Kazan, Russia

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.