Omsk, Russia

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?