Amsterdam to Moscow

Anna Blog:

Moskva. 22.06.08
8 days on the road. 2500km and half a world away.
We are a family.
If to be thrown into a truck with four other people and forced to travel 20000km over 5 months may feel to most mortals the worst nightmare they could ever imagine… well to us somehow, miraculously, it seems to be the happiest way of living.
The pleasure we find in discovering how compatible we are is an overwhelming surprise, a gift. If we all knew Ramsay before we left we actually knew each other very little. The total amount of hours spent together before we left amounts to just a few hours. There was no way to tell wether we would actually get along. Of course it only early days and we cannot take this extraordinary affinities that we share for granted.. But as each day merges into the other and each obstacle is overcome we are becoming closer, closer in a way that can only be described as Family.
One thought that struck us most was how happy and perfectly content we can be with so little possessions and limited comfort. If just enough space to sleep, a tiny cupboards to keep a few clothes and four little windows to watch the world go by is enough then why does anyone need such big houses and so many things? It may be a very simplistic, even puerile observation but an observation which nevertheless keeps on occupying our minds.

Imagine a tiny space in which you have to move either bent in half, twisted sideways or tiptoeing on a 30cm wide corridor among feet, bags, cameras and a million different things having been dislodged by the constant hiccuping motion of the truck and which somehow always end up rolling around on the floor. What fascinates me is the way we have instinctively learnt to share the space in such a coordinated motion that we almost operate as one body. During the first part of the journey, as we spend 90% of our time travelling or waiting at borders, life is a boxful of five minds and bodies canned into a noisy and unstable environment on wheels. Countries, life and dreams flash by at the window, as if we were the static ones and the scenes passing by were actually the ones in motion. The wheels of the truck go round and round, while inside five lives are contained. five spirits, five past and present and futures, five minds travelling their own path of thoughts. While marc and Ramsay take turns driving we each find our rhythm. While one or two of us will sit at the front and pore over the obscure Cyrillic map, others retreat at the back and sleep, or read, or write in their diaries, or prepare food on bowed legs in the lurching galley…
Home for the night can be a roadside truck stop, or an open field, or a mosquito infested clearing near a Polish lake, or a crowded border. Home is where the truck happens to stop and we can be sharing a meal together. Every little thing has gained in richness. Bland breakfast cereals have never tasted so good. Sprouting chickpeas in a dishtowel and nursing our bashed-up looking Basil plant like a pet became a symbol of domestic felicity.

In Smolensk, after 7 days on the road and 2500km worth of dust and grime we all went in search of one of the best thing Russia has to offer: a proper Rushki banya.
50 roubles in the hand of an ancient babushka and we were ushered into the past.
The banya is a public bath and sauna in which time has remained locked outside. In the scorching heat of the sauna women whipped each other with bunches of nettle and shared the miraculous candor of nakedness. As the heat would become unbearable we would totter on the slippery floor and sink into a pool of freezing water, repeating the motion over and over. If nakedness could mean vulnerability, in the banya the feeling was of grace, sisterhood and indefinable beauty. Women navigating in a women’s world.
Russia is an extraordinary place, a place in which our mind forever staggers in the deep paradoxes and contradictions of this vast land in which history seems to have build on itself as opposed to write over itself. At any given time three centuries are juxtaposed before our eyes. A horse-driven cart heaped with hay is parked next to a Hummer 4X4, a naked girl in a steaming room is texting on her mobile phone while a wrinkled Babushka walks past with a battered enamel bucket under her thick arm, her body covered in ashes. Yesterday as we walked though Moscow in the almost riotous
Celebrations of both midnight summer night and Russia’s victory over Holland in the football semi-final, as a million young people danced and kissed each other in the street under the Soviet star of Red Square and thousands of luxury cars lined the street beeping their horn over and over, it was hard to believe that not so long ago Russia sat behind the iron curtain fighting teeth and nails for its Communist dream…

One day in Moscow but already we are longing for the open road again.
The road has become our refuge, our way of life.
The instant our old diesel engine rumbles into life our spirit smiles from within.


Somewhere at the end of this road lies what we have come to look for.
Let us find it.