Field note 08 The Long North
Out of the palace and into the forest.
August 2022, on the third Eurotrip. In at Saint Petersburg, then north west into Karelia, where the roads turn to gravel and the country becomes forest and water.From Rodrigo's road archive
Touch or hover a marker on the route to see what is there.
The Long North
Out of the palace and into the forest.
August 2022, on the third Eurotrip. In at Saint Petersburg, then north west into Karelia, where the roads turn to gravel and the country becomes forest and water.
- 7 daysIn and out
- 60,000+Lakes in Karelia
- 2022The year
08.1With the motorcycle in front of the Hermitage. The museum runs through the Winter Palace itself and holds one of the largest collections on earth.
08.2The Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood, built on the spot where Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. The domes are covered in enamel, not paint.
08.3The Winter Palace across Palace Square, the centre of imperial Russia until 1917.
08.4Jacko on the paving of Palace Square. A Jack Russell on a loaded motorcycle draws a crowd in any language.
08.5Camp and a fire in Karelia. In late August the light hangs on most of the night this far north.
08.6A lake with nobody on it. Karelia has more than sixty thousand of them, and gravel roads that connect almost none.
08.7Jacko off the bike for a moment. Between towns out here there is nothing at all to stop for.
08.8Karelian timber houses. Wood is the building tradition here, and it has barely changed.
08.9The road surface, most of the time.
08.0
08.0
08.0August 2022, on the third Eurotrip. In at Saint Petersburg, then north west into Karelia, where the roads turn to gravel and the country becomes forest and water.
A VPN, a sofa, and a city carrying on as though nothing were happening.
I woke up on a random piece of ground an hour outside the city, where the road had left me the night before. At a fuel station I begged some wifi and fired off a round of couch requests, and by the time I was back on the bike one had been answered.
The flat was on the edge of the city, in a block with no lift, so the luggage went up in several trips because I was not leaving anything to chance. I parked where I could see the motorcycle from the window. My host left me the keys and came back after work. I made my base in the front room and slept on the sofa: couchsurfing, literally.
The first job was a VPN. WhatsApp and Instagram were both blocked in Russia by then because of the war.
What the road kept
The famous part is the smallest part.
Everyone knows the palaces. What a rider actually meets is the two hundred kilometres between one village and the next, with a lake on one side and nobody on the other.Tanks in the street, tourists in the palace.
The next day I stripped the bike down to the top case, put on a t-shirt and jeans, and rode around the city with no luggage on it, which after months of being loaded felt like a holiday.
The best of it was the Winter Palace, the tsars' place, now one of the most famous museums in the world. There were tanks and soldiers scattered around the city, a reminder that Russia had been at war with Ukraine for six months. But contrary to everything I had been told before crossing the border, the city was running normally, full of people and tourists.
I met my host later and we walked around several parts of the city together. The following morning we said goodbye and I set off for Karelia.
Contrary to what everyone had told me, the city was going about its business normally, full of people and tourists.
08.10A bridge on a forest track. Beyond Saint Petersburg the asphalt runs out fairly quickly.
08.11On the road. Between Suoyarvi and Muezersky there are around two hundred kilometres and almost nothing between them.
08.12A village shop. Supplies are simple and the stock is what arrived that week.
08.13Two loaded bikes on the road north.
08.14Pine, in every direction. Russia holds about a fifth of the forest on earth, and this is where it starts.Mud, border police and running out of everything.
North of the city it turned hard. One day I described simply as extreme, purely because of the mud I had to cross to reach where I was going, a spot recommended by a Russian rider I had been in touch with.
Then came the border zone, which in Karelia means the Finnish frontier, and a confused day in front of the Russian border police. My cash was running out at the same time, and that is where the problems started. The following day the border police at a random village turned out to be friendly, communicated with me through a translator and showed me around the area.
Further into the taiga I ran the tank dry. I was carrying a reserve can, which is the only reason the day ended at Ledmozero rather than at the side of the road.
Karelia runs along the Finnish border and is mostly forest, lake and bog. It is the emptiest part of European Russia, and in 2022 it was also a sensitive one: a foreign motorcycle near that frontier attracted attention it would not have attracted anywhere else.
08.15Riding out of a clearing. Karelia is trees, water and very little else.
08.16Another crossing. Rivers here run between the lakes in every direction.
08.17Fuel, carried. The gaps between stations in Karelia are long enough to matter.
08.18A Karelian farmstead in the sun.The field archive
16 more frames from the road
Everything else from the folder, in the order it was taken.
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