Motorcyclists Draw Stares Along the Silk Road

A startled peasant on his rickety, horse-drawn cart stared in disbelief as several dozen high-powered motorcycles sped by. This was something he’d never seen before, and he was not sure what to make of it.

With a roar, the shiny, high-tech world of Western prosperity had suddenly crossed paths with the rough, homespun simplicity of the Ukraine.

It was like that throughout the first leg of our motorcycle odyssey across the southern Soviet Union. Present met past. New met old. West met East.

In sleepy villages all across the countryside, people stopped whatever they were doing to watch the remarkable sight. For many, we foreigners, dressed at times like spacemen in shiny silver rainsuits, were the first people they had ever seen from such exotic places as Canada, France and Australia.

Our visits, no matter how brief, kept villagers talking for days.

Certainly, we must have seemed an unusual sight--110 people in a motorcycle caravan flying foreign flags and roaring along the pot-holed, two-lane roads that once were trade routes leading to the famed Silk Road.

The caravan had started out in Paris on a journey via Lyon, Munich, Vienna and Budapest to Chop, a small Ukrainian town just across the Hungarian border. Once in the Soviet Union, we rode from Uzghorod to Chelmitski to Kishinev and on to Odessa.

At Odessa, we had boarded a boat to travel across the Black Sea to Yalta, Sochi and Novorossisk, before disembarking and continuing, on to Krasnodar, Stavropol, Elista and finally to Astrakhan, where the Volga empties into the Caspian Sea.

The two-week, 3,100-mile trip, aimed at increasing cultural understanding and interchange, was sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), several Soviet organizations and BMW of France.

It was an eye-opening experience for both the riders and the people we met along the way.

At first, in places like Chop, the faces of the people who came out of their homes to watch us zoom by were familiar and European-looking. But, as we roared eastward, they became more and more exotic.

The first Asian-looking well-wishers appeared on the 160-mile stretch between Stavropol and Elista, from which an offshoot of the Silk Road once ran south to the Mediterranean. In Elista and Astrakhan, many people had the dark complexion and oval eyes of Mongols and Tartars.

The terrain also changed. Once into the Soviet Union, the well-planned, productive fields and vineyards of the Ukraine and Moldavia were replaced first by occasional farms and then by the great steppe--a vast prairie stretching endlessly to the horizon. In some places, camels trotted along the road, unperturbed by the motorbikes flashing past.

“There are treasures in the south that no one knows about--most tourists just go to Moscow,” said Jeff Brinkert, a Toronto journalist and the only North American on the trip.

Outside Astrakhan, traditional tepees, called kibitki , had been erected by the local residents, mostly Kazakhs and Turks, who entertained us with dances in folk costume and camel-riding displays.

Understandably, there was considerable interest along our route in the motorbikes themselves.

“How much would a motorcycle like that cost?” asked Vyacheslav, a first-year student at Krasnodar Polytechnical Institute and a motorcycle rider himself. When told that one of the BMWs sold for $6,000 to $8,000, he quickly converted the sum into rubles and said he would buy one.

As the caravan moved east, the food changed from typically Russian tourist fare--fried meat and potatoes--into the diverse ethnic dishes of the Soviet south. The local costumes and dances also changed along the way.

In Elista, an area populated by Kalmyks of Mongolian descent, young people dressed in rich-colored silks with sequins and fur hats interpreted through dance the flight of birds, daily chores and their people’s history.

“Under Communism it was a problem to support our traditions, but now, on the contrary, it is easy,” said Nikolai Konstantinovich Serenov, the mayor of Elista. “In schools today, Russian and Kalmyk children are learning the Kalmyk language.”

Despite the new attention paid to local custom, there were many signs of Soviet uniformity, like the statues of Lenin that stood in cities from Chop to Astrakhan. Communist Party slogans, painted on buildings and road billboards, read: “Glory to the Working Class--Builder of Communism” and “Bread Forever, Our Life, Our Motherland, Our Mother!”

Under Soviet rule, various ethnic minorities lived and worked together largely without strife, perhaps bound together by a common fear. But an unfortunate side-effect of President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s social and economic reforms has been ethnic unrest, and sections of the route we traveled had at times been flash points for conflict.

As a result, a police helicopter accompanied the caravan on the road from the Black Sea to Krasnodar, where local authorities were concerned about “extremists.” In Kishinev, the capital of Moldavia, the caravan was diverted from the city center, where a weekly Sunday protest meeting was in progress.

Several hundred years ago, hired warriors guarded the Silk Road’s merchants and their wares. Our caravan was provided full police protection for its 69 motorcycles, 10 cars and a truck toting the 20 tons of precious gasoline. For the full 1,860 miles, three or four police cars, sirens roaring and lights flashing, escorted the group through the countryside and into the towns.

“It makes us feel as if we are in prison,” said a Swiss rider. “Even though we are on our motorbikes, we feel enclosed.”

Authorities’ fears notwithstanding, there were always exuberant supporters who waved at the motorcyclists, clasped their hands together in a victory sign or rode in their cars for miles just to follow the group.

And each night, Soviet hosts were eager to treat the travelers to the best they had.

Although the participants, mostly students from France, West Germany, Canada, Japan, Australia, Austria, Italy and Switzerland, had some complaints, the overall experience did expose them to a part of the world few foreigners see.

“This was not something I would expect from the Soviet Union,” said Kristen Ritchard, a photography student from Australia. “What we know of the Soviet Union is what we learn in school or read in the papers. This is quite a different place.”

The journey did not end in Astrakhan; instead, it merely paused for a while. The trip’s organizers plan to cover the entire Silk Road, but in annual stages.

Next summer, the motorcyclists will resume the trip at Astrakhan and ride through Kazakhstan and Soviet Central Asia to the Chinese border. In 1992, they’ll ride the third and last leg from the Sino-Soviet border to the sea.

For more information on the second two stages, contact either BMW France by writing to Patrick Mage at 3 Avenue Ampere, Montigny le Bretonneux, 78886 St-Quentin-Yvelines cedex; or UNESCO by writing to Nikita Dergat, at 7 Place de Fontenoy, Paris, France 75700.