Krasnoyarsk, Russia

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.