Day 8 Sunday July 6th. Mileage 1594miles location 200 miles west Moscow

Up Sunday morning to find the hotel doesn't serve breakfast until 9:00am on Sunday so we went into Ludza and found a nice cafe/bar attached to another hotel and they served us a much better breakfast than our hotel had offered the day before. Document Man returned to Ludza with his original documents at about 9pm last night.

Straight to border and there was an enormous queue. Just like good English gentlemen we duly waited for about 15 mins. then a lorry driver said motorcycles always go straight to the front, so this is what we duly did. We waited about four cars back from the very front of the queue and after about an hour with no movement at all the Latvian border guards came past in a van and indicated that the motorcycles could proceed, but only if we pushed them and didn't drive them!! So we dutifully pushed our bikes about 500 metres and were then processed quite quickly by the Latvian exit guards. They then said we should push the bikes until they are no longer being covered by the CCTV cameras and then we could ride them across no mans land the the Russian control points.
Arrived here and processing by the Russians took about one and a half hours to fill in one form after which they wished us "dasvidania" and we were out and into Russia. The whole border process took about 4 hours in total, and this was even with us going to the front of the queue in Latvia. The people in the queue where we originally joined will not get through until August at the rate they operate.

We stopped immediately when through the border at a petrol station where there was a "dealer" who arranged everything, insurance for the bikes, money exchange etc. etc. We purchased four months bike insurance for 63 dollars each and also changed $500 into roubles to keep the "kitty" going.

We saw a large moose at the side of the motorway. The scenery has been of mainly forested undulating land with many stagnant pieces of water. No wonder that the place is renowned for its mosquitos.

We're about 500km west of Moscow and hope to get to the eastern side of the city tomorrow.

No pictures today to busy sweating and cursing.

The last hour was driving through heavy rain with standing water in the rutted road surface. Paul's bike did not cut out as it had done in the past when we hit these conditions.

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