End of the line - Vladivostok Station

We were woken up on the train at around 6am and as we pulled into Vladivostok station we were able to see the sun beginning to rise over the Pacific.  We bid farewell to the Vladivostok Youth Football Team and went to find our hotel - the Primyore Hotel, which thankfully was only a two minute walk from the station.  Getting there at 6.30am, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to get into our room, but we dropped our bags off and were able to grab a bit for breakfast.  As we entered the dining room we were met by two completely drunk locals who must have been there all night.  The invited us to sit with them and if there is one thing we have learned on this trip, it is that it is impossible to shake off a drunk and friendly Russian.  We ate the buffet breakfast and were treated to a beer by our new found friends.  It turned out that one of them was a bit of a high flyer in a Moscow based energy company (or so he said), so we didn’t feel too guilty about making the most of their generosity.

After this most bizarre of breakfasts we decided to go out and explore the city a bit.  We knew in advance that 90% of the charm of Vladivostok is its place at the end of the Trans Siberian railway line - it doesn’t have many actual sights in all honesty.  The most impressive sight in the city, if it can be classed as an attraction, is Russia’s Pacific Naval Fleet, which is kept in the bay.  To get a view of this, we climbed up the highest hill in the city - the Eagle’s Nest, to look down.  The harbour is dominated by the huge footprint of a suspension bridge that is under construction.  The city appears to be undergoing a major facelift- there is building work going on everywhere and apparently President Medvedev was here yesterday.  It seemed that we had turned up a few years early - because judging by the scale of construction, the city is going to be quite impressive when everything has been finished.

View from the Eagles Nest (notice the suspension bridge)

Guns overlooking the harbour

On our journey from Irkutsk we had meticulously planned our day in Vladivostok, but on arrival we ended up massively ahead of schedule, to the point that we had to sit on the beach at 9am for an hour to wait for the museums to open.  Our guidebook was pretty out of date in terms of prices (take note, potential Russia visitors - prices have gone up by at least double), so getting into the two museums we wanted to see ended up messing up our budget a little bit.  We started in the Vladivostok Fortress Museum, which was full of all sorts of war memorabilia.  Crucially, there were a lot of English captions and this meant that we were able to take a lot longer walking around and taking it in.  The fortress was a key strategic point, overlooking the Pacific and guarding the fleet and the museum was well worth a visit - in a city where there isn’t much else going on.

Cramped fish (don’t ask me what it is)

Our next stop had been recommended to us by Sergey on the train and was of particular interest to Marine Biologist Alex.  Its position on the Pacific Ocean gives Vladivostok a range of marine biology that is fairly unique to Russia and the Oceanarium has recently received a massive facelift.  Frankly I wasn’t hugely interested in going in, but it was well worth it - even if the conditions in the tanks were probably fairly debatable for some of the larger animals.  We managed to time our entrance pretty badly - coinciding with a school group, so after about half an hour we decided to slowly amble back to our hotel for our much anticipated swim in the pool.  Having checked into our room and had a sweet, sweet shower, we found out (much to our horror) that the pool that had been advertised on the website didn’t actually seem to exist.  This was a massive blow, but I guess the idea of the pool had got us through the more depressing bits of our train journey.  We contented ourselves with the boost that the shower had given us and then sat around in our comfortable hotel room for the early afternoon.

Vladivostok city

We had pretty much seen all that we wanted to see and our only remaining task was to find some souvenirs.  This wasn’t quite as easy as we had hoped, due to the relatively low numbers of tourists who visit the city, and required a fair bit of asking around.  Eventually we found a little shop that sold relatively cheap Russian dolls so we stocked up a bit.  Russian dolls are some of the most expensive items that we had come across, so we settled on the tiniest ones that seemed to be genuinely handmade.  With souvenirs in hand, we went for one last stroll through the city, past the docks and the main square until we got to our hotel where we had our dinner at the attached restaurant.  As a standalone city Vladivostok certainly isn’t worth visiting, but its position at the end of the Trans Siberian Railway and the fact that any self respecting traveller only visits on their way from or to Moscow, makes a visit to the city something of a badge of respect.  At least in my humble opinion.

This was going to be the big one.  A lot of people say that Irkutsk is the half way point between Moscow and Vladivostok and give or take 500km or so (which is nothing in Siberian terms), they probably wouldn’t be far off.  The journey seems fairly short on the map - as the crow flies, but the line heads due east from Irkutsk to Khabarovsk before hooking south to Vladivostok, roughly following the Russian border with China.  In total, we would be travelling 4000km in three days.  We got on the train at 7.50 on the 28th June and finally got off three days later at 6.20am on the 1st July.  For the sake of writing the blog I am going to merge the three days into one - you would enjoy reading a minute by minute account about as little as I would enjoy writing it.

Me and Sergey

In terms of fellow travellers, we had a really good mix.  For the first day, from Irkutsk to Chita, we had an old mother and her daughter.  They didn’t say much and seemed pretty in awe of us as english people - just before they got off they asked, bashfully, whether they could take a photograph of us.  For most of the second day we had the cabin to ourselves, which was nice as it allowed us to spread out a bit.  In the evening, a retired army major called Vlad got on with a woman called Liliana.  They both came from the same little town and the former could speak broken English.  A lot of people had got on at the town and they all seemed to know each other.  They were fascinated by us as we were the first English people that they had ever met and they kept popping their heads into our carriage to say hi and gawp a bit.  Most foreigners don’t come this far - by now they will have turned off to Mongolia or China, so the locals are all very interested.  When we woke up the next morning the townpeople had left and had been replaced by Vladivostok Football Club’s youth team, who were just coming back from an away match at Belogorsk (which was a day and a half’s train journey away).  The first team play in Russia’s Premier Division and the youth team is in the Russian Youth First Division - so they are pretty good and get paid for playing.  Luckily the goalkeeper, Sergey, could speak really good English and as the team was going home to Vladivostok they made excellent companions for the last leg of our trip.  Over the whole length of the journey, from St Petersburg to Vladivostok, we had had some real gems.

The dining car

After eating our sandwiches for lunch and pasta for dinner on the first day (we had prepared these in Irkutsk), we had to resort to a lot of instant noodles and snacks.  Both were available from the ‘provinista’ - the woman who maintains the carriage.  We also sampled the restaurant car, partially for the novelty and partially for a change of scene from the cabin.  The food was expensive and came in extremely small portions, but it gave us an excuse to stretch our legs and sit somewhere different for an hour or two.  We picked up a few bits from the platforms - biscuits and ice creams for example, but the barrows full of fresh produce, that fellow travellers suggested we would see, just weren’t evident.  With a constant supply of hot water for tea and coffee, a few supplies from Irkutsk and an ample supply of bits on the train, we were able to stave off hunger and have a relatively balanced diet.

The main form of entertainment for me was War and Peace, which I took a fairly hefty chunk out of.  Among with book reading, we played a lot of cards and generally tried to make things take longer than they should - having massive lie-ins in the morning, or taking ages having a wash for example.  The whole goal of every action was to waste as much time as possible, which may come as a surprise to people who see it all as a huge adventure, but with a total of over 150 hours spent on trains, you do everything to pass the time.  The scenery itself was quite impressive around Irkutsk for the first day or so, as we passed through vast valleys and along the side of rivers.  On the second day we entered a limestone region where the ground is permafrost - frozen all year round.  Not a lot grows here and it is only the hardiest Russians who live here.  When the railway was constructed, fires had to be lit along the entire length to melt the ground temporarily in order to dig foundations.  Any tools that were thrust into unmelted permafrost would just deflect off the surface.  This process would have continued along thousands of kilometers, just proving what an unbelieveable feat of engineering the railroad is.  This was, paradoxically perhaps, the hottest part of the journey.  The days were long and the train had turned south - exposing the west side of the train (where the cabins are) to the full force of the sun.  As we approached Vladivostok it began to get cooler as the Pacific drew near.  The trees changed from evergreen to deciduous and we finally, 10,000km and 9 days on a train after we had left St Petersburg, arrived at the end of the line.

Today was set to be a bit of a nothing day as we had to complete the six hour slog back to Irkutsk.  Breakfast was a bit more normal - salty rice pudding and a yoghurt and we were picked up by the minibus at around 9.45.  Our Polish friends were journeying home with us.  As soon as we headed from Khuzir to the ferry back to the mainland it started raining - we were glad that we weren’t out and about on the island at the time.  The journey itself was uneventful and we got back to the hostel in Irkutsk at 4ish.

Irkutsk Market

There were a few other sights in Irkutsk that I had been hoping to see, but unfortunately by the time that we had sorted ourselves out and done some shopping it was too late - the sights were all a little bit out of town.  Our plan had been to eat out, as we wanted to eat a local fish delicary called ‘Omul’ which supposedly tastes like a cross between salmon and trout and can only be caught in Lake Baikal.  Unfortunately, as has been the case for most of our time in Russia, the prices we very high and we just couldn’t be sure that the portions would be any good.  Luckily we had discovered the city’s indoor market and we were therefore able to pick some fresh Omul up which we cooked ourselves - it was pretty good actually. We also picked up some supplies for tomorrow’s epic train journey from Irkutsk to Vladivostok and spent the evening cooking, catching up on the blog and sorting out our bags.  As I said, a  bit of a nothing day.

Day One: Olkhon Island and Shaman’s Rock

View over Khuzir Bay, Lake Baikal

Our trip had thus far been very centred around cities and train carriages - with the notable exception of accidently getting off in the middle of the forest when we were trying to find Sergiev Posad.  While it may seem like you are experiencing Siberia from your comfy train carriage, we knew that this was just an illusion and that just seeing it and not actually venturing into it would feel like a lost opportunity.  To rectify this we decided to spend a few days at Lake Baikal, which is to the north east of Irkutsk.  As with most of the famous sites in Russia, I hadn’t actually heard of the lake before we arrived, but statistics alone made it a worthwhile place to visit.  It is the oldest fresh water lake in the world, at 30 million years old and is also the deepest at just over a mile.  If you look at a map of Russia you can see Baikal fairly clearly and while it seems pretty small compared to the vastness of Siberia, it is 400 miles long - pretty much the same distance as London to Edinburgh.  A statistic that is often quoted is that if all of the world’s freshwater supplies failed, Baikal could provide drinking water for everybody on the planet for 40 years.

First views of Olkhon Island

The lake is also growing at around 5cm a year, as it is positioned on a tectonic fault line which will one day split Asia in two.  The bottom of the lake is full of volcanic vents which, combined with its age, isolation and lack of salt make it a unique ecosystem with 1,700 species of plants and animals - two thirds of which are only found in the area.  We were staying on a large island in the middle called Olkhon Island.  The journey from Irkutsk is fairly uncomfortable - as about a third of the six hour journey takes place on unpaved roads, but it is worth it just to feel like you are really heading towards a genuine wilderness.  The trip was an organized tour from the Baikaler Hostel in Irkutsk, who had arranged for us to stay with a local family.  Having left Irkutsk at around 9, we arrived at the family home at gone 4 (due to various unforeseen delays on the journey).  Lunch was provided on arrival and we were told that our dinner wouldn’t be much later - at 8.  With a couple of free hours we decided to explore the town that we were living in.

Shaman Rock

There are around 1500 people living on the island and the majority of these are in the main town of Khuzir.  Our house was on the edge of the town but it only took about 5 minutes to walk to the centre along the dirt tracks, flanked by traditional wooden houses.  The coast was not far away and we followed the cliffs around to the nearby ‘Shaman Rock’ - a jagged peak that juts out from the coast and was once a centre of shamanism in the region.  Even now, people come to the rock to tie ribbons, representing worries or problems, to the trees with the idea that you are leaving them behind at the rock.  The beaches on the island are, remarkably, covered in fairly soft sand and the two of us decided that it would be a shame not to take a dip in a Siberian lake - with the air temperature up in the low 30s it certainly seemed an opportune time.  The waters was incredibly cold, despite the hot sun, and after jumping in we were quickly out again, looking pretty timid next to the locals who were wading in with nothing like the amount of squealing as us.

Shaman Rock and the sunset

We left ourselves enough time to get back to the house and clean ourselves up a bit before dinner.  While the house was probably originally just for the old couple, a series of extensions in the garden had turned it into what is essentially a guesthouse.  There were therefore other tourists at the house and we sat down with some Brits for a spaghetti dinner.  It was still light afterwards so we grabbed some beers and headed down to the beach to watch the sunset.  Some Polish people we had met on the minibus from Irkutsk had had a similar idea, so we sat and talked with them until the sun had gone down.  As is always the case where I am involved.  I was ashamed to speak English with them as they spoke faultlessly and I didn’t know a word of Polish to throw back, but there we go.  At about half 11 we headed back to the house, which was easier said that done due to the lack of streetlights on the island.





Day Two: The Cape and a Campfire

The cape of Olkhon Island

Our mean machine

As part of the package option from Baikaler Hostel in Irkutsk, we were set to spend the day on a tour to the cape at the north of the island.  After an odd, but tasty, breakfast of some kind of cold pizza, we showered and were picked up at 10 by an old Soviet style minibus.  There are lots of these on the island and believe it or not the ridge is far better with them on off road terrain than with their Japanese and American counterparts.  I fact, I would say that aside from the overwhelming diesel fumes coming from the engine into the cabin, it was a pretty comfortable ridge - despite the fact that the terrain was extremely rugged.

Our first stop was on a cliff overlooking a little hamlet along with some sweeping beaches.  It seems like the cows on the island are amazingly nimble, as there were several standing on the cliff face or on nearby ridges in much the same way as you would see mountain goats.  We spent 20 minutes snapping photos before piling back into the minibus to get our diesel-high on and continue north.  Our second stop was at a beach with a few huts beside it.  Two of these huts had been knocked down, with only bits of timber and masonry remaining to show where they had been.  There also seemed to be the remains of a dock on the beach, which had also been knocked down.  Our guide, who spoke only Russian (there were some French people who could speak Russian, but no English, so I gathered what was being said in French), told us that these derelict buildings are the remains of a Gulag.  We couldn’t quite believe it at first - set as the huts were on a beautiful sandy beach, but actually it made a lot of sense.  The winter here is extremely harsh and there would be no escaping from the island.  We hadn’t seen any Gulags, so it was interesting to see one in such a unique location.

The cliffs of Olkhon Island

We kept travelling north along the length of the island.  Khuzir is about halfway up the 70km length of the island, but the 35km to the cape required about two hours of driving due to the adverse terrain.  We stopped three or four times on the way up at picturesque spots, before finally being given an hour at lunch to walk to the cape (where vehicles couldn’t go) before coming back for lunch.  The cape was really worth seeing, as it gives an indication of how vast the lake is.  To the west you can just about see the mainland, but to the north and east there is only water - it looks just like the sea except for the fact that the water is completely still.  After getting some photos at the cape, we returned to where our minibus had been parked, only to find that it had gone.  This was pretty daunting, considering the vast, open landscape, so we frantically searched for where it had gone.  Eventually (thankfully) we bumped into another minibus driver who was friends with our one and who pointed us in the right direction.  It turned out that they had moved the minibus to a spot for lunch having dropped us off.  I don’t quite know how the other people in our group had understood that and we hadn’t!

Tethered horses at the weather station

The lunch was really good - local fish soup along with some nice sandwiches that they had made up for us.  The cape was, obviously, the furthest point of our tour and we made our way back along the same route as we had arrived - there is only one track along the length of the island.  We stopped off at a weather station on the way back, on an isolated beach surrounded by loads of wild horses.  From here we made our way back, trying to fall asleep after a deceptively tiring day.  Unfortunately it seems to be impossible to fall asleep whilst in a state of dirt road-induced head banging.  The journey took two hours or so and we both had a little nap once we were back at the house.  After a more traditionally Russian dinner of dumplings and potato, we grabbed some beers and headed back to the cliffs.  I have never seen it anywhere else, but Russian beer comes in MASSIVE litre cans that take ages to drink, so Alex and I sat drinking from the same can for about an hour.  We planned to go back to the hostel for an early night, but on the way back we bumped into the Poles who were just starting a campfire on the cliffs.  This seemed like a pretty cool idea and they invited us to join them for a few hours.  As travel experiences go, this was fairly special - sitting around a campfire watching the sunset over Lake Baikal.

Campfire on the cliffs

Knowing how difficult it was to find our house in the dark, we left just as the sun set.  On our way back we saw a massive dog staring down a tiny little kitten and the two of us, seeing that this was an unfair fight, shooed the dog away.  The kitten seemed to appreciate this and decided to follow us all the way back to the house (without us realising) and we found that it had come inside with us.  Olya, the woman who owns the place, wasn’t too happy with it, so she threw the poor kitten outside, but as we headed to brush our teeth it had come back to us.  Also, on our way to brush our teeth, we bumped into some Irish people who had just arrived at the hostel and had just cracked open the vodka.  They invited us in and it turned out that there were about 10 people of all nationalities in their room.  We couldn’t refuse, so left our toothbrushes in the room for another round of meeting and drinking.  We eventually made it back to our beds at 2am - having originally planned to be back for 10pm.  The best laid plans and all that.

The remains of four burgers

The train from Yekaterinburg arrived at Irkutsk at 09.40.  The station is on the opposite bank of the Irkut River, so we had to walk into town to find the hostel.  We were extremely hungry and thirsty by this stage, so our top priority was somewhere for food.  It shames me slightly to say that we stopped at the closest restaurant that we could find - the amusingly named McFoods, which was an awful lot like an American chain with a similar name.  Our immense hunger meant that we consumed not just one, but two ‘twin’ burgers (essentially four burgers) and had two drinks of coke. And a coffee.  This fat-fest cost us about 8 pounds.  By this stage we felt pretty recovered, though in desparate need of a shower, and therefore headed off to our hostel - the Baikaler Hostel.  The Yale professor that we had met in Moscow advised us that the owner of the hostel, Jack Shemerdoff (who is standing right next to me as I type), is something of a legend in these parts as an adventurer who designs and runs tours in the Baikal region (which I will describe when I get there).  We are going to start one of these tours tomorrow - I don’t want to give anything away today!

Karl Marx Street, Irkutsk

After showering and making ourselves feel like human beings again, we headed out to explore Irkutsk.  The city is perhaps the most popular on the Trans-Siberian trail.  This is partly down to it being an attractive city in itself, with the nickname 'Paris of Siberia’, but is also due to its vicinity to the world’s oldest and deepest lake - Lake Baikal.  We had arranged to have four nights in the area - split with two in Irkutsk and two at Baikal.  Our first afternoon in the city would be our only real chance to explore it, but it seemed to be pretty small and compact.  We started by walking along the main street - Karl Marx Street, towards the north.  This took us past a remarkable number of expensive clothing and jewellery shops, which was a long way from the 'outpost’ feel that I expected for a city right in the middle of Siberia.  Equally unexpected was the temperature, which stayed at a fairly steady 32 degrees celsius throughout the afternoon - the hottest it had been all trip and around the kind of temperature I had been experiencing in South East Asia a month ago.  And you thought Siberia would be cold.

Playa Kirova, Irkutsk

At the top of Karl Marx Street we turned past a series of public fountains, where kids were running about getting drenched and headed towards the central market. There was a huge variety of food on offer and it all seemed really fresh so we set ourselves a mental bookmark to come back and sort out stuff for our dinner.  Our walk took us back through the centre of the city, past the central square and around the various churches that dot the city’s skyline.  It was definitely the most pleasant Russian city I had been in since St Petersburg.  There seemed to be some kind of student petition going on and when we explained that we didn’t understand what they were petitioning for, they welcomed us to the city in broken english - a far friendlier welcome than we had recieved anywhere else.  After looking around the outside of the churches and at the grand buildings in the city centre, we headed back to the supermarket and market to get some food.  We decided to split up - with me doing the supermarket run and Alex doing the market run.

River Irkut, Irkutsk

It turned out that I made the right call here, as it took me 5 minutes to grab the bits I needed before heading back to the hostel.  Alex, on the other hand, had further to walk and within a few minutes of my arrival at the hostel, the weather completely turned and there was a huge thunderstorm.  After waiting for an hour I assumed that he had found shelter, or was lost - its difficult to navigate Russian cities unless you can read cyrillic, so I headed out to find him.  And I therefore got drenched as well and couldn’t find him.  Fearing he had been kidnapped, I headed back to the hostel to think up contingency plans and just as I was about to phone in the SAS, he arrived at the door absolutely drenched.  He had been both taking shelter and being lost.  He had however bought some cool food back and he made a wonderful spaghetti bolognese that was a fantastic relief from train food.  It was still light after dinner, so we wandered down Karl Marx Street, getting an ice cream on our way, to the River Irkut to watch the sun setting.  Tomorrow we head to Lake Baikal, where we will stay with a Russian couple - Olya and Kolya, in the middle of the Siberian countryside.  Electricity only arrived 5 years ago and the toilet is in a shed.  Should be quite an experience.

Our four train journeys across Russia could be split into two categories: bearably small and unbearably massive. By the time we had left Yekaterinburg, we had completed the former category and entered the latter.  The journey from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk is a big one, weighing in at 3,369km and crossing 3 time zones.  It is the equivalent of travelling due east from Kandahar, Afghanistan to Singapore - so roughly the combined width of Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Burma.  We got on the train at 22.50 on the 21st and didn’t arrive in Irkutsk until 09.40 on the 24th.  To make matters worse, we had done our first two journeys in the relatively luxurious ‘Firmenny’ class of train, which are more modern and better equipped than their standard equivalents.  Fearing a nightmare of a journey, it actually started out pretty nicely.  The only person in our carriage was a friendly old man (with a very complicated name which we forgot and didn’t have the courage to ask for again).  The train was a lot older than the other two, but it was clean and relatively comfortable and we were able to get off to sleep fairly quickly on our first night.

Baraba Steppe, Siberia - notice 'tree line’ on horizon

For those people who believe that the Trans-Siberian railway runs its entire length through spectacular terrain are sadly mistaken.  Between the Urals and Irkutsk, there is very little of interest.  At the start of the journey we passed through dense Taiga forest, which was impressive in its scale, but meant that the view for a day consisted of evergreen trees.  After this we entered a 600km stretch of nothingness called the Baraba Steppe.  This is essentially a massive, flat swamp where occasionally there is enough firm ground for trees to grow, or for a village to have sprung up.  The sheer vastness of this nothingness is best demonstrated through an odd optical illusion.  On the horizon it always seems as though there is a line of trees.  This doesn’t actually exist however as it is the combination of the small copses of trees and the vast space that appear to merge into a forest - the trees that appear to be in a continuous line could be several kilometres apart.  It is a marvel that they managed do construct the railway through this terrain at all.

A village, around 400km before Irkutsk

Towards the end of the journey, on the third day, the terrain began to become more interesting as the train snaked it way through valleys and hills on the way to Irkutsk.  We passed lots of villages, some of which were made up of picturesque wooden houses but some of which were pretty ugly.  The towns in particular were pretty horrid to look at and our Trans-Siberian guidebook (which contains a handy kilometer by kilometer guide) doesn’t have much good to say about them - each town is normally centered around a factory, which everybody works at.  The guidebook says things like “don’t go to so-and-so unless you want to buy bricks/paper/timber” for example.  In the morning we had gone through the city of Omsk, where we picked up a young guy called Ilya who didn’t say much and slept and sweated a lot.  We passed through the city of Novosibirsk, the third largest in Russia, at around midnight and collected another guy called Max - it turned out that Ilya had read his ticket wrong and was in the wrong bed.

Our friends on the train

Travelling east overland through three time zones means that you essentially have to choose when  you change your watch.  Some people have their watch set on Moscow time for the entire journey, but we decided to stay with Yekaterinburg time (MT+3), which gave us three hours that we could 'skip’ throughout the journey by jumping our watches forwards an hour until we reached Irkutsk time (MT+6).  Meal time can therefore occur whenever anybody fancies it (as everybody has their watches set to a different time) and tends to be a communal affair where everybody shares the food that they brought with them.  The food that Alex and I bought with us was consistently rejected, whether out of politeness or disgust we don’t know.  The only thing that we offered and they accepted were apples and the plastic forks that we had with us.  The first night, before Ilya left, Alex and I ate the pasta that we had made in Yekaterinburg along with the fresh cucumber, tomato and bread provided by the older guy.  Ilya kind of ate everybody’s food and didn’t say anything.  The second night was a far more rowdy affair - Max was a lot more lively that Ilya and cracked out the Russian Vodka.  This was eaten along with tinned fish, dry brown bread and smoked pork fat, which you have to inhale before and after your shot of vodka to take the edge of it.  This seemed to work - the four of us got through two bottles of vodka (one of which me and Alex went and bought from the restaurant car), meaning that we spend the evening fairly merry.  Before the journey started we were worried about the idea of sharing a carriage with drunks - having had uncomfortable experiences with a few already.  If you can’t beat them, join them.  We rolled into Irkutsk in the morning on the 24th, feeling surprisingly fresh but thinking that the sight of another vodka shot, or the smell of smoked pork fat, would make us pretty unwell.

Day One: Church on the Blood and Yekaterinburg City Centre

Church on the Blood, Yekaterinburg

The train rolled into Yekaterinburg Station at 3.40 and we rolled out of it onto the platform and then into the waiting room.  It was dark in the small ‘dark section’ of the night, so we decided to hang around the fairly busy station, rather than walk through an unknown Russian town in the early hours of the morning.  The waiting room was fairly comfortable and the two of us had already passed the tired barrier into the 'light headed but awake’ state.  With the sun only setting for a couple of hours a night, it wasn’t long until we were able to get up and find our hostel - the 'Meeting Point’ hostel in the town centre.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite such a good meeting point as we struggled to find it, due to the fact that the city’s street numbers seemed to have been assigned at random. When we did find it, there was nobody in.  This wasn’t what we wanted to hear after being awake for so long, so we asked around for help as best as we could.  The best help came from the nearby  Park Inn Hotel, who looked up our hostel on the internet and rang them up.  It turned out that the owner had just popped out, so we were good to go.  Which was a massive relief.  After getting in we both had wonderful showers.

Statue of Nicholas II and his family

The main reason that I had wanted to visit Yekaterinburg was that it is the place where Tsar Nicholas II and his children were killed - a barbaric event that really shaped Russia’s history.  On 17th July 1918, the Tsar and his wife and children were shot and bayoneted to death by Bolsheviks at the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg.  His son Alexei, famous for being hemophilic and being 'cured’ by Rasputin was amongst the five children killed.  In 1977 Boris Yeltsin, the mayor of the city (later to become the Russian President), ordered the Ipatiev House to be pulled down - I can’t quite work out why, but in 1990 the plot of land was handed from the government to the church for them to build a memorial chapel.  In 1981 the Orthadox Church had canonized the members of the Romanov family who were killed in Yekaterinburg.  The full name of this chapel is the 'Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints Resplendent in the Russian Land’. The bodies of what was thought to be the Romanovs were found in 1979, but this fact wasn’t made public for some years to come.  In 1998 tests began by research centres around the world, using DNA from Prince Philip amongst others (most European royals are related) and the tests came back positive.  The bodies of the Romanovs were moved to St Petersburg.  The church isn’t the most stunning of Orthadox churches I have visited, but it is certaintly one of the most poignant and important.  In the basement of the church are larger marble plaques bearing the names of the Romanovs and the day that they died.  It seems that the murder of the Tsar and his families is seen by most Russians to be one of their country’s darkest moments.

View over the lake, Yekaterinburg

QWERTY keyboard monument

After this pretty sombre sight, and really the only place that I knew of being a major attraction, we decided to walk around the rest of the city.  I had never heard of Yekaterinburg before I started researching this trip, yet it is the 4th largest city in Russia with a population of 1.35 million.  It is a large industrial and financial centre and, from what I have gathered in a local newspaper, will be the furthest east football stadium used in the Russia 2018 World Cup.  Apparently they are planning to building a high speed railway line from Moscow which will shorten our 28 hour journey to just 7, which is pretty impressive.  The city is set around a lake and is fairly clean and pleasant.  It has that clean but sterile feel of a place that is used mainly for economic purposes, rather than as a cultural centre, but there is a large student base and there are many displays around the city of works by art students.  The most interesting (and bizarre) of these os the QWERTY keyboard monument - a large set of concrete 'keys’ that are set in the ground as a monument to…keyboards.  Also there is a large Beatles following in the city and there is also a memorial to them too.  A dear old lady came up to us as we took photos of this Beatles monument and asked us to translate the lyrics that had been put up on the wall - she had lived in the city her whole life but had never had an English person to read them to her.  Unfortuantely we couldn’t translate them, but we gave her the gist in English.  We might not have fitted loads in today, but Yekaterinburg is definitely a place that you can only squeeze an afternoon of sightseeing out of and frankly we were ready to just crash at our appartment having had next to no sleep for the previous 36 hours.

'The Beatles’ monument

Day Two: Asia/Europe Marker and History Museum

The Europe/Asia border

We were thinking that we might have a bit of a nothing day in Yekaterinburg today - having seen the majority of the city’s sights yesterday.  Our hostel is basically a flat, run by the lovely Katya and we met another English guy called John who we talked to in the evening.  He was in a similar situation and we decided that the three of us found out that it is possible to get to the Europe/Asia border by taxi for about 20 pounds.  Splitting the cost between three of us made this quite an economically sound plan.  We were woken up by John at 11.30am, having crashed last night. Katya had arranged for us to be picked up at midday by a taxi, so we had a quick breakfast and headed off.  The journey itself was interesting, as we passed through the relatively compact Yekaterinburg suburbs listening to a Russian radio station that played non-stop western music, including classics such as Eiffel 65’s Blue.  We arrived at about half 12 and got our fill of photos of the monument at the border.  It is interesting to know that the border is dictated by river basins, so a drop of water that falls on the east of the border ends up in an Asian river whereas a drop of water on the west ends up in a European river.

Russian military hardware, Military Museum

We got back into town at about half 1 and made ourselves lunch while John went to explore the Church on the Blood.  Our afternoon plan was to get visit the Yekaterinburg Military Museum.  The exhibits are completely in Russian, but it is worth visiting because it contains fragments of the famous U2 spy plane, flown by Gary Powers, that was shot out of the sky near here during the Cold War.  For those who don’t know the story, the spy plane was shot down by the Russians and the pilot survived.  The Americans pretended that the oxygen supply of one of their weather planes had failed over Turkey and that the pilot had become unconscious - the autopilot had taken it into Russian airspace.  Cunning Khruschev however hadn’t actually told the Americans that the pilot had survived, so all the time that they were making up a cover story, Gary Powers was confessing.  He didn’t have much reason not to - he had been captured with hundreds of roubles and fake identities, so it would be a pretty tall story to suggest that he was finding information about the weather.  Aside from fragments of the plane and bits of Powers’ emergency kit, there was also a lot of WW2 memorabilia which was interesting to see.  It was definitely worth the two pound entrance fee, even if I couldn’t read any of the information.

Afghanistan War Memorial

On our way back to the hostel we stopped by at a memorial to Russian soldiers who had died in Afghanistan and Chechnya.  This was quite a poignant memorial as they go, as it was a statue of an exhausted Russian soldier with his AK-47 pointing towards the sky - a far cry from the usual upright and proud Soviet war statues.  This statue had a completely different kind of dignity though, and seemed to be far more suited to a memorial to the dead.  This was about all we had to see in Yekaterinburg and we walked back to the hostel via the pedestrianised shopping street (named the 'Arbat’ of the Urals).  We got back to our hostel and said goodbye to Katya (if you stay in Yekaterinburg, you HAVE to stay at Katya’s Meeting Point Hostel).  We had stocked up on food at the supermarket for the upcoming three nights on the train to Irkutsk.  Yekaterinburg isn’t an obvious choice for Trans-Siberian travellers, but I would thoroughly recommend it.  It is cool to see what a normal Russian city is like and it has plenty of things to see for a day or two.  For some reason I felt really at home here and I think that it is perhaps because it is the last bastion of Europe (although it is JUST in Asia) before we head out east.  By the time we get to Irkutsk, we will be thoroughly in the middle of Siberia.  So see you there!

View from the window - note, this is not Siberia yet

Our journey from St Petersburg to Moscow had been a pretty gentle introduction to what it is like to sleep on a Russian train, with a journey time of a leisurely 8 hours.  Today we began our first real Trans Siberian experience, with the 28 hour journey from Moscow to Yekaterinberg in the Ural Mountains.  Leaving at 23.55 on Saturday night, we arrived in Yekaterinberg at 3.20 local time - having crossed two time zones.  To give you an indication of how far we had travelled thus far, St Petersburg is on a similar longitude to Istanbul.  Moscow, which is 800km away, is on a similar longitude to Damascus, Syria (the train journey is south east, so there is no time zone change).  Yekaterinberg, 2600km from St Petersburg, is on a similar longitude to Kandahar, Afghanistan.  The total journey from St Petersburg to Vladivostok is about 10,000km - so there is still a long way to go.  Technically, we aren’t at Siberia yet - having just got into Asia from the Urals.

Inside the carraige

Now that you have got the rough logistics of the journey in your head, I can start to tell you about what it was like.  It turns out that the train we were catching was the no.20, which is the service that runs all the way from Moscow to Beijing (taking 8 days).  Our cabin of four only had one other person in - a girl called Valerie.  We weren’t to find out her name until the morning, because we kind of got off on the wrong foot.  She spoke only vague English and wanted to try and explain that she needed to get changed and that we should stand outside, but our lack of Russian vocabulary caused us to just sit there looking confused.  We eventually understood and got out with a flurry of apologies, but I think our original hesitation made us come across as perverts - she didn’t talk to us until the morning.  Alex and I slept pretty well and woke up at 9am feeling fairly fresh.  Our entertainment for the journey was based around reading, admiring the views, sleeping and talking to Valerie.  Once our initial confusion had passed, we were able to get talking in a combination of her fairly basic English and our very basic Russian.  My Russian dictionary sat on the table for when we needed to look up a word - and with a full day to hold a conversation, it didn’t particularly interrupt the flow.  The whole carriage was interested in the two English travellers onboard, because as much as everybody talks about doing the Trans-Siberian, it is still very much a service for Russian people.  The conversation with Valerie based around some pretty frequently asked questions given to English people - do you like David Beckham?, did you enjoy the Royal Wedding?, what football team do you support? etc, but this was interesting and gave us both a chance to pick up some Russian vocab.

View from the window

As for the scenery, I think that most people (myself included) have an image of the Trans Siberian railway journey being an epic voyage across all kinds of dramatic scenery.  Frankly, it was pleasant but not stunning.  The majority of what we saw was pine forest, farmland or rolling plains.  Every now and then there would be a town or village consisting of wooden houses and dirt roads - fitting into my stereotypical image of the Russian countyside.  The Urals, which I thought would be a wall-like mountain range dividing Europe and Asia, are actually only about 500m above sea level at their highest point within the proximity of the railway line (they get a fair bit higher to the north however).  The range is certainly a visible landmark, but it is composed more of hills covered in pine forest than of dramatic snow capped peaks.  Valerie got out at the city of Perm at about 11pm and a new guy called Pavel got in.  He also spoke a bit of English, but as it was getting late we introduced each other before settling down for our second night.  Neither I nor Alex slept much, as we knew we would be up and out at 3.40am.  We arrived on time, and now we are in Yekaterinberg.

Sunset over the Kama River, near Perm

Day One: Arrival from St Petersburg

Komsomol Metro Station, Moscow

Having left you last night as we got on the the train to St Petersburg, we have now completed our journey to Moscow.  The train left Moscovsky Station in St Petersburg at 23.00 and arrived at Leningradsky Station in Moscow at 7.30 the next morning.  The journey was really comfortable, saved a night paying for a hostel and crucially gave us an easy introduction to Russian train travel.  Nobody spoke any English, but a combination of my reading cyrillic and the joint Russian vocabulary of me and Alex got us by.  The people on the carriage weren’t particularly talkative (who can blame them) but the guy next to me woke us up when we got to Moscow which was kind of him.  We jumped straight onto the metro to our hostel, but then found that we didn’t have enough money for a ticket.  Unfortunately, the Russian system means that you can’t leave the station once inside - you have to pay for a ticket to somewhere.  Panicking a bit, we decided to try and buy a ticket to the next station along and luckily JUST had enough money - a lesson to learn.  From there we walked, but it had been worth going down there.  The Moscow metro is the most attractive in the world and by chance we started in the pick of the bunch. Unfortunately photography is banned but luckily somebody else has taken one for me, so I will steal theirs.

Red Square, Moscow

We got to the ‘Godzilla’ Hostel, where we would be spending the next three nights, at about 10.  We couldn’t check in until 2, but we took the opportunity to catch up with the news in the TV room and made some bookings on the computer for the rest of the trip.  We checked in and had a much needed shower before having a vague walk into town, stopping for lunch on the way.  We decided to aim for the legendary Red Square, a shrine for two people who had covered Soviet history intensively at school.  Incredibly, when we arrived we weren’t even sure that we were at the right place - I thought it was inside the Kremlin complex, but it actually sits outside along one of the walls.  Not only was it not where I thought it to be, but i was also not as grand as I expected - having seen all the videos of Stalin overseeing thousands of troops and tanks walking through.  To me, it looked a lot like most of the other square I had been to, with St Petersburg’s Palace Square a far grander version.  Having said that, the sense of history is palpable as you stand there with the Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and Lenin’s Mausoleum all in the same camera shot.

Fountains in the River Moskva

It was getting too late in the day to go inside anywhere, so we decided to just wander around the city streets.  Citizens of St Petersburg used to look down upon citizens of Moscow as 'villagers’, because for a long time (even as capital of Russia), the city was divided into vary distinct districts based on former villages.  This means that each area is unique in its own way and where it misses out on the grandness of St Petersburg, Moscow is a lot more interesting and quirky than I expected it to be.  In my mind it was going to be a communist concrete jungle, but a remarkable amount of cobbled streets and traditional looking buildings exist alongside parks and fountains.  I was pleasantly surprised and this more than made up for my slightly underwhelmed reaction to Red Square.  We had already have a fairly hefty meal for lunch, so we went to a supermarket and picked up some stuff to make wraps for dinner before settling down for the evening at the hostel.


Day Two: Lenin’s Mausoleum, Christ the Saviour Cathedral and Arbat Street

Lenin’s body, Moscow

We started with a fantastic, self-cooked breakfast of eggs on toast and then headed straight for Red Square, leaving everything in our locker in the hostel.  We were going to Lenin’s Mausoleum, where the actual preserved dead body of Vladimir Lenin is lying for all to see.  We left all our stuff in the room because of the bag fiasco at the Hermitage in St Petersburg and because you aren’t allowed cameras inside anyway. We figured we would head back to the hostel to pick stuff up later.  I have taken an image from the web to show you just how odd Lenin’s waxy dead body looks.  It was amazing to be able to see it, but at the same time it was also pretty disturbed.   It also completed quite an odd communist trio of tombs/bodies that I have seen on my year out - Lenin, Ho Ch Minh and Tito.

Christ the Saviour Cathedral, Moscow

We headed back to our hostel for a coffee and some lunch and then walked back down into town.  We had originally planned to go inside the Kremlin complex today, but it closes on Thursdays unfortunately.  This wasn’t too much of a worry though as we just swapped some bits on our itinerary around.  We headed for the Christ the Saviour Cathedral, the tallest Orthodox cathedral in the world (but not the largest - we saw this in Serbia earlier this year.  We had heard that it is possible to climb to the top of the dome and get some really good photos over the city.  Unfortunately we couldn’t actually see any steps up there when we arrived, so we went inside the building itself.  Amazingly, it is only 20 years old as it was rebuilt as a copy of the original that was destroyed by Stalin during his anti-religion phase.  He intended to replace it was a kind of 'temple of humanity’, which would have been the biggest building on earth.  Having knocked down the cathedral however, it turned out that his building would have been too heavy for the marshy land around the river and he instead decided to build a swimming pool - a pretty poor replacement in all honesty.

Arbat Street

Our last real stop of the day was Arbat Street and New Arbat Street.  The former of these is the pedestrianized shopping street that mainly caters for tourists, with souvenir shops, street performers and cafes.  The latter is one of the newer shopping streets that is mainly used by Russians.  We had a drink on Arbat Street and watched some of the performers, but the two weren’t quite as great as they were hyped up to be.  We hadn’t actually seen many sights today, but had walked for miles and miles, taking in the city and as a result we headed back to the hostel via Red Square, where we updated our video diary.  We had been trying to save money by doing our own food, so made a dinner of bologneise in the hostel kitchen.  I can’t recommend Godzilla Hostel enough - it is one of the best run places I have ever been and we had the whole kitchen to ourselves.  Early night tonight as we are getting up early to take a train out from Moscow to the nearby town of Sergiev Posad.


Day Three: Sergiev Posad

The monastery complex

Four days in Moscow is actually a bit overkill, unless you are aiming o spend lots of time and money in museums.  Having had a fairly successful day trip to the Peterhof from St Petersburg, we decided to be a bit more adventurous in Moscow by taking a train out into the countryside.  Our goal was the town of Sergiev Posad, the most holy site in Russia and the centre of the Orthodox church over here.  We got the metro to the station and then caught a one and a half hour suburban train, costing a reasonable 5.60 pounds return.

'76  kilometer station’

Unfortunately, we missed the stop as a result of the station sign being hidden by another train.  We watched in horror as the churches and cathedrals past us by and we headed off into the Russian wilderness.  Logically, we got out at the next station and prepared to head back in the opposite direction.   This next stop was completely isolated, in the middle of the Russian forests - it didn’t even have a name, only a sign saying '76 kilometers’, which I assume is the distance to Moscow.  There were no people or houses nearby and the few locals who got out ether disappeared into the trees, or were picked up by relatives on quad bikes.  There appeared to be a timetable on the side of the deserted ticket hut and we gathered that another train would be arriving about an hour later.  After an hour of sitting on the platform, watching out for hears, we hopped on a train back to Sergiev Posad.  We had planned to arrive at half 11, we actually arrived at 3.

The Bell Tower (left) and Assumption Cathedral (right)

The town of 100,000 people is just a normal Russian settlement, but on the outskirts is the walled monastery complex.  The site lies outside the zone of devastation caused by Hitler and the buildings are therefore the originals, which is uncommon n the Moscow area.  It is a really stunning sight, set on a hill and protected by walls that once repelled some 20,000 Polish invaders whilst only manned by 1,500 Russians.  The monasteries were all very impressive and the central one (the Assumption Cathedral) with its sky blue domes was where the Tsars used to be christened.  Photos weren’t allowed within the complex, but I was able to get some good snaps around the grounds.  The central square contains a fountain connected to a natural spring that supposedly appeared during the Polish siege.  It is considered holy water and pilgrims come from all over to drink from it.  There wasn’t much of a queue as we walked past, so we filled up our bottles.

Drinking holy water

After an hour or so of walking around, we walked back to the station and caught the train back to Moscow.  Some bad seat selection ended up with us in a carriage full of Russian middle aged drunkards.  They were more amusing than threatening - a few of them were sober enough to keep the others in order.  One of them was really stumbling around and fell off his seat as we stopped at a station, cracking his head on a metal bar.  It really dazed him and his mates couldn’t get any sense out of him.  Looking at us, they saw our bottle of Russian holy water in the side of my back and yelled 'voda, voda’ at us.  I didn’t know what they were getting at, but I handed it to them only to watch them pour it all over this poor guy’s head to wake him up.  Maybe the holy water cured his alcoholism.  We headed back to the hostel once back in Moscow, picking up some stuff for dinner on our way through.  Our meal was pretty amazing - we were joined by an English couple who had sold their house and were using the profits to travel until they found somewhere to live, and a Yale professor of Ecology and English.  Needless to say, Alex and I didn’t say a lot - our anecdotes paled in comparison!


Day Four: The Kremlin

Trinity Tower, The Kremlin

All the maps of Moscow have the Kremlin marked as a big red splodge, right in the city centre.  There is no questioning what the focal point of the city is - all roads lead to the Kremlin and we had already walked past several times.  Before I came, I assumed that the Kremlin was a building that was the evil version of the White House in Washington DC.  It turns out however that most older Russian cities have a Kremlin, because it is just the Russian word for 'citadel’.  It just turns out that 'the’ Kremlin refers to the most famous of the lot - the centre of the Russian government in Moscow.  On our way through, we passed he tomb of the unknown soldier - a very sacred site for Russians, with the dates 1941-1945 engraved into it.  Two soldiers stand guard and an eternal flame burns.  Strangely enough, lots of Russians come to the site to have their wedding photos taken, but we were there too early to see that.  Security is pretty tight and once again we weren’t allowed bags.  The ticketing system was pretty rubbish (two booths and miles of queues), but we are pretty used to it by now - our top tip for travelling in Russia is that it can take as long as 2 hours to get inside anywhere popular.

Palace of Congress, The Kremlin

There were several 'grades’ of tickets available, which corresponded to the amount of buildings that you could enter.  Being backpackers, we got the cheapest - which basically allowed us to walk around the central square and into two of the cathedrals.  The thick red walls of the Kremlin make it very difficult to imagine what it is like inside, as only a few buildings and spires are taller.  I didn’t know what to expect therefore, and was pleasantly surprised to find an interesting array of museums, cathedrals, government buildings, squares and parks.  I don’t know if it has been completely changed since Stalin’s time, but it completely lacked the sinister feel that I was expecting.  We entered through Trinity Tower and immediately passed the most obviously communist mark on the Kremlin - the 'Palace of Congress’ which used to be the centre of government and has now become a theatre for performing arts.  Its frankly a pretty ugly mark on what is otherwise a very attractive area.

The Bell Tower and Cathedral of Archangel Michael

The path through the Kremlin is fairly well marked - any movement off the footpaths is immediately greeted with a whistle and shout from a policeman.  The complex is still the centre of Russian government and it seems that there still exists a residual suspicion of foreigners.  Our ticket entitled us to enter Cathedral Square and look at the grand buildings that surround it.  The first of these, the Cathedral of the Annunciation, was the Tsar’s private chapel and contains the coffin of Tsar Alexander III.  As cool as it was to see this famous Tsar’s coffin, this was nothing compared to the building opposite - the Cathedral of the Archangel Michael, which contains the coffins of 46 Tsars, including Ivan the Terrible.  The coffins are all lined up together, with only the cyrillic name on the top to distinguish them - a remarkably communal area for men who lived their lives above everybody else.

The Tsar Cannon (check out the cannon balls)

That was pretty much all we were allowed to go inside at the Kremlin, but we were able to go past both the biggest cannon and the biggest church bell in the world.  These weren’t quite as impressive as they could have been, as the cannon never fired a shot - the cannon balls couldn’t be loaded inside, and the bell has a big chunk missing from it.  They were cool to get some snaps of.  On our way out we walked through some of the grounds of the Kremlin - pretty parkland with flower beds and benches, believe it or not.  We also passed the Armoury Museum, which cost a fair bit extra (we didn’t enter) but for those of you with more financial clout, this museum is probably the best one to go to within Moscow.  Or so I have heard.

GUM department store

From the Kremlin we headed over to Arbat Street to pick up some postcards and have a light lunch.  On our way back through to the hostel we went into Red Square for the last time.  The stage that had been there the whole time had been taken down, which meant that we were actually able to get some photos of Lenin’s Mausoleum.  I had spent days looking for the 'GUM’ (pronounced goom) department store, and it turned out that it had been under our noses the whole time, on the edge of Red Square.  I’m not usually one for department stores, but this one had quite a history.  It was built as a grand shopping arcade, but when the communists arrived they took over all the businesses and put their own, state sponsored, goods inside.  As with most communist shops, there were severe shortages and the building served as the ultimate icon of these shortages.  Now, it is an even more impressive icon - it sits directly opposite Lenin’s Mausoleum and the Kremlin and is the most exclusive shopping centre in the city.  It is perhaps the ultimate symbol of Moscow’s new found self, that you can stand inside a shop like Lacoste or Dior, look through the window, and see the place where Lenin’s body lies.  I am sure that he is turning in his pod.  If this isn’t enough symbolism for you, the street outside GUM, with Lenin at one end and exclusive shops all the way along it, has the ex-KGB headquarters at the other.  This means that you now buy a Ferrari in Moscow in a shop that is within about 100m of both Lenin and the KGB HQ.  You still can’t go in the latter though - I think that there are secrets inside that may never come out.

The old KGB headquarters

This was, perhaps inappropriately, our last sight in Moscow, as we went to the supermarket and headed back to the hostel. We had stocked up on food for the evening’s journey to Yekaterinberg - a journey lasting for just over a full day.  After dinner we aimed to have a photo of us having a shot of vodka like we did in St Petersburg - a tradition that we wanted to start.  Unfortunately, as we entered our bar of choice, we were joined by a Russian guy who wanted to practise his English, but was completely drunk.  He wasn’t threatening or anything, and we still had our shots (along with a lot of 'welcome, welcome’ from the drunk), but we didn’t really think it was the time to whip out my expensive camera.  We are now waiting around until midnight, when the train leaves.  See you in Yekaterinberg.