Kirilov, Vologda Region

June 1, 2013

It seems as though it’s been much more than four days since I arrived in Moscow to begin scouting our first tours here.  Svetlana met my flight and we were soon weaving through traffic that’s as heavy as New York City – perhaps even a bit worse.

I sometimes whimsically refer to Svetlana as my “Russian Agent”. The fact that she’s a lovely young blond who is fluent in English and who has racked up significant achievements in karate certainly embellishes the analogy and the image. Over the last several years “Sveta” has become a good friend who I view as an important business partner.  She’s agreed to accompany me through Russia on my two-week scouting adventure. We recently hired our first Russian-speaking tour leader, but Sveta has agreed to also accompany our group on our first Russian tour next year.

It didn’t take long to confirm the wisdom of having a Russian partner. Road  signs are purely Russian and once you step outside the lobby of your hotel in Moscow you aren’t likely to hear English spoken. I can’t even read the maps, since the Russian alphabet is different than ours.  What sort of chance do you have when “Kirilov, Vologda Region” is depicted as “Кириллов, Вологодская Обл”.

I had asked Sveta to try to arrange meetings with some key people in Moscow who I believed it would helpful for me to know as I focus on building our business here.  We had hardly left the airport parking lot when she’s on the phone, confirming three meetings, the first of which would take place at lunch, after I had a few hours to clean up and change out of my “airplane clothes”.  By the time I was ready to spend a second night in Russia I had already had very productive meetings with the head of BMW Motorrad for Russia, the president of the BMW MOA (BMW Motorcycle Owners Association of Russia) and the president of the Russian Motorcycling Federation.  All of them willingly shared local knowledge and helpful suggestions regarding our plans.

Question: What do you do when the president of the BMW owners group encourages you to stay in Russia for an additional week so you can join a small group of riders for their annual off-road getaway in the remote, northernmost reach of this expansive country?

Answer: you do a quick check to insure the world won’t come to an end if you’re gone for an additional week and then you accept the gracious offer.  More on that in a future blog, once the scouting for our first Russia trip is finished.

During the last few years, Sveta has logged a few thousand miles on the back of my motorcycle in the USA as well as South America. She’s traveled extensively with us in Africa and New Zealand too, so she knows what long two-wheeled trips is all about.  As we planned our scouting mission we wrestled with the question of doing the scouting by motorcycle or by car.  Although we would have enjoyed the benefit of having the motorcycle for photo opportunities, Sveta persuaded me at the last moment to use her car rather than a motorcycle.

“We’re going to travel in many areas of the country where I have never been, and I haven’t been able to get reliable information about road conditions along the way,” she cautioned.  “We’ll have a much better opportunity to get all of the scouting done according to our schedule if we take my car for this scouting.”

So, the car it is for the scouting, but I can look forward to the last week riding a 1200GS Adventure from Moscow to Murmansk and into the Russian wilderness. Not a bad combination.

Shortly before leaving for Russia, Sveta called to say that Sergey Gruzdev expressed interest in joining us for a significant part of the scouting.  I had met Sergey earlier in the year when I led a private Russian trip from Bariloche to Ushuaia.  When I questioned why he would be interested in accompanying us, Sveta said that like her, Sergey had never visited some of the areas where we would be going and he had always wanted to see them.  So now we’re a two-car caravan with Sergey in the lead and Sveta and I following behind.

So here I am in the small Russian village of Kirilov, after traveling about 800 kilometers (almost 500 miles) during the last two days.  This has been great mileage, considering the amount of time that we’ve been spending checking out hotels, restaurants, local attractions, and of course, taking a few hundred photos.  As a rule of thumb, I try to spend about one day of scouting for every two days that we’ll ultimately build into the itinerary for the tour.

I don’t have many friends who have had the opportunity to tour in Russia, but most tourist itineraries are limited to a few “Golden Ring” cities, generally beginning and ending in either Moscow or St. Petersburg.  After leaving Suzdal and Yaroslavl (where we spent our first night on the road) we left the Golden Ring behind and are traveling in an area where few foreign tourists tread, and where you won’t get any help from travel booklets and brochures or from Google searches.  Several of the “treasures” that we’ve discovered in the past few days will provide riders with a very unique and authentic Russian experience that it would be virtually impossible for them to find on their own.  Glenda is one example.

As we turned off the paved road to explore what appeared to be an interesting village set on the shores of a lake, we passed an elderly Russian woman riding her bicycle. I told Sveta that it would be great to have a photo of her, so she stopped the car and asked the woman if she would mind if i took a few photos.  The woman was shy, but agreed to pose for me.  After engaging her in conversation, Sveta said that the woman, whose name is Glenda, said that it was a shame to take a photo along the road, because her son had built her a beautiful little house and it’s a shame we couldn’t take the photos there.  Sveta asked the woman how we could find the house and promised to come and see her after we scouted the rest of the village.  Glenda got back on the bike and pedaled away, probably doubtful that she would see us again.

We found a small “general store” where Sveta purchased a bag or oranges and a box of candy that I could present to Glenda.  When we pulled up to Glenda’s home, she was working in her garden.  She was surprised and delighted when we presented her with the gifts, and she spent the next half hour showing us around her property and posing for numerous photos.  She assured Sveta that we would be welcome to stop and visit her again in the future when we return next year with a group of motorcyclists.  Sveta assured me that a future visit to the village would be as interesting and important to the villagers as it would be to our guests.  This sort of “treasure” makes scouting a tour so incredibly rewarding.

Sveta, Sergey and I are having the time of our lives and are laughing a lot at some of our unexpected experiences.  Both of them have found that they are having difficulty communicating with the locals because the dialects are so different from anything they have heard in the past.  They admit to being surprised by this, as they have never traveled in this part of Russia before.  Sveta suggested to Sergey that since he’s having trouble communicating with the locals in Russian that he may as well spend more time speaking to me and to practice his English.

So what am I finding so far about roads, meals, accommodations, and points of interest along the way?  Unfortunately I’m out of time as we’re now preparing to leave Kirilov and continue north.  I have only enough time to look for an internet connection so that I can post this blog before getting back on the road.  It looks like I’ll be able to post it from Petrozavodsk, were we’ll take an hour and a half boat ride to visit a famous World Heritage site – Kizhi Museum Reserve.  I’m posting a few photos, but don’t have time to do many.  Put the mouse over the image to get the navigation bars.

More to follow.