Two Englishmen & a Zaporozhets
Ed recalls a peculiar day at the Ukrainian border
Another fantastic Beaulieu Spring Autojumble reminded me of my epic trip alongside Sam Glover to last year’s Beaulieu bash. We had driven a garagefind Zaporozhets 968M from Moscow to the Ukrainian border, where we met the full force of border crossing bureaucracy.
Let me set the scene: Captain Haddock of the Ukrainian Customs Service was having a bad day. ‘Shut the damned door – I don’t want all that noise in here’ he barked at a poor lorry driver. But Captain Haddock’s day was about to get much worse with the arrival of myself, Glover and a 1991 Zaporozhets on Moscow export plates.
‘Moscow? Moscow? They could have gone through the Baltic States! They could have gone west through Belarus! What are they doing here?!’ he shouted at his second-in-command, pausing periodically to clutch at his aching temples. We smiled benignly and tried to look less irritating – we didn’t want to watch a grown man pulling his own beard out.
We were trying to leave Ukraine through Captain Haddock’s border post – and we understood his sense of impending doom entirely. On entering Ukraine, it had been solemnly pointed out to us that the car’s transit plates were not valid outside of Russia and we would have to pay a bond. We were soon taken to the customs office. There was a long conference around a computer screen and many concerned looks – from the customs officials rather than ourselves, which is never a good sign. They were struggling to assign a value to the hapless Zapo. As the 3000kmfrom-new car sat outside, ripply, misaligned panels and orange-peel paint shimmering in the mid-day sun, they decided to calculate its price as scrap metal. The magnesium engine casing pushed this up to a hefty £240. The bad news was that the bond would therefore