From Moscow to the North Cape
by bicycle

The OSM map gets extra points today because it shows us where to get drinking water: There’s a pump right next to the level crossing. It’s become quite hot, almost 30 degrees. We fill up everything we have. A man comes from his yard and wants to fill his buckets. Menno asks if he can take a photo. Sure, says Sergei, and invites us to tea.

Encounters, hospitality, abandoned villages and lonely stretches of land: this diary takes you on a 4000-kilometer journey through rarely visited corners of three countries in north-eastern Europe. With bikes and tent we cycle far away from tourism from Russia to Karelia, through Finland and across the Arctic Circle. Spring also moves north with us, complete with flower meadows, cuckoo calls and swarms of mosquitoes. For 60 days we experience adventure instead of everyday life, and pedal our bikes instead of the hamster wheel.

Chapters:

1. Trip Preparation - bicycle travel gear and equipment
2. From Moscow to Lake Onega - by bicycle in Russia: the capital, Golden Ring, Vologda, Kirilow
3. Karelia - the big lake Onega, a bear, Medvjezhegorsk, dusty roads, lumber trucks and FSB
4. Finland - great camping, lots of rain
5. Lapland - reindeer, cabins in the woods
6. Norway - Barentssee, grand landscape

The book is illustrated with 37 photos and route maps in color.

[...] I’m just about to post on Facebook about our first day when an older gentleman pushing a mountain bike approaches and is delighted to speak with us. He wants to know where we’re from and where we’re heading. We have a long conversation, the subject of which isn’t entirely clear. He recommends that we buy paper maps and points to the bookshop on the corner. He would’ve shown us on a papermap the sights in Oblast Moscow we absolutely shouldn’t miss. He finds our OSM app suspect and thinks we’re unprepared for such a difficult tour. I end up asking him if he knows where we can get denatured alcohol. I start with У меня ест вопрос (oo minya yest vopros; I have a question). He stares at me expectantly, happy to hear a complete sentence and hoping he can finally help us. “Denatured alcohol? For an alcohol stove? No, we don’t have that here.” This probably confirms his impression regarding our preparations: No paper maps, and no fuel. Not to mention our limited knowledge of Russian. Nevertheless, he continues trying to help us. He has a liter of alcohol at home and could give us some of it, he says hesitantly. Okay, apparently there is no fuel alcohol in Russia. We haven’t found any alcohol over 40% in the stores. So we give up for the time being and resign ourselves to cold food.

The traffic is going better today than yesterday. It’s quieter, and we’re also getting used to it. We stop at a gas station where I buy some water and two Mars bars and accidentally pay for the next customer’s gas. The cashier had been grumpily counting the cash for the shift change, and hadn’t noticed our bicycles or me at her window. So she has no idea that I don’t want gasoline, or that I might be a foreigner who doesn’t understand her. She mumbles something in my direction, which I interpret as “with a card?”, and I indicate yes. It was a misunderstanding: She’d been asking about the number of the pump. I look at the high amount on my credit card receipt (she hadn’t used the cash register) while the next customer tries unsuccessfully to pay for his gas. Total confusion ensues, especially since I paid by card. The cashier looks up from her pile of money, sees me and the bicycles and finally gets it. Her bad mood gets worse. She’s in absolutely no condition today to be able to solve my problem, so she just gives us a pissed-off stare. [...]

[...] A sign tells us we’ve left the Moscow region, and are now in Oblast Twer. The street immediately becomes quieter. There are wooden signs on electricity poles with the words творог, сур, молоко and сметана. It’s good to know at least the Russian words for food: творог (tvorog) is a grainy white cheese, much stronger than cottage cheese and cyp (syr) is what we’d call a young cheese. Молоко (moloko) means milk and сметана (smetana) means sour cream. With our stomachs growling, we turn toward the dairy farm. It looks organic. Not that I know much about agriculture, but at least I don’t see a closed stable with an exhaust system and silo, or perfectly straight furrows in the field. There’s a wooden house in front of the path. Strollers, bicycles, toys. No dog. In the back a large barn or maybe another wooden house will be built from wood. The farmer takes big strides towards us. He smiles and greets us with a firm handshake and Добро пожаловать (dobra pazhalavatch; welcome). He takes us into the house, to the small kitchen that also serves as a salesroom, and calls for his wife, who comes down the stairs with three small children in tow. They let us taste the tvorog and the sour cream, which are very tasty. The farmer fills up a PET bottle with milk from a bucket, a plastic bag with tvorog from another bucket, and a mug with sour cream from a large glass. We’re also offered bacon, but we don’t need any. We pay the equivalent of around € 3, and immediately take a few gulps of milk to assuage our hunger. Then the farmer sends us out on the farm with the eldest child (a girl of about 8) to show us everything: pigs, vegetables, rabbits, and a new calf. [...]

[...] In the late afternoon, we spot a sign saying Museum village. The place is called Uchma. We’re in a sightseeing mood, so we take the turn and drive through a normal little village with one or two paths and arrive at the penultimate courtyard of the museum. There are many wooden houses on this somewhat small area, not painted in the usual bright colors, but rather in their natural state, with the typical nalitchniki, the elaborate decorations on window panes and gables.

We park our bikes on the way to the entrance and open the gate. A big dog lies sluggishly in the sun and blinks at us. The afternoon sun bathes the ensemble in a golden light as a couple of geese wobble across the grass. The terrain slopes down to the river, merging seamlessly into swamp and then into the Volga. We hear film sounds coming from one of the buildings and open the door. We’re received by a woman who speaks English. Now we’re in the Russian Village Museum, which depicts village life in post-war Russia up to Perestroika. There had been livestock and fishing here, and of course agriculture. We look at tools, clothes and furniture from that period and take funny photos with Soviet accessories.

“Nowadays nobody fishes here,” says the woman from the museum. Commercial fishing is even prohibited. There’s no more agriculture either, “ a tragedy for Russia,” she says. Maybe I should tell her about the organic farmer 70 km south? What she’s probably referring to is that there’s no fruit or vegetables from Russia in the supermarkets, which we’d already noticed. Even in small shops, fruit and vegetables are very limited because nothing grows here at this time of the year.

Naturally she wants to know what brought us here and what our route looks like. Menno is about to show her on his phone when he realizes he left it in the bike’s holder. [...]

[...] So we drive to the ferry and wait until 6 p.m. There are already quite a few people waiting, all with bulk purchases, many with plants. A woman asks me if I can keep an eye on her bags. Yes, of course. When she comes back, she starts interrogating us. Where from, where to, why. She says she is from Finnish Karelia, lives here in Petrozavodsk and has a dacha in Kizhi. That’s where she’s headed now. She wants to know exactly where our journey will take us. Somehow she’s not really happy with my answers. She points to Menno: Он тоже не говорит по-русски? (on tosche nje govorit po russki), he also doesn’t speak Russian? What’s that supposed to mean, тоже!? I’ve been struggling through this conversation in Russian for a quarter of an hour and then she asks whether he “also” doesn’t speak Russian? No, I say.

Then she pulls an 8-fold Karelian newspaper out of her medium-sized woman’s handbag and holds the Finnish-language front page under my nose. Here, that’s me, she says. Then she speaks Finnish. I assure her in German that my Finnish is undoubtedly even worse than my Russian and she switches back again. I understand that she wrote this article on the occasion of the May 9 demonstration, which is pictured on the front page. In the picture, she’s holding up a sign with a photo from the forties of a young woman. Her sister, she explains, a doctor, very pretty. Then there are dates and war events that I can’t follow. Even after studying the Wikipedia article, Karelia as a republic remains a fuzzy autonomous region for us, which seems to be the result of several fuzzy wars.

In any case, I recognize that I’m looking at a regional patriot. I make a teachable face and emphasize my receptivity by now and then repeating her phrases. Suddenly she looks sternly at Menno again: Is that your husband? Yes, I say, and fear that Menno is not sporting the appropriate facial expression. Do you have children? No. Do you want some? A minefield! Может быть (moschet byitj), maybe, I say and sense something bad is coming. In fact, she looks sternly at Menno again. I have no idea what her problem is. И он? Он хочет? And him? Does he want them? [...]

[...] In Lahkolampi we go to buy ice cream. We’re standing in line when a man in a uniform and a uniform cap comes in and barks something. Besides us and the saleswoman there’s a woman, a couple, and three children who’ve been hanging around since our arrival, holding chocolate bars and inspecting us curiously. The uniformed guy speaks directly to me. I tell him I don’t speak Russian. He says another sentence which I don’t understand, probably official Russian, something like: “Identify yourself!” Is it as funny and ambiguous in Russian as it is in German, where it could also mean: “Deport yourself”? “Passport,” he then remembers.

I walk with him outside to the bikes and show him my passport. Menno comes too. Вы тоже не говорите по русски? (Vi tozhe ne gavarite pa ruski), he asks Menno. No, he doesn’t speak Russian either. I speak English, I say. “Google,” he says and laughs. He takes out his cell phone and wants to photograph the passports with the migration papers. The wind keeps blowing the paper away. Cooperatively, I hold the passport and paper so that he can photograph our passports. He’s there with a civilian car, a rather shabby small car. I tap his tag with my index finger and read aloud: Ka-re-li-a. He nods approvingly. I ask as if I could not read his stamp myself: Вы полиция или армия? Are you police or military, ФСБ, FSB, he answers patiently while typing on his cell phone in the blazing sun. Aha, so he’s actually just surprised to see us here and now of course curious. It’s fine. As a foreigner, you’re likely to be stopped by the FSB near the border. I’d expected controls much earlier.

Uniform Cap is finished sending photos.“Google Perevodshik,” he says into his cell phone. Google asks us for our route. I explain it. He wants to see where we’ve been. When I show him the track on OSM, he perks up and looks at it closely. He wants to know exactly when we arrived. April 30th. He counts on his knuckles to see if there is an April 31st. There isn’t. This is important if we leave on May 29th and stayed in Moscow on May 1st and 2nd, and wisely nowhere more than three days. The Google translator is now asking us if we have a Marshall plan - Маршрутная листа (marshrutnaya lista) in the original, i.e. a route plan. No, unfortunately we don’t have a Marshall Plan, we confess cluelessly and make serious faces, just Open Street Map on the mobile phone. Mr. Cap calls his colleague Aleksei and tells him who he has here: Germans, and all by bicycle, he concludes. [...]