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Holland, 10 November 2003

Last weeks in Europe and Travel Plans

Odv
2004-09-15 11:32:03

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As we are preparing to leave for Ecuador on November 11th, here is an update on our last weeks in Europe and our travel plans for the next months.

When we drove from Poland to Estonia, I had uncertain expectations about the Polish-Lithuanian border. A border I had crossed many times between 1992 and 1994. The fastest I had ever crossed it was in 4 hours, that was by asking a truck driver to let me go in front of him for a small donation (I refused to let the border guards profit from their delaying tactics), thus avoiding the 3 day wait.

After the last crossing in December 1994 and after both countries had again failed to open the second border crossing as they had promised many times, I vowed never to cross it again, at least for the time being. Since then we have always flown directly to Tallinn. The flight duration after all was less then the time you needed to wait at this one particular border!

Had the situation improved by now? It started out badly, since we needed to purchase road insurance for Lithuania, which unlike ALL the other countries in Europe (including Albania) is somehow not a party to the international green card car insurance (they told me this was going to change by next year).

The border crossing took us "only" 1 hour. A record! I was still wondering what the hell those borders guards were doing to need 5 minutes to process 1 car. A Latvian co-victim of this inefficiency assured me that this was the worst border of all and he was right, both the Lithuanian-Latvian and Latvian-Estonian border crossings went pretty smoothly. The only border which had been worse was the Greek-Albanian border, which took us 2.5 hours.

As I had driven the road through Poland to Estonia many times nearly a decade ago, I was hoping for serious signs of improvement. Unfortunately not much of it was visible in Poland. Though the roads did not reach the low Albanian standards, they simply had not improved ...