March 17

The day before the beginning of our trip to Fiji, the Russian Foreign Ministry strongly advised me to provide it with our itinerary.

The reason for the Ministrys request was that our delegation included: high-ranking government official Elena Kondakova, who is not only a pilot-cosmonaut, but also a deputy of the Duma -- the lower chamber of the Russian parliament; three other pilot-cosmonauts (Sergey Avdeev, Musa Manarov, Vladimir Titov); one of Mir's chief designers (Leonid Gorshkov); and myself, an aerospace advisor to the governor of Moscow Region.

More From the Mir Trackers

Yuri Karash Meet the major players and learn how Bob and Rick Citron put their team together in "The Hunt Begins" , the first installment of SPACE.com "s Mir Expedition Journal.

Bob Citron himself wrote a piece for SPACE.com explaining the trials and tribulations of putting a multinational observation expedition together on the fly. READ MORE .

Finally, Citron shares his thoughts on why Mir matters .

Because of this, our group has an informal status of Russias official representatives to the Mir deorbiting event.

However, the Ministry has another reason to monitor our stay in Fiji. The political situation in this country could hardly be called stable. Last year, the Australian army had to intervene in the fighting between different political forces. There were a few Russians on the island at the time and the Russian embassy in Australia had to ask the Australians to evacuate them from Fiji. If anything like this happens again, it would be easier for the Russian government to take all the necessary steps to assure our safe and quick return to Russia.

I satisfied the Ministrys request by sending it a fax informing it about our itinerary. Soon they responded, confirming that Russian embassy in Australia had begun tracking our trip to Fiji.

The service varies at Sheremetievo airport

I picked up the Japanese transit visas almost 10 hours before our flight to Japan. My next step was to pick up our tickets at Moscow's central Aeroflot office. Aeroflot sells tickets for international flights only to those passengers who have valid visas to their destinations.

Once I had passports with Japanese visas and our airline tickets to Japan (tickets to Fiji were already waiting for us at the Qantas airlines desk in Japan), our trip to Fiji began looking more or less like a reality.

Everyone but Kondakova, who was very busy that day performing her parliamentary duties, agreed to meet at Sheremetievo airport approximately two hours early. Kondakova promised to get there an hour before the flight.

Although Aeroflot advises international passengers to arrive at least two hours before their flights in order to have enough time to clear customs and immigration control, there is a way to speed up this process.

Sheremetievo has a so-called VIP room, a legacy of the Soviet era designed to facilitate arrival and departure procedures for members of the government and political elite. Thanks to these rooms, elite passengers did not have to wait in lines to customs and immigration check points, and could arrive in the airport a half hour before the flight.

The Soviet Union is gone, but the VIP room remains -- with a couple of changes. In todays Russia, anyone can order VIP room treatment for $30. And now, VIP customers luggage is often checked, where in the Soviet era it was not.

High Russian government and political officials -- particularly Duma deputies, "Hero of the Soviet Union" and "Hero of Russia" title bearers -- still get VIP treatment for free. Since all Soviet and Russian cosmonauts traditionally receive such titles, Kondakova and the other cosmonauts were set.

Although Gorshkov and I could have bought VIP room service, we decided to clear customs and immigration control like regular passengers. Sheremetievo had opened a so-called "Green Corridor" for those who have nothing to declare, so we went through this "corridor" and boarded A-310 aircraft destined to fly to Japan.

Kondakova, Manarov and Avdeev went through the VIP room and joined us, as we expected, just a few minutes before the airplane door closed.

A luggage-loading problem held up departure an hour, but not even the delay could spoil our happiness of being finally en route to a place from where we would see the last moments of Mirs life.

Next page: "A room that reminded me of a prison interrogation facility"

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No VIP treatment in Japan

We did not anticipate any problem upon our arrival to Narita airport in Japan. We were transit passengers who, according to a local immigration law, were allowed to stay in the country up to 72 hours without visas. Besides, our stay in Japan was protected by Japanese transit visas that we had received in Moscow, just in case.

The reality turned out to be different, however. Avdeev and Kondakova cleared immigration and control without problems. When Manarov, Gorshkov and I came to the immigration checkpoint, the smiling young women looked at our Japanese visas and suddenly started discussing something. Then they called a senior immigration officer who asked us to follow him.

The officer brought us to a room which reminded me of a prison interrogation facility that I had seen in U.S. movies -- no windows, doors with locks on the outside, a few benches, chairs and a table. He politely but firmly asked us to stay there, took our passports and walked away.

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Our initial reaction to this incident was to laugh. We had no reason to expect that anything was wrong with our passports or visas. We thought that it had been just a simple bureaucratic glitch that might happen anywhere and to anybody.

After we had spent about an hour in this room without any word from the Japanese -- or Kondakova and Avdeev who were waiting for us somewhere outside the immigration checkpoint -- our mood changed.

Finally, the Japanese officer came to the room. He asked us in "English" (that sounded more like Japanese to me than any other language that I know) to prove that we were heading somewhere else in less than 48 hours, as indicated in our passports. I told him the tickets to Fiji were waiting for us at the Qantas airlines office and showed him a fax with copies of our Air Pacific airlines reservations.

The officer explained to us that the fax was not enough and that he had to get a confirmation of our tickets reservations from Qantas, which helps Air Pacific handle its operations in Japan. Unfortunately, nobody was at the Qantas desk. The officer suggested that people from the desk had stepped out for lunch and asked us to wait for another 20 minutes.

Twenty more minutes passed. I called the officer in the adjacent room and tried to convince him we were not illegal immigrants, smugglers or terrorists, but people on an important official mission.

I even jokingly called Musa Manarov a "Japanese national hero" because he flew in space with the first Japanese astronaut, Toyohiro Akiyama, in Soyuz TM-11 in 1990. This made no more of an impression on the officer, however, than if I told him that Manarov delivered pizzas.

As it became clear later, the true reason for our detention turned out to be the inaccuracy of Japanese embassy officials in Moscow. They simply forgot to sign our visas! Somehow, Avdeevs and Kondakovas passports weren't thoroughly checked, but ours were and this is why we were detained.

Another 30 minutes passed. I stepped from the room and demanded to be put in touch with any Russian Aeroflot or embassy official in Tokyo. Five minutes later, an Aeroflot representative showed up in the room. He kindly asked us to excuse the Japanese immigration officials for the inconvenience, told us that he had already put our problem under his personal control and that in 10 more minutes the situation would be resolved.

He kept his word. In 10 minutes the officer came to the room, asked for our apologies, returned our passports to us and blamed the problem on Japanese diplomats in Russia. Japanese immigration officials have no professional sympathy for Japanese embassy officials since the former belong to the Ministry of Justice while the latter report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

We cleared immigration, rejoined Kondakova and Avdeev, and spent a wonderful day in Japan.

Next page: Meeting Bob Citron in Fiji

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Finally in Fiji

After a seven-hour flight southwest across the Pacific, we stepped down from the aircraft into the humid and warm air of Nandi airport in Fiji on March 16.

The Fiji immigration officials had already been warned of our arrival. One of them pulled us out of the general line of passengers, hurrying us through immigration and customs control and putting us, together with our luggage, into a waiting van.

A 15-minute drive later, we were accommodated in our comfortable apartments in Sheraton Resorts hotel, one of the best hotels in Fiji.

Bob Citron graciously shared an account of how he planned the Mir Reentry Observation Mission with SPACE.com that Yuri Karash calls "probably the most complete report on themission." Read it HERE , or take a look at Citron"s views on why Mir matters .

On the day of arrival we tried to recuperate from jet lag that amounted to a nine-hour difference overall between Moscow and Fiji.

The next day Bob Citron came from Los Angeles with Vladimir Titov, another Russian "Mir Tracker," and some other members of his expedition.

Although Bob and I had never met before and all our interactions had been limited to e-mail exchanges, we hugged like old friends. While organizing this mission on both sides of the ocean, both of us had been through too much to avoid developing real sympathy for each other.