London to Moscow central – a seven-hour human endurance test

I’m writing this in the back of a Russian taxi, navigating its way from Moscow airport into the centre of the Russian capital.

Ostensibly I’m here for a conference. But in truth I suspect I am the subject of a test of human endurance. My driver Sergei speaks no English, and my tender and rusty Russian has only enabled me to divine, each time I ask, that it will be “another hour” to our destination.

So far we have taken longer to reach half-recognisable Moscow from the airport than we took flying from London to Moscow airport – three and a quarter hours.

We are behind a gold-coloured Bentley and in front of a white (or once white) Range Rover. In among the dense, dusty traffic, there’s serious money. The indications are that Moscow does not abound in car washes.

We are moving at about 2.5 miles per hour in six lanes of solid traffic. That makes 12 lanes because the six in the opposite direction are, if anything, even slower and more dense.

One’s sense of Moscow graduates from rustic wastes around the airport, through tumbledown, corrugated-iron-fenced scrapyards, to the familiar Stalinist blocks of flats that used to describe the whole city. I have not been here since the Berlin wall fell and the world changed.

And once you reach the outer rim of the centre, this place, too, has changed. So has the nature of the traffic. No Russian cars: no Volgas, no Russian-built Fiats. Japan, Germany, France, Korea, and Japan seem to dominate the vehicle supply. Then there are a few oligarchical high-end cars which seem to have a British stamp about them.

One emerges from a sudden tunnel into a landscape of glass. There’s a Novotel over there, and an oil company over here.

Sergei, anxious about my fiddling about in the back, writing with the light on, has passed me his phone. An English-speaking woman, Yelena, says he has told her we have 10 minutes to the conference centre. I must go. But not before I do the maths. By the way, that 10 minutes until our destination proves to be 23 minutes.

So three hours London Heathrow to Moscow Airport, four hours Moscow airport to the downtown conference centre in the heart of Moscow. If I want to get out of here as planned in two days’ time, maybe I’d better set off now.

Follow @JonSnowC4 on Twitter