Moscow - Crimea: Vatnik vacation. Part I (PHOTO, VIDEO)
Moscow - Sevastopol, May 08 (Navigator, Ivan Nikashin) - How does Russian Crimea greet Russian tourists? About this in the author's column for "Navigator" writes a Russian political strategist Ivan Nikashin, who traveled by car from Moscow to the peninsula for the May holidays. Ivan has been to Crimea more than once - several years ago he worked here in the team of ex-governor of the Moscow region Boris Gromov.
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...After drinking vodka and playing Kamarinsky on the balalaika, my friend and I decided to go to the Crimea in May. Against the backdrop of well-known events, it is very trendy to emphasize racial arrogance, and therefore the first phrase is partly comic. But in general, driving a car to the peninsula in the midst of the military and sports festival “Russian Spring” means you have to be an unscrupulous official with a mighty horse or a fool. Naturally, we had no ksivs. As well as the air tickets promised from above for seven and a half back and forth (they were twenty-seven to Simfer, if that). But the road called. Crimea is our homeland, because we lived, worked, and I even remember the time when the Massandra port was simply “red” and not “red”. And yes, I hitchhiked in 98 after the Rolling Stones’ Moscow concert. And yes, my grandfather fought. In addition, adventure was guaranteed, judging by the posts from the queue for the ferry in Taman. In general, let's go, as Gagarin told Kerouac!
Adventures were not long in coming. According to the ancient Russian tradition, you had to pack a lot of unnecessary things into your suitcase for two days in order to eventually forget your passport. Thanks to the driver of the Lyubertsy administration, Ilyich, for taking my document to the Moscow Ring Road and thereby reducing the time it took to pass the Moscow Ring Road itself. Now Ilyich is always in my heart. Special respect to the head of the Lyubertsy region V.P. Ruzhitsky, who gave me the go-ahead for a short vacation during the difficult pre-election year. Now his name will be indexed in Yandex again, and perhaps I will be forgiven for being late for work. And this is quite likely, given the hell that awaited us at the ferry crossing. But more about that later, while our Chevrolet was briskly running along the federal highway, decorated in places with toll sections, where for money they offered smooth asphalt and emergency commissioners, here and there serving behind the wheel of expensive Volkswagen pickups (yes, they go there too our money!).
Happy is the motor tourist who does not have a license! He has the opportunity to look around and rejoice at how the fresh, soft emerald spring greenery is steadily winning more and more space from the post-winter domestic dirt. He drinks himself a beer and welcomes the victorious march of the Russian spring. Reads the road signs and rejoices in all the riches of the great, powerful, truthful and free. Here, near the Sturgeon River, is a monument to the Orthodox warrior Evgeniy - the one who refused to remove the cross from his chest and was beheaded for this by Chechen bandits or “shaitans,” as Russian patriot Ramzan Kadyrov calls them. Here is an advertisement for a roadside motel with Tina Kandelaki, inviting passers-by either for a meal or for an hour. There are gypsies running around at gas stations, trying to commit criminal acts against tired truck drivers and tourists who have come out to pee. Here is the river with the romantic and tolerant name Golubki, and here is Nepryadva, where the polite people of Prince Dimitri drank from their helmets, and the turn to Kulikovo Field, and the Beautiful Sword, where representatives of the legitimate Mongol-Tatar government were later driven.
If I were a poet, I would write something topical, like:
No Russians? Not true! - here she is, Nepryadva!
Is it risky to fight? This field is Kulikovo!
But fortunately, I am not a poet, so, having asked the reader for forgiveness, we will entertain him a little more, reducing the intensity of civil pathos with reasoning about the eternal. Roadside toilets in Russia. Just as in tsarist times the miles were striped, they beat out the rhythm of the road. These brick strongholds, each of which is a potential firing point for repelling enemy attacks, inspire both involuntary respect for their secondary properties and disgust for their main properties. Not once, not twice, not three! - I had occasion to see standing male persons perched behind this artificial barrier and sitting persons, I don’t know what gender, for he is a gentleman and an astigmatist. In any case, no one went inside. It is typical that in paid areas, stone spectacled “emjos” are often found at regular intervals. Apparently, there is some kind of regulation for the number of toilets, but there is still no requirement for quality. Breathe, as they say, deeply - we are driving through Sochi.
The Lipetsk region flew by unobtrusively: prices for travel on a commercial road, however, were growing, but for gasoline they were steadily falling, however, not falling to the level accepted in the oil-producing powers. But in the cafe with the short name “Rus”, the price list pleased me, as did the assortment, the harbinger of which was the exciting smell of a hodgepodge of mixed meat and the Rabelaisian portrait of the driver who was eating it. There was a traffic jam on the border with the Voronezh region as a result of an accident, but another beautiful ethnic name – Kon-Kolodez – came into view.
The residents of Voronezh were a little tired of the obsessive PR of their successes: billboards kept reporting that the locals held the championship in milk and cattle (cows, to put it simply!), and in general, in terms of a set of indicators of living standards, the region was in 7th place in Russia.
The answer to why only on the seventh was given by the roads and roadsides. The first were uneven, like life in the 90s, and the second showed such shiny and black dirt that one recalled the impassable road to Chernigov, described in the epic about the horse traveler Ilya Muromets. Closer to Rostov it became completely dark, rain began to pour, thereby determining a coffee break and a halt near the Gazprom gas station. She was remembered by the two ladies serving the cash registers. The sociable and pretty cashier had the appropriate surname Tokovaya, and the harmful and not entirely beautiful cashier had the appropriate surname Gadyuchkina.
The Rostov region lives in the name of Sholokhov. If it’s a cafe, then “Aksinya” or “At Shchukar’s”. If it’s a hamburger, then it’s definitely a “Donskoy” one. When the Chinese build a bridge to Crimea and the threat of a ferry crossing does not hang over the road traveler, we will definitely stop by Veshenskaya!
In Kuban, the Cossack theme is growing. It greets you with signs of settlements and sounds on the waves of the Kazak-FM radio station, a version of Radio Chanson with local traditions adjusted. The main content of the songs: gay-hop, go for a walk! But for vacationers it’s the best. I was pleased with the tolerant inscription at the entrance to one of the villages: “We welcome guests, please respect order and our traditions!”
In Staronizhnesteblievskaya we met a local artist and woodcarver Oleg. Oleg showed his workshop: there are paintings, and cats, the blanks of which he cuts out with a chainsaw within an hour, and Tatar throwing axes and much more. I remember the portrait of a drinking monkey - it already looks painfully like Someone! Oleg said that this was an accident.
In addition to the presence of creative people in Kuban, I was also pleased with the abundance of unpasteurized beer - Stavropol, Adyghe, as well as the fact that everything here blooms and smells not only thanks to the climate, but also to the thriftiness of the local residents. Unlike the Moscow region, where only cottages are growing well so far, among the Cossacks all the fields are plowed and sown, grain is in the elevators, and cows are in the cowsheds. The manure waste heaps clearly demonstrated that everything was ok with the nutrition and care of the local cows.
But here comes Taman. It was easier for Lermontov’s smugglers: they got into the boat and sailed. After passing through the village with the revolutionary name Ilyich, we ran into a queue that went somewhere for a ferry to the port of “Caucasus”.
The queue deserves a separate description. We stood for eleven and a half hours - some said that there were five kilometers ahead to the goal, others were more optimistic. But time passed. Every now and then locals rushed forward in the oncoming traffic, followed by guests with Moscow license plates and never turned back. So the blogs don’t lie about the business of selling seats. One impudent “Lexus” with thieves’ license plates, wedged in front of us, was rebuffed, and several neighboring crews joined in at once. Still, self-organization of citizens is a great thing! And it’s clear why Muscovites are not loved anywhere. For arrogance and show-off.
Another profitable business for the aborigines is feeding. The phrase “we have such prices in Kuban!” quickly became a meme in our car (soy sausage in dough - half a toss, instant Nescafe - thirty). The entrepreneurial spirit of the Kuban residents gradually flowed into the resort hospitality of the Crimeans, and now signs with offers for rental housing began to appear on the trees. After flying over the line of a helicopter with the authorities of civilization, something else was added: the people were given mobile plastic amenities, naturally, pointedly ignored by the men.
When our patience began to run out, and it became clear that we would meet May Day in line, the movement in the column suddenly accelerated. A traffic controller suddenly emerged from the ground and shouted: if you want to board the ferry, get there quickly! And he pointed somewhere away from the main line, into the industrial zone. Two more cars managed to pass behind us, after which the passage was blocked again. In the industrial zone, it turned out that the cars would sail on a cargo ferry, which was additionally adjusted to prevent collapse. The process was led by some young people wearing tricolor vests from a company that provided transport services during the Sochi Olympics. This did not add order, but the already accumulated experience of self-organization allowed citizens to quite quickly turn the crowd into a cultural queue.
Finally, the cars and drivers were loaded onto a truck, and the passengers set off for Crimea on the Yeisk ferry, which could only accommodate two dozen cars, but there were many more people. Remembering the outgoing Spring and Labor holiday, the most unusual in my life, I forever renamed the craft “Etiegomaisk”.
Forty minutes - and here it is, Crimea, here it is - Kerch! The cars were promised to be returned to the owners in three hours, so there was time to look at the militias on duty at the port and remember all the delights of the Crimean service that developed during the period of Partition. The lady from the cafe - a similar one Tabakov played in the play “Always on Sale” - immediately shortchanged me by fifty rubles (for that kind of money in Kuban you can buy a whole sausage in dough!). I paid without talking, because any show costs money. And it was: for fifteen minutes the aunt was tormented by her conscience, since it was one thing to cheat a Muscovite, and another to cheat a compatriot. And I decided to return the money. But that’s not all: the returned half toss did not give the lady peace, and after another quarter of an hour she took it back, recalculating the amount for bread and plastic dishes. Well, you get the idea. The counter-argument that she shamelessly passed off a glass with a capacity of 0,4 as a half-liter glass finally pushed the lady onto the warpath. Our neighbors, the Voronezh students, suffered in this battle. After eating, they fell dead on the table to sleep, as it was the turn that decided the students' last strength. The aunt tried to deprive them of sleep, because in a dream a person does not make orders and does not bring profit. When asked to bring regular tea, the owner of the tavern brought a cop. He turned out to be a young kid still in a Ukrainian uniform, but already tuned in to a Russian salary. After hearing about the Law on the Protection of Consumer Rights, the servant of the Law realized that it was not worth the risk and quietly retreated.
The three hours promised by the carriers passed in such innocent entertainment. And then three more. And then people began to grumble, especially after the joke I suggested that the cars might already be unloaded somewhere in sunny Turkey. Self-defense representatives came running in response to the noise, the most intoxicated of whom tried to explain that they were only keeping order and were not responsible for anything at all. At that moment, a young man in a Sochi vest appeared again and everyone began to be called onto buses to go to the fishing port of Kerch to pick up cars.
The fishing port was no longer guarded by self-defense forces, but by golden eagles. After some time, seven hundred tourists, including babies and elderly ladies, began to forget about the suffering of the children on the Maidan, hold rallies and slightly press against the iron gates of the entrance. Thank God that at that moment the technical problems were solved, the ramp, which did not open, opened, and the column of the impromptu motor rally flowed to Crimea.
See you soon, Kerch! Heading to Sevastopol!
It was May 2nd and no one knew anything about what was happening in Odessa...
To be continued.
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