Walked round Kizlyar for a short time, marvelling how a town with such a grisly history could recover. In 1996, Chechen terrorists invaded Dagestan and kidnapped over 1,000 people. They threatened to shoot them and the army was sent in. That drunken buffoon Yeltsin (known in Britain at the time as the “darling of the west”) took personal control of the operation in the hope that it would help him win an election. Got pissed and set one army unit shelling another so that part of the army mutinied. 278 soldiers and an unknown number of hostages were killed. That is why there is such a heavy army presence to reassure people that it won’t happen again.
However the army roadblock we met last night had very friendly soldiers and they were still there in the morning. I think they stopped us to break the monotony of their day. The soldier I spoke to last night asked me to get out of the van and asked “U vas oruzhye?”. Couldn’t believe what I was hearing until he pointed to his semi-automatic. Felt like saying “No but Ive got a howitzer”, but you don’t joke with men with guns! “U vas konyak?”. “No,I don’t drink.” And we were waved on with shouts of “Good luck”.
There is a gravel road to Astrakhan through Lagan which is only 235 miles. We came to a T junction which pointed right to Lagan and left to Yashkul. A man at a garage advised us to go via Yashkul, much better road. And it was, except it lengthened the journey to 343 miles.
The landscape is a mixture of arid steppe and semi-desert for all the 343 miles. It is basically sparse grassland with occasional clumps of bushes with lovely light-green leaves and the occasional single dead tree with a storks nest on it. At one point, crossing a low ridge, I could see for 20-30 miles ahead and a long winding succession of lorries travelling eastwards. At the lonely hamlet of Artezian we stopped and had a rather nice bowl of soup (which they call borshch although it doesn’t have any beetroot in it). This Dagestan version of soup was not as good as the Ingushetiya version. A lorry driver gave me a piece of his Dagestan-style pizza and it was very tasty.
The road block between Dagestan and the Kalmitskaya Republic was identical to that between Ingushetiya and Dagestan, so I was expecting a long bureacratic wait. I suggested Jennifer came with me, and she noticed a sniffer dog and I asked the soldiers if she could take a photo. They beamed with pride and, on going through the security into the registration office, a young lady soldier noticed the pic of the dog. The officials laughed, and she said “Labrador”. She then took our documents, gave them a cursory glance and waved us through the exit while a queue of lorry drivers glared at us.
We passed a Buddhist stupa on the road with a little Buddha statue in it and a quote from the Dalai Lama. Then a lovely thing happened. A lorry in front of us pulled onto the hard shoulder while a similar lorry coming the other way also stopped and the drivers got out for a natter, leaving only a narrow gap to get through. As I squeezed through, I noticed a motor bike coming up behind us and thought “Of shit, the police, I’m going to be done for speeding”, especially as the motor bike passed us and waved us down to stop. It was our Finnish friends from the Georgia-Armenia border. We invited then into the van for a coffee and they related their adventures in Armenia before going to Azerbaijan.
Eventually reaching Astrakhan, I struggled to find the hotel at Ulitsa Leitenant Schmidt. A taxi driver told me to go to the city centre and ask again, a bouncer at a night-club described in great (too much) detail for me to remember, but told me to head for the Kremlin. Three young lads got out their phones and pointed to a large lake before arguing among themselves about how to get to the hotel, another young man spent ages scratching his head before telling me it was very close but the one-way system meant I had to drive a long way round. Eventually, a lovely young couple volunteered to take us there in the van and the girl phoned the hotel to get instructions. We drove the wrong way down a one-way road and, just as I was losing hope, we drew up at the hotel at just after midnight.
