From: meb4593@galileo.rtn.ca.boeing.com (Michael Bain)
Newsgroups: rec.motorcycles
Subject: Tacoma Cop Catches All of Russia on a Motorcycle
Date: 21 Dec 92 22:58:28 GMT
Organization: Boeing Commercial Airplane Group, Seattle


Reprinted without permission from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
(Joe Mooney, P-I Reported)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

When police Lt. Darrell Hughes sought permission to ride his
motorcycle the length of what once was the Soviet Union, a feat never
attempted by the sensible people who live in that country, he got a
rather firm "nyet" from Intourist, the bureacracy that deals with
visiting foreigners.

"Impossible" was the word agency officials used.

They were wrong.  But not by much - as Hughes would discover in a tail
bonejarring, 5,700-miles trek across a land where paving was
considered optional even on the main roads.  One Siberian pothole
stands out:  Both of Hughes' thumbs were sprained as he clung to the
handle grips.

But as Hughes would eventually concede, when the Intourist people used
the word "impossible," they meant it in more than just the
bureaucratic sense.  There was some compassion in their verdict as
well.

He now believes that if it hadn't been for the protection of the
Russion National Police - two officers accompanied him every wretched
kilometer, from Eastern Siberia to Finland - he would have become
hopelessly lost in the wilds of Siberia.  "The Siberian roads aren't
marked very well," he says.

Or he would have died at the hands of the Soviet motorist whom Hughes,
a former traffic officer, characterizes as "absolutely crazy."

Ordinarily, a thumbs-down from Intourist would place an insurmountable
obstacle in the way of a would-be traveler to the Soviet Union.

But Hughes found a way around the obstacle last February when he was
assigned to coordinate a visit to Tacoma by four high-ranking police
officials from Vladivostok.

Their stay was part of the formalities marking a sister city-port
relationship between Tacoma and Vladivostok.  Hughes took the
opportunity to suggest the motorcycle tour to his visitors as a
demonstration of good will.

The official answer was slow in coming.  But on June 1, three months
after a formal, written request, Hughes got a letter telling him to be
at the starting line on July 1.

He didn't have to check with pessimists at Intourist to realize that
was impossible.  He taked his hosts into giving him an additional 30
days to make arrangements and was in Vladivostok by Aug 11.

A shipping problem delayed arrival of his motorcycle, a BMW R100 GS
Paris-Dakar, a 1,000cc jewel that breezed through the trek without a
hitch.  But the delay nearly wiped out the trip.

The bike finally arrived five days before Hughes would have been
forced to cancel in deference to Siberian weather.  But on Aug 20, he
set out from Vladivostok, accompanied by two majors from the national
police, Victor Strigin and Alexander Golubshansky.

The Russians rode in a police car that had been made up to look like a
Tacoma Police vehicle.  Using razor blades to cut out stencils, they
hand-painted Tacoma Police Department emblems on the front doors.

Their itinerary first took them 500 miles north of Vladivostok, where
they encountered a serious technical problem: no roads for a 700-mile
stretch through the Siberian wilderness.

Here, above the Chinese border, even the indifferent attempts to
create the dirt roads that were standard in other areas in Siberia had
been dispensed with.

He could cross it only on a train.

Hughes, his traveling companions, their car and his motorcycle were
crammed for four days and four nights in a boxcar.  They slept in the
boxcar; they at in the boxcar; they cooked in the boxcar.

Hughes remembers it as "the longest four days of my life."

Still, the trip wasn't all misery and inconvenience.  The people along
the way treated Hughes as a hero.  He carried $1,500 and a credit card
to cover expenses, but in a country where the cash in his pocket was
more than a colonel in the national police earns in a year, his money
was no good.

Hughes had to learn not to stare at objects, otherwise they were
thrust upon him as gifts.  In the course of his trip, he sat in
Stalin's chair and put his feet up on Stalin's desk in a once-secret
bunker in the city of Camera.

He was given a number of private tours, ranging from industrial
strength (automobile factories and hydroelectric plants), to sublime
behind-the-scenes visits to the Hermitage, the Pushkin Palace and the
Kremlin Museum.

He stayed in a luxury villa on the Volga River where previous notable
guests included Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Soviet spece here
Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

And along the way, Hughes attended Moscow's Bolshoi Ballet in blue
jeans, tennis shoes and a dirty jacket.  He was shown precisely where
his trip would be commemorated in the national police museum.

And he posed for pictures with citizens n front of virtually every
statue and memorial in every city along the way.

"It was the closest thing to being Elvis that I'll ever experience,"
Hughes said.

Impressions?  Hughes found the former Soviet Union astonishing dowdy
by American standards.

He was able to wash his clothes only twice during his six-week stay:
once on arrival in Vladivostok and not again until he reached Moscow.
There, in a "luxury" hotel, a maid came to his room, washed his
clothes by hand in the bathtub and hung them to dry on the shower rod.

What infrastructure exists is in a sad state of disrepair. 

"It's almost as if the public works department gave up and said, 'We
aren't going to fix this anymore,' " Hughes said.

But the dominant impression was the warmth of the people.  They loved
his motorcycle;  they loved the daring of his trip; they loved the
idea of a visiting American police officer, particularly one who
didn't wear a uniform; but mostly they loved the explanation for his
remarkable journey.

Hughes told them such a trip probably should be considered impossible,
given the language barriers, the cultural barriers, the costs and the
physical hardships.

"But if we put our minds together," he told them, "nothing is
impossible.  We can do anything."

Hughes reached the border of Finland, his official objective, on Sept.
30, one month after embarking from Vladivostok.

He hopes to bring his Russian friends, Majors Strigin and
Golubshansky, to the United States for a payback trip down the West
Coast to California.

The pieces haven't fallen into place yet, but Hughes is confident they
will.

This time, no one is using the word impossible.

-- 
Michael "Chuck" Bain                       meb4593@icdfs.ca.boeing.com  
----------------------------------------------------------------------
		     "Semi-Loud Pipes Save Lives"
Newsgroups: rec.motorcycles