Overland Tales

Day 112-115: Pacific

admin — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 11:00:45 +0000

As I stepped off the train in Vladivistok on a bright Saturday morning, I’d dearly like to tell you that my first thought was not one of immense relief. That was, however, the overriding feeling as I escaped the confines of the train and made my way through the station, stopping to snap an old locomotive engine which doubled up as a monument to the, well, monumental task of building a railway line that stretched the immense length of Russia.

Once I’d settled in the not-as-grand-as-it-sounds Hotel Vladivostok – I duly present Exhibit A – and showered, changed into fresh clothes and eaten a distinctly non-noodle-based meal in a traditionally-styled Russian restaurant, other feelings did come though; primarily a sense of pride that I had successfully tackled Russia solo, dodging its pitfalls to come out the other side still in one piece.

I had long held Vladivostok in awe. Once a thriving East Asian port boasting a cosmopolitan mix of peoples with which one could draw parallels with Singapore, the Soviets changed all that by driving out the non-Russians or shipping them off to labour camps, promptly closing the city to the public and turning Vladivostok into a naval base and home to the Russian Pacific Fleet. It reopened only after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

My mind’s eye still pictured Vladivostok as an exotic outpost on the frontiers of the world, and so I was always going to be disappointed by the reality: an average Russian city built up on an attractive curl of land overlooking the Pacific. It was to a lookout point I headed to get my first proper look at the ocean; the train journey had only offered up fleeting glimpses of distant water.
Somewhere over the horizon was my next destination, the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. I had hoped to continue my overland theme by reaching it by ship, which was due to sail tomorrow. I headed down to the shipping office to book my ticket only to find it firmly shut. I would have to try my luck with the office tomorrow.

Up bright and early the next day to run the gauntlet with the shipping office, I found it open and staffed by a number of women. Although they weren’t behind ticket windows, they may as well have been. I approached one with my fingers crossed.

“I’d like to buy a ticket on the boat today to Japan, please.”
“No tickets.”
“What, the boat is full?”
“No. The boat is not full. No tickets.”
“If there are spaces, why can’t I buy a ticket?”
“Need your name on a list of foreigners.”
“Then can I put my name on the list, please?”
“No. List already sent.”
(Becoming increasingly testy) “Can you contact someone to add my name to the list, please? The boat doesn’t sail for another 12 hours.”
“Not possible.”
“Will you try for me? I can pay extra for you to try.”
“Nyet.”

And so my hopes of continuing my journey overland to my next destination were scotched, there and then, by a mardy Russian official who would not lift the slightest finger to help my predicament. Death by Russian bureaucracy: an appropriately bittersweet end to my Russian adventure, I thought as I wandered down to the dock and watched the ship I had intended to be on being loaded with its cargo. The ticket window ladies had had the last laugh.

I didn’t wallow in pity for long, though. Back at the hotel I booked myself on a flight from Vladivostok to Niigata for the following day, and I started to get excited about returning to Japan, the place that had made such an impression on me when it had been the first stop on my Round the World Trip back in 2005.

And as my clapped-out Aeroflot plane accelerated noisily down the runway at the airport to the north of Vladivostok and lifted off over the ocean, my four-month overland trek from my front door in the UK through fifteen different countries on foot and by bicycle, bus and train right the way to the Pacific Ocean came to an end. Any feelings of disappointment about my method arrival in Japan had faded to be replaced by a sense of achievement about what had passed – and excitement about what was to come.

Time for the next adventure.

~FIN~

Day 108-111: End of the Line

admin — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:00:04 +0000

Ambling back to the port, I waited patiently for the minibus, to be gradually joined by an increasingly large group of Russians. As there was no semblance of a queue and a detectable anxiety amongst the group regarding whether there would be enough seats available, I sharpened my elbows and put my running shoes on. When the minibus pulled in I was there with the best of them and luckily managed to grab my rightful seat, which was much more preferable than waiting around two hours for the next one at which the same palaver was bound to happen.

Back in Irkutsk I wandered from the bus station into the centre. Being located approximately halfway along the Trans-Siberian Railway and a stone’s throw from the wonderful sight of Lake Baikal, Irkutsk was a popular place for travellers to break their mammoth journey in two, and as a result I was back in hostel territory. My homely choice was run by a woman and her son from their place in an apartment block. I grabbed a dorm which was occupied by an Aussie chap, and as the first native English speaker I had met in two weeks I was happy to trade tales with him about our journeys so far. It seemed as if neither of us had had an easy time of it.

Once I had settled in I traipsed back out and over the bridge in the cold to the train station for my final duel with the ticket window ladies, but on this occasion I had an ace up my sleeve. Irkutsk had a Service Centre, a plushly furnished lounge with two “deluxe” ticket windows and not a single other person in sight. For a small commission, you could book tickets here at your leisure without babushkas prodding you in the spine or receiving theatrical sighs or huffy abuse through the window. More than worth the money in my book.

As tempting as Irkutsk nightlife seemed, the area round the hostel had become notorious for violent assaults after dark. Thinking I’d had enough drama on this trip already, I opted for an early night instead. It was for the best; I had to be up early anyway, as I had an important train to catch in the morning: my last ever in Russia.

On my balcony in Listvyanka I’d been planning my journey beyond Irkutsk, and looking at the map I realised that on that particular stretch of the Trans-Siberian, there was little that I was really interested in seeing. I’d also realised that I’d had my fill of Russia. I’d enjoyed much of what I’d seen, and been scared witless for some of it too, and wanted to leave it at that; anything else felt as if it would just be going through the motions. I could soldier on and see Ulan Ude, Chita and Kharbarovsk as I had intended a few months ago, or alternatively I could just buy a single ticket to take me all the way through to Vladivostok.

And so yesterday at the Service Centre I had gone with the latter option, and booked a single three-and-a-half day train ride from Irkutsk to Vladivostok.

Spending three days on a train is a unique experience which anyone should try once. (Once is enough, though). Amongst other things you learn how tentative your grip on sanity really is. I have absolutely no idea how the travellers who choose to traverse Russia from side-to-side without stopping anywhere – a seven day stint – manage it without committing Murder on the Trans-Siberian Express.

If you can imagine a music festival such as Glastonbury being held in a very long corridor, then you’re close to understanding what an extended period of time on the Trans-Siberian is like. Broken sleep punctuated by people chatting or getting up for the toilet, no showers, odd-smelling toilets, five meals a day of instant noodles accompanied with vodka, music playing at most times piped into your compartment by the ABBA-loving Provodnitsa (I am convinced the Cold War would have been over in the seventies if we had sent Agnetha, Benny, Björn and Anni-Frid to negotiate and perhaps play a few tunes) and all manner of interesting and slightly freakish people to watch and meet.

Russians tend to like to relax on the trains, which can mean anything from bringing all their home comforts with them to changing into adidas tracksuits, white socks and plastic sandals. Occasionally you see a killer t-shirt; the best one I saw had a massive stars-and-stripes-patterned “USA” and was worn by a middle-aged Russian man, seemingly the mirror image of those kids in the West that happily wear t-shirts adorned with the hammer and sickle.

For the first few hours of the journey I had the lovely sight of Lake Baikal to take in. The tracks followed the southern shore of the huge frozen lake, and I watched little settlements flash by as well as an unsightly industrial complex latched onto – and no doubt polluting – the huge body of water.

I braved the dining car once, being given a menu despite soon finding there was only one (pricey) option available: a lumpy bowl of borscht (beetroot soup) topped with smetana (sour cream) which was thrown down in front of me without a smile. I didn’t encounter any other non-Russian travellers on that train, nor as a matter of fact on any other I took in Russia, mainly due to sticking to shorter-hop regional trains rather than the No. 1 Rossiya which does the whole long haul from Moscow to Vladivostok and back and is the train of choice for a lot of foreign travellers.

Late into the second day on the train, the journey really started to drag. I had read anything legible in my possession twice over and despite efforts to charge my laptop by running a plug under the corridor’s carpet, it had become unworkable due to others moving into my compartment. The chaps were nice enough, and despite not speaking English, eventually seemed to want to try to converse. As I had done with the railway mechanics in Kazan, I got out my guidebook and showed them the map of my journey, as well as the phrases in the back. This led to them reading the Mongolian phrases (Mongolian is also written in Cyrillic) out loud to themselves to fits of laughter.

During the journey we hugged the Chinese border, at some stretches apparently being only a few dozen miles from it. On the third day, after making a brief stop at Kharbarovsk, we turned south for the final stretch, and with me climbing up the walls from cabin fever, I packed my stuff as we chugged our way down into the legendary Vladivostok’s outskirts and finally into its historic train station.

Day 106-107: On Frozen Pond

admin — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 11:00:54 +0000

Another twenty hour journey on the Trans-Siberian passed without particular interest or incident. The novelty of taking long train journeys every other day or so was wearing off a little, and despite trying the whole range of brands and flavours of instant noodles on offer in Russian supermarkets, they were also growing a little tiresome.

At Irkutsk I wandered out of the station and over the bridge spanning the river to the main part of the city. I stopped at a pleasing find, a French-style cafe, to refuel on caffeine and a croissant and pressed on through the streets making a beeline for the local bus station, where I deciphered the timetable to check out buses running to a little settlement on Lake Baikal called Listvyanka.

I queued up at the ticket window with a slip of paper in hand, and on reaching the front despite providing my best pronunciation of Listvyanka I was still corrected my a local trying her best to push in line in front of me, even though, er, I was already being served. The lady behind the plexiglass correctly inferred my pronunciation anyway, and collecting the ticket I wandered off to play a game of “match the Cyrillic” with the departure boards of the buses.

The hour-or-so journey out from Irkutsk through luscious woodland saw us finally hit Lake Baikal, and snarled up in a traffic jam caused by affulent Russians making their way back from the weekend getaway village, I had plenty of time to take in its wonder.

As far as the eye could see, Lake Baikal was frozen, and covered in a layer of snow; a breathtaking sight. Incredibly, the lake was being used by vehicles. A temporary road was visible across the side of the lake, with 4×4′s tearing along it, hovercrafts were zipping across the surface and the aforementioned rich Russians were pulling doughnuts on the ice in their Japanese motors.

Finally arriving at the port – at which the boats were not going anywhere any time soon – I grabbed a smoked fish being cooked up by the locals and headed down to the frozen lake to walk along it parallel to the choking line of traffic back to the previous settlement in which my alotted accommodation was located.

I had decided to treat myself and go for a fairly nice hotel with a warm and comfy room, the best part being by far the fact I had my own balcony with a wonderful view of the valley, and with the Russian weekend-trippers thinning out, I sat outside, the quiet punctuated only by the odd dog bark, and watched the sun disappear from the valley.

Normally I enthusiastically embrace the food of the countries I visit, but that hadn’t been wholly possible on the trains in Russia. There was a dining car on most trains, but it was pricey and, well, tasted like food cooked on a train, which is never the best. I had dined in canteen-style restaurants in Moscow where you help yourself, and had eaten my fair share of pelmeni (Russian dumplings) and borscht (beetroot soup) as a result, but I had been dissuaded from visiting too many proper sit-down restaurants as a result of the language barrier. Adding to that had been the undercurrent of mild culture shock I had been experiencing. I find familiar food to be the best antidote to culture shock, so a pizza or steaming bowl of ramen which I might have overlooked in a more comfortable state of mind were now gratefully received when found.

So I was pleased to read that Listvyanka had a Russian restaurant along the main road which apparently offered an English menu, and I wandered on to it after dark that evening. The service was authentic Russian – you had to all but grab a member of the waiting staff by the arm to place your order – but I enjoyed a great evening of hearty food alongside Siberia’s nouveau riche.

Emerging into the cool night air, I was presented with a velvety-black sky above hanging above the dark lake laden with thousands upon thousands of stars; in my thirty years I had never seen such a beautiful sky. In our Green and Pleasant Land the light pollution obscures just how beautiful the heavens are above us, but here, out in the middle of the vast expanse of Russia, the Milky Way was crystal clear.

For that brief moment at least, all the hassles and troubles I had experienced along the way all seemed worth it.

Day 104-105: The Recovery Position

admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:00:11 +0000

I was escorted from my light “interrogation” in the basement by a member of the railway police upstairs to a public waiting room and put under the watchful eye of a typical middle-aged female Russian train official nearby. When the time came for my train, she called another railway policeman to personally accompany me to the platform via a “backstage route” to my carriage. I got the chilling impression that this supervision was done for my own safety.

I felt a wave of relief as I settled into my kupe bed and saw the grim highrises of Omsk recede from view. If the attempted mugging in Moscow had shaken me, then this event was off the Richter scale. Looking back though, I realised I had done the right thing and couldn’t see how I would’ve done anything differently. The only way to avoid such risks would be to completely shut myself off from any contact with locals, but by doing so I would be missing out on so much of the friendliness of the Russian people, and defeating the object of travel. Nevertheless, as my mind tried to close out the alternative futures in which I had acquiesced to stupidity and donned a Siberian stranger’s cold weather gear, I decided to tweak my spider senses to be more wary of others.

Inside me there was also a growing desire to just get the Hell out of the country. Even though St. Pete and the cities between Moscow and Omsk had been absolute delights, they had been challenging too in mental terms, especially with the language barrier. I longed to reach the familiarity of Japan, which despite its similar language barrier was a breeze to travel through in comparison. But I was not even halfway on my overland journey yet, and had a couple more interesting stops in Russia ahead of me.

My train’s destination was the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. The journey took nearly a whole day, but I had the kupe mostly to myself, with only one Russian popping up quietly during the night and disembarking early the next morning. It gave me plenty of time to unwind, catch up on my journal and read up on my (mostly unremarkable) destination, and arriving into the station at gone midnight, I picked my way through the icy dark streets to the Hotel Krasnoyarsk, jumping at the slightest thing that moved.

As expected, the hotel was open at this hour and luckily manned by a receptionist who could understand basic English. The place was a behemoth of a Russian business hotel overlooking the main square of the city. The room rate was, once again, double that quoted in my guidebook, but I was in no position to argue.

It’s interesting to see what facilities Russian hotels make available to their guests. From Nizhny Novgorod to Tobolsk to Krasnoyarsk, it seemed standard to have a full-size fridge – one that would be perfectly adequate for a family of four – in the room. Intended for beer or vodka, perhaps? In contrast, the one thing that would’ve been really useful to me in each of the rooms I put my head down in was a kettle, and yet I never did see such a contraption in a hotel room in Russia.

I woke up having moved on substantially in mental terms from my ordeal, and was invigorated by the lovely sight of the Krasnoyarsk main square from my hotel window, with a view of the hills that flanked the city reaching into the distance. I warmed to Krasnoyarsk in the light of day, wandering its busy main street and market stalls and attending to some of the administrative tasks I had failed miserably with in Omsk, finding an internet cafe to catch up with the outside world again and locating a fine pizza place – run by an Italian ex-pat and his Russian wife – for lunch. Washed, refreshed and recovered, with clean clothes and a carrier-bag full of food in hand, I made my way to the train station – making a point to avoid the station bar this time – to press onwards to Irkutsk, the jumping off point to Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world.

Day 103: Mafiasco

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 11:00:46 +0000

Up until now I had been living it up on my train journeys in the kupeny (compartment) class of accommodation, so I thought for one journey I’d experience the cheaper platskart class in which the beds were open plan, with six of them squeezed into the space that four shared in kupe.

Boarding the train, I picked my way past Ruskie kids playing tag and dodged all manner of hanging clothes and hazardous towel traps strung across the narrow walkway to my bed, giving a silent nod to the babushka and middle-aged man and woman with whom I was to share the table space. To describe the carriage as resembling a moving refugee camp was not unfair. Luckily I only had to tolerate it for an overnight journey during which I would mostly be sleeping, if all went to plan.

A few hours along the journey, the middle-aged lady spoke Russia to me, and I was on hand with my apologetic “I’m a stupid Englishman” response in Russian. But rather than ignore me, she gestured to the bright orange fish eggs she was spreading liberally on a crust of bread, and pushed the massive tub of them towards me. I refused once out of politeness, but when she insisted, I took her up on her offer, spooning out a lump of the salmon caviar into a slice of bread and tucking in. As embryos go, they were pretty good, and it certainly made a nice change from instant noodles. I offered her my Russian Standard vodka in return, but she didn’t seem to want any potato-based goodness.

I did a lot of watching in platskart, particularly curious to see how Russians interacted with each other. On first boarding the train I had assumed by their actions the man, woman and grandmother were all travelling together, but eventually I realised they were actually all strangers travelling separately; the way they had talked, looked out for each other – especially for the grandmother – and shared food (even with a dumb Englishman) had given me that impression. It seemed to further support the notion of supposedly steely, heartless, cold Russians as being, on the contrary, warm, caring and generous to others. As long as they weren’t sitting behind a ticket window, that is.

The overnight journey, punctuated with lots of languorous stops in mysterious places, had run parallel to the Kazakhstani border, and my destination Omsk, an administrative centre in a region of very little else of note, was only a hundred miles north of Kazakhstan. I was deep inside Mother Russia.

Arriving at the station I wandered into the city centre with the limited help of my crap Lonely Planet map. I found a place to have breakfast – Russian bliny pancakes with coffee – and took stock. Administrative tasks were high on the agenda. I still needed to purchase my last set of Trans-Siberian train tickets, so looking to get that last niggle off my mind, I wandered over to the port building, which appararently had a travel service centre with some English ability. But do you think I could find it? I located the building the map referred to, but it was both locked and generally empty of people – and furnishings, for that matter.

The treasure hunt continued throughout the day; restaurants, internet cafes, banks and other places happily marked on my map I had decided to track down seemed to have all upped roots and moved (or gone out of business). That’s the problem with guidebooks; by the time they’ve been written, they’re out of date. You come to expect a few inaccuracies, but to not be able to find anything was incredibly frustrating.

Luckily, the Omsk drama theatre hadn’t gone anywhere, but it was a rare pleasurable sight in a generally bland and unengaging Siberian city. After the absolute gems of Nizhny Novogorod, Kazan, Yekaterinburg and Tobolsk, Omsk was a real disappointment, but thanks to a not-so-little incident that happened to me in the train station awaiting my onward connection to Krasnoyarsk, it will forever be imprinted in my memory.

With little in the city to hold my interest apart from the odd, er, odd piece of street art, I returned to the train station and took a pew in the basement bar to write my journal and sink a couple of light ales. Over on the next table were a couple of Russian chaps quietly drinking. Somehow one of them got chatting to me, in very broken German of all things. I was wary of him, as his face seemed to indicate he had had (and lost) a recent fight with a flight of stairs. His colleague, however, spoke English, and seemed a far nicer chap. We got talking about the usual topics that get thrown up in a conversation between an English traveller and a local – typically the Premier League and the Royal Family, in that order of importance – and one of them kindly bought me a beer.

The guys – who were probably not long out of their teens – were keen to impress. Beckoning me closer, the English-speaking chap whispered to me with a gleam in his eye.

“We’re mafia.”

In an exaggerated gesture and letting out a theatrical “Wooooow!”, I played along with their little game of impressing the foreigner.

“See that man? He’s our Godfather,” he went on, pointing out a shambling old homeless-looking man with a carrier bag in each hand. I supressed a snigger and continued the theatrics, introducing an undertone of sarcasm for my own amusement. “Wow, he looks very dangerous”.

I was rather enjoying our good-natured exchange, but the air of conviviality was wiped out when one of the chaps received a phonecall, which led to a brief but panicky exchange between my two new friends. Regaining his composure slightly, the English-speaking “mafia” man told me what was up.

“My girlfriend coming here. She not see me drinking. I must hide from her. You must wear my coat. Now.”

It was an utterly preposterous request, of course. Even though I was a few beers down the line, no amount of alcohol could prevent me from smelling a rat a mile off. I point-blank refused, laughing it off at first and then becoming deadly serious about my refusal, putting on my own coat and grabbing my bag near. Something was going on.

I didn’t have long to wonder what, as about thirty seconds later, three Russian policemen marched into the bar straight to our table.

Bollocks.

My German speaking “friend” immediately raised an arm and pointed it squarely at my shell-shocked person.

“Angliski! Ruski Ruski Ruski Ruski Ruski Ruski…”

You didn’t need to speak Russian to realise that the blame for whatever the police had been tipped off about was being laid well and truly on my shoulders. The policemen eyed me suspiciously.

Bollocksbollocksbollocks.

We were led to a small police office in the basement. I was motioned to enter into an adjoining room, which my English-speaking “friend” objected heatedly to – no doubt he wanted to spin his own yarn first – but luckily the police shouted him down. I walked into the bland cell-type space and was faced by three bona-fide non-English speaking wooly hatted Russian policemen who I had to convince of my innocence. The only thing preventing me from filling my pants in terror was the fact I knew I had nothing to hide, steadied somewhat by the Dutch Courage running through my veins.

The police asked for my passport. A photocopy wasn’t going to win me any favours in this situation, so I gave them the real thing. They checked my visa and my registration with the computer; naturally it checked out fine. They asked something about a train, so I produced my train tickets, kept meticulously in order ever since I arrived in Russia. I counted them out into the palm of the hand of a policeman.

“[Tapping Chest] Tourist! Moscow. St Petersburg. Niznhy Novgorod. Kazan. Yekaterinburg. Tobolsk. Omsk. Krasnoyarsk… TOURIST!”

This seemed to convince them; they were happy I was not some kind of criminal but rather a foreign tourist that had been caught up in something. But what? All was suddenly made clear.

One of the policemen made motions of patting my arms up and down, and said a single word which put everything into perspective.

“Narkotika.”

So I’d chosen to drink with a couple of known drug dealers… whoops!

The policeman only made a half-arsed attempt at a search, finding nothing apart from snotty tissues, of course. There was a brief moment of alarm when the chap pulled out my decoy wallet to find it packed with Pounds, Euros, Polish Zloty, Lithuanian Litas, Latvian Lats and Estonian Kroons and pulled a suspicious face, but I repeated my refrain of Tourist! Tourist! and dug out my guidebook map to show them the route penned on in biro looping through Western Europe and the Baltics.

Happy with the facts I had provided, and not having found anything suspicious, they let me go, and I breathed a massive sigh of relief.

But had I been wearing my English-speaking friend’s coat, who knows what they would have found – and where I would be right now?

Day 101-102: The Russian Frontier

admin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 11:00:13 +0000

On my overnight journey from Yekaterinburg I had been dealt the fortuitous gift of a four-person cabin all to myself, so I made the most of it, spreading my stuff about and dining like a budget-conscious king on the spoils from my Yekaterinburg supermarket trip. I slept OK, waking briefly to see a hazy sunrise and dozing again until my 8am wake up call from the Provodnitsa indicating we were bearing down on the little Siberian town of Tobolsk.

The small, dilapidated station was to the north of the town, so I hopped on the Number 6 bus, crowded with Russians, which puttered its way southwards and down to the centre of the old town, stopping at the Kremlin. The hotel I had picked out was just a minute’s walk away. Although uninspiring from the outside, the lobby was pleasant and decked out in a traditional rustic Siberian style. I approached the desk and launched into my Russian opener.

“Excuse me, do you speak English?”

I received back a shake of the head, but not unkindly so; the lady even looked slightly apologetic, although there was no reason for her to be, as I doubted many English speakers frequented this outpost in the middle of Siberia. I ploughed on with a sentence from my guidebook which I hoped would secure me a single room for one night. The lady tolerated my dreadful pronunciation, and using her common sense – a rare trait in the Russian service industry – she correctly interpreted my request, and proceeded using as little Russian and as much mime as possible. On paying the reasonable room rate I was assigned a small but adequate room with a lovely view of the wall of the building next door. I made myself at home, had a wonderful hot shower, washed some clothes and then proceeded to sleep for England, making up for those lost hours of train sleep.

It was well into the afternoon before I stirred and got out to see the town. The hotel bill had literally cleared me out to the very last ruble, so empty-pocketed the immediate priority was to find a cashpoint to replenish my funds. I walked to each of the banks on my crap guidebook map to find they had either disappeared or did not accept foreign cards. A frustrating hour of trudging about the snowy streets finally led to salvation in the form of a supermarket which had VISA-capable ATM machines in the lobby, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Tobolsk was a fascinating little place. It had a distinct “frontier” feel about it, a forgotten Siberian outpost trapped in a time bubble. The old town had the usual poorly-built Soviet towerblocks, but far more interesting were its beautiful little old Siberian cottages bedecked with colourful window frames. The cottages seemed to be fighting a losing battle against the encroachment of the concrete monstrosities from the new part of town; sadly I saw several huts in the process of being torn down.

As dusk approached, I returned to the hotel; Tobolsk didn’t really have anything in the way of evening entertainment. I picnicked on food I’d bought at the supermarket, watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer in Russian on the battered old telly in my room, and slept soundly once again.

The next day I set out to explore the town’s elegant Kremlin and southern half of the old town. A long wooden staircase (or are they steps? There’s a philosophical question for you) down from the Kremlin’s walls led down to the floodplain and hundreds of interesting old buildings in various states of repair. Intrigued, I set out to explore the streets, starting with a weathered Orthodox church, but didn’t get very far, as a loose group of dogs decided to take interest in me. Ever the coward, I retreated at their barking and snarling back up the wooden staircase and to the bus stop with a view to heading back to the train station in good time.

Unfortunately I made a schoolboy error with the bus. The Number 6 had taken me from the station to the Kremlin, and I assumed it terminated there and the same number bus would return me there. Boarding the bus, we headed in back through the new town, but as I watched the scenery go by, the route looked less and less familiar. Out into the countryside we went, ending up at what seemed to be some industrial complex, where the remaining people got off, and I was left there sitting like a lemon as a new lot of people got on for the return journey.

Luckily, the middle-aged female conductor had noticed my bewilderment, and came over to speak Russian at me. I said “train station?” in Russian to her, and she shook her head violently. “Four”, she replied in Russian to the English simpleton, holding up four fingers. I’d got on the wrong bus. I had a train to catch. I was buggered.

I was saved by the milk of Russian kindness. The conductor’s young female deputy – henceforth to be known as my angel – had come over to listen, spoke briefly to the two men in front of me, and then asked me in German whether I was, er, German. I replied in German to the Russian girl that I was English – all very confusing! – and she then spoke up in damn near perfect English:

“You want the number four bus. Follow this man in front of you. He will show you the bus to take to the station.”

I was taken aback; I hadn’t expected any English comprehension out this far, and here was my guardian angel to the rescue. I thanked her profusely and kept my eyes on the chap in front. After ten minutes he got off, beckoning me to follow him. As a rule I don’t generally walk through the deserted countryside with strangers, so I kept my wits about me, but my instincts told me everything was fine. After another ten minutes of waiting at a bus stop, the number 4 came along, and we boarded. Finally, after a further journey, I saw the station loom ahead; I shook the hand of my co-saviour, disembarked and entered to wait for my next train, relieved and once again touched by the heart-warming kindness of everyday Russians towards a bumbling stranger from the West.

Day 100: Tsar Trek

admin — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 11:00:15 +0000

Back at the train station with time to spare, and buoyed with confidence after a few days successfully navigating Russia without coming to a sticky end, I decided to run the gauntlet with the imposing line of ticket windows to purchase another onward leg of my journey.

The windows were apparently very specific depending on your circumstances; some were for individuals in the military, or veterans; others for the disabled, or elderly. Being able to read the Cyrillic above each window didn’t get me very far, not knowing what the Russian words meant, so I took the path of certainty and joined the longest queue.

I had everything prepared on a slip of paper, carefully written in Cyrillic: the number, time and date of train, departure station and destination, and preferred sleeping class. Nothing could go wrong.

Except, er, if the mardy-faced battleaxe behind the plexiglass started to speak Russian to me after punching in the details, signalling a problem with my booking, which is of course what happened. Perplexed, I assumed the train was fully booked, and so asked her in pigeon Russian for “next day train”. She continued to flick R’s at me and I had no hope of understanding, so I shook my head helplessly, thanked her and walked away.

I am nothing if not stubborn, and so I was back to rejoin the queue minutes later with a new slip of paper with a new destination and different train. On reaching the front of the queue again, I received a withering look from the bat behind the counter, but undeterred, I passed my new slip of info to her. Success! It seemed to be OK, and I caught her asking for x-amount of rubli. Asking her in Russian to write it down please – a highly useful phrase – the price seemed OK, so I slid my VISA card under the counter.

This caused her to become quite irate: “Nyet Karta!”, or something similar, amongst a terse torrent of Russian. Annoyed, I raised my hand up to the glass and slowly and deliberately tapped my finger on the VISA symbol prominently displayed on the glass, which had the desired effect to aggravate her even further.

Thinking I had better not push my luck too far, I slid the required number of rubles under the counter and a minute later I was walking away from the hag in possession of my very own, personally-acquired Russian train ticket.

Never again…

My overnight journey to Yekaterinburg was the worst so far, with the carriage samovar, a water heater that looked to be out of the 70′s – the 1870′s, that is – putting out brown water. The carriage was also like a furnace – the thermometer read a crazy thirty degrees – making it very difficult to sleep. My compartment buddies looked to be young students, but they didn’t even talk to each other, let alone me. Around lunchtime the next day the Provodnitsa, a little man this time who looked just like Joe Pesci, entered our compartment and started speaking Russian. My compartment buddies all shook their heads to his querying, so he turned to me.

“Sverdlovsk?” he asked.

Perplexed, I went into apologetic Russian mode. “Excuse me, sorry. I don’t understand. English.”

This caused him to rudely make a comment to the other passengers, at which one of them laughed. Clearly he had a short man complex. But the penny had dropped with me in the meantime; I knew what he was on about.

“Yekaterinburg?” I asked him, jabbing a finger at the buildings out the window.

“Da”, he interspersed with more baffling and seemingly rude Russian. He had come in to tell me it was my stop, one of the Provodnitsa’s duties. What had confused me was that he had used the Soviet-era name for the town, Sverdlovsk. Despite to being renamed to Yekaterinburg in ’91, some people – including all railway timetables – still refer to it by its Bolshevik name. I’m convinced there are people in this country who don’t realise the Soviet Union ever collapsed.

Saddling up, I followed Joe Pesci to the end of the carriage and waited for the train to slow. As he shovelled coal to keep the carriage burning at over thirty degrees Centigrade he continued to talk at me in Russian, which by his tone and face I could tell was none-too complimentary. Incensed at his rudeness, when it came to disembark, I gave him the widest possible foreigner grin I could, and loudly and clearly said to him “F**k you very much”, which made me feel a whole lot better. To Hell with Anglo-Russian relations today.

A thousand miles east of Moscow, Yekaterinburg straddled the border between Europe and Asia, marked by the north-south ridge of the Ural mountains. I had around six hours there to see the sights, freshen up and stock up on supplies. Yekaterinburg was the hometown of popular alcoholic and general all-round hero Boris Yeltsin, and more gruesomely, the place where Tsar Nicolas II and his Romanov family met their makers – murdered by the Bolsheviks – in the basement of a house. It was to this location I first headed.

The house had been ripped down decades ago, by order of Yeltsin himself when he was a local governor here, and a memorial Church on the Blood and monument had been built on the spot to commemorate the Tsar and his family.

Yekaterinburg seemed a more international place than Nizhny Novogorod or Kazan; there were far more options for food, including a Japanese ramen restaurant which despite living off instant noodles for days I couldn’t pass by. I discovered a huge supermarket and stocked up on goodies for the onwards trek. In the brief time I spent there, I got the impression of a more dynamic and modern place than either of my two previous destinations, and felt it would be one of the more interesting places in Russia to live outside of Moscow and St. Pete.

As night fell I marched back to the railway station past the elegant buildings of the city, stocked up with plenty of food and drink and prepared for a jaunt away from the big cities to experience a smaller Russian town… and hopefully a shower too.

Day 99: Ivan the Terrific

admin — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:00:17 +0000

I was starting to get into the swing of the trains. Last night I had been on a shopping spree, buying up an unhealthy selection of Доширак instant noodles, fruit, biscuits, and, er, vodka to keep me going on the long overnight journey. Settling into my bunk minutes before take-off, I thought I might be lucky enough to have the whole compartment to myself… until four Russian chaps carrying with them what seemed to be their worldly possessions bundled in.

They made themselves comfortable, two of them plonking themselves down on my lower bunk (something which some might find rude, but which is entirely expected out this way). I was wondering at what point they would shake me down for my camera, but then one of the chaps, a cheery young fellow, turned to greet me in Russian. I replied with my stock Russian response.

“Hello. Sorry excuse me, no Russian. (Tapping chest) English.”

In response to this I had come to expect a few cautious (or curious) stares, followed by a polite nod and then for me to become a ghost. What I received this time, however, was a thoroughly warm welcome.

The chap who had spoken to me, Ivan (er, I may have made that name up), spoke a few dozen words of English, and he got across that they were all mechanics working on the railway. In my best terrible Russian accent flicking R’s like there was no tomorrow, and with the aid of the ancient art of mime, I tried to describe what the hell I was doing in their country.

“Tourist. English. Train… Moscow… Vladivistok.”

I showed them the map of Russia in my guidebook, as I had used up all of my known Russian vocabulary (apart from asking where the toilets were), and indicated the route I had drawn in biro from my home in the UK across Europe to St. Petersburg and Moscow, all the way across Russia to Vladivostok. Ivan could read the Roman alphabet, and he pointed out Kazan, to which we were headed, then pointed to him and his friends. I guessed they were on their way home after a week at work somewhere around Nizhny Novgorod.

At that point, Ivan reached into his wallet and produced a dog-eared picture of a young woman, who I took to be his sweetheart. We made the appropriate noises and gestures that one would make in the company of other young blokes when a picture of a fine young woman is passed round – which I shan’t go into detail about here – and then returned to the map. Ivan pointed out the Ukraine and with a deadpan face told me it was “No good” – with which I had no choice but to grimly nod in agreement – before another of the chaps produced a dreaded bottle of vodka.

Erk!

With great difficulty I managed to excuse myself after the second toast, miming what I hoped was the concept of having an inferior liver as a result of my nationality and not being able to take my booze, and allowed them get on with the celebrations themselves, sharing food with them to munch on as they worked their way through the bottle. Just as I started to flag, they luckily relocated to the restaurant car, and I turned in for the night.

I had good reason to believe the train driver was on the sauce as well, as we made several lurching, faceplant-the-wall-whilst-sleeping stops in the middle of the night to lurk quietly at mysterious spots in the middle of nowhere. As a result, I slept poorly, being woken at 5:30am by Ivan coming back into the compartment – he hadn’t been to bed – with vodka bottle in hand. Seeing me stir, he gave me a lopsided grin:

“Stievn! Vodka, Stievn?”

As we arrived at our destination, Kazan, the railway workers saddled up, and I shook their hands, touched by their warmth towards a non-Russian speaking foreigner.

There is something about arriving in a new place at dawn that manages to reset my travel meter, wiping out any lingering aches, haggard nights of sleep or traces of culture shock, and as I stepped off the train in Kazan this morning to a magnificent Red Dawn my tiredness and anxiety about Russia disappeared, replaced by heady excitement of what the rest of the journey might bring.

Although only 600 miles due east of Moscow, Kazan was a very different side to the Russia I had seen so far. As the capital of the largely Islamic Republic of Tatarstan, an autonomous state inside Russia, Kazan was home to millions of Tatars of Turkic origin. Within moments of leaving the train station I was spotting mosques and a number of buildings proudly displaying the green and red flag of Tatarstan. Russian Orthodox Christianity had good representation too, with a fine old Orthodox church gracing one of the city centre’s streets.

With the city still waking up, I retired to a local cafe for an hour or so nursing a coffee before setting off northward to – yep, you’ve guessed it! – the town’s UNESCO-listed Kremlin for a look round, walking past once-magnificent but sadly now decrepit buildings to the striking white fortress. The centrepiece of the structure was the soaring QolŞärif mosque, a new structure built on the site of the mosque that was torn down centuries ago (along with all the others in the city) some time after Ivan the Terrible’s annexation of the city.

Kazan was yet another jewel of a Russian city; what it lacked in modern sparkle it more than made up for in character. Like Nizhny Novgorod, I was very glad I had taken the time to stop off at it rather than travelling straight on through as many travellers do.

I slowly picked my way down from the Kremlin back to the centre and holed up for a couple of hours in an inviting-looking Bavarian beerhouse just down from the cafe I’d visited earlier, and enjoyed a couple of cheeky authentic German beers and non-instant-noodle stodge before braving the sleeting snow back to the magnificent train station.

Day 98: Gorky 5

admin — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 11:00:29 +0000

A seven hour train journey stretching into the evening was exactly what I needed to recover from the shock of the supposed mugging attempt I’d experienced earlier in Moscow. I stretched out, relaxed and tried to move my mind on from the incident, looking forward to being out of the behemoth and arriving at the smaller city of Nizhny Novgorod, one of Moscow’s historic “Golden Ring” cities and still known to many by its Soviet-era name of Gorky (named after the writer Maxim Gorky, who was born there).

Arriving very late into town, I picked my way through the dark, empty streets, more wary than usual after my little brush with crime, until I reached the hotel I had earmarked, a souless business hotel close to the railway station complete with fruit machines lining the lobby. I was disappointed to find the published room rate was three times that quoted in my guidebook; it was a rip-off. The miserable receptionist, who thankfully spoke a little English, wasn’t budging with the rate, and after watching a Russian chap check in late and pay the full whack, I accepted that they weren’t trying to con me just because I was foreign, and painfully handed over the rubli for a room. It wasn’t quite worth the money I paid for it, but it was a close call; I had underestimated the value of a warm, dry place with a proper, non-moving bed, hot shower, with facilities to wash and dry my clothes and put my feet up to watch telly after days of dorms and trains, and I awoke the next day refreshed and more relaxed.

Checking out, I traipsed through the snow past the statue of Lenin situated outside the hotel across the long bridge spanning the frozen Oka river into the heart of Nizhny Novgorod. The bleak styling of the Soviet period contrasted with a brightly-coloured orthodox church I passed. It hit home that I was an independent tourist now deep into distinctly non-tourist Russia, and things would not be getting any easier any time soon. Thankfully, with practice I had finally mastered reading the Cyrillic alphabet, even doing so now without moving my lips, and I had a whole repertoire of suitably apologetic phrases on tap to explain my nationality and inability to speak Russian. Being able to read signs freely made the world in which I roamed less alien. But without a doubt, mild culture shock was setting in.

Picking my way through the snow, I made my first port of call the Kremlin. Before I’d started reading up on Russia I had assumed there was only one Kremlin, the structure in Moscow; but it turns out Kremlin is a more general Russian term meaning a walled fortress, and most major cities had such a thing. Inside the early 16th century walls were a number of examples of Second World War military hardware. There seemed to be a lot of army bods about, and I got the impression it doubled up as some sort of army HQ. Wandering the grounds, I came across a War Memorial with an “eternal flame” burning, and rather oddly saw no less than four wedding couples having their pictures taken within the grounds. Apparently the Bangles-esque eternal flame was good luck to visit. Rather them than me on a baltic winter day like this, I thought; it gave a whole new meaning to “something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue“.

I had really taken to Nizhny Novogorod. Its charming imperial centre had a long pedestrian district of shops within old buildings, lined with ornate lamps and dotted with statues. It was a relaxed and affluent place.

My cultured-shocked mind was glad to discover there was a so-called English pub off one of the sidestreets of the shopping district, and I made a beeline for it for one of the best plates of fish and chips this side of Blackpool, and cracking the laptop out, I managed to get a good bit of work done too before it was time to traipse back over the bridge to the train station to admire its all-seeing Soviet wall mural and await my next overnight train deeper into Siberia.

Day 95-97: Mugscow

admin — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 11:00:48 +0000

Yesterday evening I had deciphered my ticket correctly and tracked down my very first Trans-Siberian train with a good amount of time to spare. Walking the platform along the immense length of the train I located my carriage and came face-to-face with my first Provodnitsa, a (typically middle-aged and female) member of train staff whose job it is to look after a particular carriage. After checking my passport matched my ticket, she let me board, saying to me what I guessed was the Russian for my seat number. I responded with a da and a fleeting smile I quickly remembered to suppress.

Tash had managed to book me a lower bunk in a four-bed sleeper for the overnight journey to the Russian capital, which was ideal; the lower bunks could be lifted to reveal storage space underneath for luggage, and once you were lying on your bunk, you had to be unconscious or dead for anyone to get at your stuff. That said, I saw little evidence to mistrust my Russian cabinmates anyway, who were three quiet Russian blokes. We exchanged polite nods as we each arrived, but after that everyone stayed mute for the duration of the journey, which suited me just fine.

The facilities of the carriage were basic but more than adequate. There was a coal fire the Provodnitsa stoked which kept the carriage warm and the samovar fired up so that boiling hot water was always available, a real lifeline for the long-distance traveller. The toilets were functional and uniquely smelling, although rarely unpleasantly so, being generally kept clean by the diligent Provodnitsa. It was a fairly comfy and likeable environment in which to travel – and a bloody good job too, as I’d be spending over a quarter of my time in Russia on trains – and that evening, tucked up and toasty-warm, I slept wonderfully as we rocked our way to Moscow.

Confusion initally reigned on my arrival into the capital; the ornate station I emerged into was bizarrely an exact brick-by-brick copy of the station I’d left behind in St. Petersburg. I made my way to the metro station, but a confused crowd was buzzing around outside, and there were barriers up and no-entry signs on the doors. Assuming an incident had closed the station, instead I cracked out the map for the thirty minute walk along Moscow’s huge roads of crumbling concrete monstrosities towards the more appealing centre.

I found my way to the hostel I’d picked out and grabbed a bed. Russian bureaucracy dictates that any visitors to the country register within three working days with immigration, but luckily the hostel could do this on my behalf (for a fee, of course). Armed with my temporary registration in case of any entanglements with the Russian fuzz – they like nothing more than to ~~confiscate~~ check the registration documents of tourists for ~~fabricated allegations~~ visa inconsistencies which can lead to a ~~bribe~~ fine – I let myself loose on Moscow, making a beeline for the Kremlin, within ten minutes walk of the hostel.

Gloriously lit as night fell, The Kremlin was immense. I followed its walls and found myself in Red Square – which, er, was more of a rectangle, really – gazing at the magnificent sight of what we know as St. Basil’s Cathedral (although incorrectly, as it turns out; St. Basil’s is just the name of a chapel inside the cathedral, not the whole thing). In contrast to the Kremlin, which had exceeded its dimensions in my mind, St. Basil’s was smaller than expected, but absolutely glorious, even if I couldn’t get out of my head its similarity to a clutch of iced gems.

I spent a lot of the remainder of my time in Moscow traversing the dangerous six-lane highways around the centre. Once I received my visa registration back, I headed south of the centre to a travel agency that spoke English, and managed to book up another wodge of train tickets for my onward journey with the help of a friendly lady called Natalya. (Most people seemed to be called Natalya here.) The journey gave me the chance to take in my fair share of Moscovian pollution as well as see some more of the city away from the tourist bubble. The reality away from the marble pillars of the Kremlin area was grim underpasses selling tat to women called Natalya and stray dogs escaping the cold.

Back at Red Square in the day, I noticed Lenin’s Tomb, in which he lay in a preserved state; but having never bothered to queue for the “privilege” to see Mao in Beijing or Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, I wasn’t about to start now with this particular Communist leader, but instead headed to a nearby typically Russian “canteen” food restaurant to fortify myself with cabbage, beetroot and potato-based goodness.

I hadn’t really taken to Moscow; it felt inaccessible, impersonal and alien. I guess it didn’t help that I had met few other travellers or Russians, apart from Natalya at the agency, and of course not forgetting Natalya and Natalya working at the hostel. I also felt on edge more than I had so far on my travels. It didn’t help knowing that the police needed to be avoided just as much as the criminals.

Whilst I managed to avoid any entanglements with the former category of Russian during my time in Moscow, the same cannot be said about the latter. Whilst walking along a street not far from the Arbat shopping district, I paused to take a photograph of a building on the far side of a typical Moscow six-lane highway. The next thing I knew someone was shouting at me in the street.

“Militski! MILITSKI! Passport! PASSPORT!”

Terrified, I turned to see a Russian guy in a puffer jacket yelling at me. I quickly worked out he was saying he was police and wanted to see my passport. Although shitting myself, I mentally reminded myself of my birthdate and realised that I actually wasn’t born yesterday, and with a lack of uniform, badge or any identifiable signs of being associated with the Filth, this guy wasn’t getting a thing off me. (As an aside, even if a uniformed police officer asks you for your passport in Moscow, you should give them a photocopy; if you give them the real thing they’re likely to hold it to ransom).

With me busy yelling “Nyet! Nyet! Nyet!” at the chap, he grabbed me by the strap of my backpack running across my chest. “Fotoapparat!” he bellowed.

And there it was: I was being mugged for my camera on in broad daylight on a street packed with Russian office workers walking by.

Finally my brain broke away from bleating a constant stream of nyet and I started to speak loudly in the Queen’s English at the people walking by; something terribly lame such as “Help me, I’m being mugged!”. It did the trick though, as the guy released his grip, and I turned and legged it as fast as I could, still very much in possession of my passport and camera, although a fair bit shaken up.

With hindsight, it turns out what I thought was probably just a mugging could also possibly have been a case of healthy Russian paranoia. It is possible the seemingly innocuous building far across the road I was busy snapping was in fact a government or police building, and a concerned Russian citizen took it upon himself to apprehend the “westerner” taking what he could have viewed as “sensitive pictures”. Incidents like this are not unheard of; Western tourists have even been known to have been arrested for taking photographs of innocent structures such as train stations.

I guess I’ll never know what the real reason was. But to say I was glad to leave Moscow later that day was certainly an understatement.