The final day of our World Record Run started near the border between Lithuania and Latvia, so we realized that we could be some hours ahead of our schedule. The main challenges that could destroy our plans were our last border crossing between Latvia and Russia, which often takes a lot of time, and low temperatures – about -1,5˚C, so roads could be icy. Also, we needed to stop in the Latvian town of Daugavpils to remove some additional equipment. Thanks to our friend Pavel and his colleagues from the Volkswagen dealership in Latvia, we made all removing operations whithin 15 minutes! So we were ready for the border crossing, which took about 30 minutes and that is a really short time for it. We also want to say thank you to our partners from DB Schenker, who helped us to make the crossing of that border as fast as possible. So at 04:30 am in the morning we started our driving on the Russian M9 highway which goes exactly to our east destination point. Now we were sure that we could be faster than planned. We needed a little bit more than 5 hours to reach it. But we couldn’t imagine, that our World Record Tour will end so quickly and we couldn’t realize, that a few hours later everything will be finished and we have to say “that is all”. At 09:50 am that was really all – we stopped our car near the sign “МОСКВА” (“MOSCOW”) at M9 Highway close to the Moscow Ring Road. But we had to prepare for some formalities, so the official time of our arrival was 09:54 am (Moscow time), which was confirmed by a group of officers from the Moscow road police and Mr. Manke, a member from the German embassy in Moscow. So after the 3 days 04 hours and 54 minutes we finished in Moscow after we left Dakar on the 22th of April and set a New World Record on that 7.995 km long distance between these two cities. It is unbelievable and was a great ride with a great Volkswagen Amarok V6! One more blog from our arrival in Moscow is coming.
Author: Peter Bakanov