16 Nov 06
So far, the Paris-Beijing transcontinental drive has covered 3,887 miles. Our Mercedes-Benz E320 CDi, registration S-PP 377 and emblazoned with a rippling Union flag, has arrived in Yekaterinburg, the far side of the Urals, grimy but unscathed.
This busy but nowadays aesthetically challenged city sits about halfway along what is now Russia's southern territorial limit, past palaces destroyed (along with Czar Nicholas II and his family hereabouts) by the Bolsheviks, with Soviet brutalism springing up in its place.
The Soviets renamed the city Sverdlovsk, and it was near here that Gary Powers' U2 spy plane was shot down in 1961, prompting an East-West spy exchange a year later in the best Cold War tradition. So it's hard to credit that I'm here now, about to set off towards Kazakhstan and the greatest amount of continuous empty space I'll have ever encountered. All that nothingness to come... no wonder Stalin thought Kazakhstan a suitable place for troublesome internal exiles to be set to forced labour.
But I'm jumping ahead here. Today's Kazakhstan has suddenly become famous as the land of Borat, so if this new cultural ambassador is to be believed the changes since the Soviet era may not have gone entirely according to plan. First, though, we have to get there, heading via Chelyabinsk (a past Cossack stronghold and later an important stop on the trans-Siberian railway) and seemingly endless birch forests.
At a run-down filling station I encounter my first roadside Russian toilet, in a corrugated triangular hut. Inside is nothing but a stinking hole in the ground. This, as I shall discover, is usual, so it's the birch forest for me. If the former Soviet Union is planning on improving its infrastructure, this might be a good place to start.
