Our route in Google maps, including our campsites. Have a look! Just click on the map to open it.

The last long pull… we all made it back to Amsterdam! After 28023 km, across 25 countries, 9 time zones, in 118 days, with an average speed of do-not-ask and countless hours of quality time in our Lada, we can report that Amsterdam is not the worst place to come home to. Locals tend to be relaxed and friendly, they have these really pretty canals, you see lots of people on bikes, and we have heard the place is pretty liberal so we may have to check that out as well.

Now really, mucho thanks to all of you for your support and witty comments during our trip. We very much enjoyed the updates from far away, even though we’re currently utterly depressed to be back in the Lower countries. But then, no doubt we will find an excuse to hit the road again after we’ve caught up with all of you and bored you to death with the stories we couldn’t post here for security reasons. So for future reference keep an eye on:

www.landcruiser2sahara.wordpress.com
www.pickuptruck2theamericas.wordpress.com
www.piperarcher2iran.wordpress.com

Ciao ciao,
David and Ingrid

Back in Russia, because we luv it. Kaliningrad was a German town and formerly known as Köningsberg. After the second world war it was almost completely destroyed. The remaining German buildings were destructed by the soviets and replaced with nice communist architectonical concrete buildings. The castle did survive the war and the first wave of soviet reconstruction but was dynamited out of existence in 1968. It were replaced with a lovely “House of the Soviets”. Money ran out before it was finished and till this very day the building is not in use.

Typical Westerners we are, we never thought much of the esthetical values and economical insights of our communist friends. Since Kaliningrad one could question the ethical values as well; the city is named after Stalin’s close friend Kalinin who ordered the Katyn massacre and was responsible for the famine in Ukraine in 1932 (Holodomor). Not the kind of person you would like your city to be named after.

Kaliningrad had more death and disaster on offer. We came across a monument for Alexander Marinesko. He was a Russian submarine commander and responsible for torpedoing the Wilhelm Gustloff a German passenger ship which carried mostly German refugees at that time. Some 9000 people died during the attack, making it the worst marine disaster ever. Alexander Marinesko never actually lived in Kaliningrad so why his monument is in this former German town one can only guess.

But summing up all the horrible facts about Kaliningrad would not do any justice to the place – it is, after all, the city of Kant. Where he was born, where he lived and where he died. And why we were impressed after all (if only to cross off another name from our dead philosophers tour we started a while ago). Some Enlightenment to the place after all then.

Also the submarine museum brought some light to our existence, although the thing was turned partly into a memorial for the Kursk submarine disaster.
We tried hard to get the bloody thing started. This without success. Russian mechanics…

Of course we raced through Russia for only one reason; to get to Italy! We left our Lada with the drunken Brits on stagnight in Riga, flew to Milan, got chauffeured into an Audi-with-airco to lake Como, looked for George Clooney in Bellagio, but most of all: went to the wedding of little sister Carolien to her now husband Marc. All ultra romantic and relaxed, and a very welcome break from the Soviet wilderness and packs of noodles. Bad news: we had to fly out of this idyllic world to drive Lada home…

After leaving Siberia we still had a few more thousand kilometers to go.

On our way we visited Vladimir

The Pushkin house and thomb

And Pskov

The story

The pictures

Siberia has quite a few extra-large cities, we found on our way. After Ulan-Ude and Irkutsk we pushed our Lada further west. Raving reviews about Tomsk made this city our logical next stop. Not entirely our cup of tea. Admittedly, the place does get quite lively after a Sunday afternoon football match, and also the card-eating habits of the local ATM machine added to the excitement. Still, we prefer the stylish chic of Krasnoyarsk, where old ladies proudly show us around in yet another house of art (switching on the lights as we walk to the next room, dusting off the artefacts) and where the girls are so pretty it mixes well with the paintings of Russian wanderers. Anyway, a nice place. Next pleasant surprise (especially after spending two nights folded up in our Lada at local truckstops) was Tobolsk, the former Siberian capital with a pittoresque kremlin, the last exile home of the last tsar before his trip to execution in Yekatarinburg, large merchant homes and Amstel beer.

On the way (well, not quite, but with a few hours detour as we got lost in the countryside) we visited a monastery-turned into gulag-but now monastery again, where locals splashed around in the holy waters (sorry, no pictures of that part). Intereshna.

But the highlight so far has to be Yekatarinburg in the Ural, with it’s bloody history of Romanov killings and maffia wars, our funky Soviet towerblock hotel in the shape of a hammer and sickle (visible from the sky), war memorials and military exposure dotted around, and an endless stream of Irish pubs. Uchin intereshna.

Tomorrow we head towards Perm to visit the former labour camp Perm-36 and then it’s still a long trip (crossing the Asia-Europe border) to get to Riga in Latvia…