hour.
After clearing the Russian-Lithuanian border, things were easy, and it only took 7 hrs or riding to make it to Tallinn. We could've made it to the last ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, but they didn't have room for our bikes, so we spent one more night in a hotel and soon all the Lokit will be safely home.

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