If nothing else, this demonstrated that there really is an international bond between cab-drivers. The Volga, probably from the mid-1980s, looked and felt like a 1960s Fiat, albeit a big and luxurious one. Rushing past were some of the world's most famous baroque and neo-classical architecture, of more interest to us at that time was the fact that the road was wet in parts, dry in others and icy in between. Added to this were gargantuan potholes and trolley bus tracks, which often stand many centimetres proud of the road and cause cars to change direction or bounce clear into the air. Even where the road was smooth, our driver was forced to make liberal steering inputs just to keep the car travelling straight ahead.
Local law prevents the use of the horn, and it seems to be the only law everyone obeys.
When a oncoming car turned across our path, our driver got his best chance to put his well-worn piece of Soviet machinery to the test. There are no words which quite explain the sensation of sitting above four drum-braked wheels which are skating, squirming and bouncing over a surface made up of bitumen, mud, steel, pebbles and clear air. But the eyes opened fairly wide as the rogue car got ever closer. No, we didn't hit and no, the driver's poker face didn't acknowledge that this was anything out the ordinary. The St Petersburg motoring experience, however, is not composed exclusively of exciting near misses.