Moscow was nothing like I expected it to be, although the only images that I had of it before were those from James bond films, so they were hardly accurate. We were met at the airport by a friend of a friend who not only let us stay in his apartment, but went to stay somewhere else so we had the place to ourselves.
On our way back from dinner that night we emerged from the subway to be met by two policemen standing over a tramp lying face down in a pool of his own blood - maybe this place is more like a James bond film after all.
The following day as we were leaving our building we bumped in two paramedics carrying a corpse down the stairs and into an awaiting ambulance. What a great start to our trip! We seemed to spend most of our first day underground on Moscow's famous metro. Some of the stations really are beautiful with huge chandeliers and stained glass and even statues dotted around the place. It is very confusing though as not only is everything written in Cyrillic but also stations have different names depending which line you
are on. It took quite some time for us to work this out.
Eventually we emerged from the underground to explore the city. We went to the Bolshoi theatre but the ballet is on holiday during the summer so we scrapped that idea and went to Red square which is cool. There are lots of multicoloured churches nearby and of course the famed St Basil's cathedral at the end. All of the seating is still there from when the soviets used to parade their nuclear arsenal through the square. Something that we won't get to see.
The Gum (Goom) department store runs along one side of the square and rivals Harrods in grandeur. It is a far cry from the communist days where all of the thousand shops sold the same thing. Now it is full of exclusive boutiques. We wandered around the centre of town for ages which was nice to see all of the places that we had heard about from spy novels. We even went in to the Kremlin, which is a huge compound with lots of churches and a massive bell. everywhere there are old cannons stacked up on the floor next to buildings. These
had all apparently been confiscated by some Russian army off some other invading army ...something like that.
In the Kremlin gardens we were interviewed and photographed by someone from Cosmopolitan who told us that we would be in the September edition. Look out for us! (The Russian version though)
In the west the Russian stereotype drinks heavily from dawn till dusk. I can now say with some authority that, yes this is true. Business men in suits go to work in the morning with a briefcase in one hand and a can of fortified beer in the other. During the lunch hour the same businessmen come out and sit in the parks and polish off a half bottle of vodka before going back to work.
Someone who lives here told me that many people go missing in the middle of winter because they get drunk at night and pass out/fall over in the snow and freeze to death. By morning they have been covered in snow and so it is only in spring when the snow begins to thaw that the streets give up their victims and they are discovered, perfectly preserved.
Our last day in Moscow we
went to see Lenin's tomb. You go in to this underground chamber and there he is lying in a glass box. He looks like a waxwork but I was assured that he is real. The Russians take it all very seriously. I was even asked to remove my hat by a very stern looking soldier. We also went to see the graves of other famous Russians. I had only heard of Uri Gagarin (the first man in space) and of course Stalin. I was shocked to see a lady all dressed in black kneel at Stalin's grave kiss the statue and lay a wreath. Far be it from me to tell these people their own history, but wasn't Stalin an evil murderous bastard?
Despite Russia having a reputation for being poor, Moscow is one of the wealthiest places I have ever been. Everywhere you look there are convoys of blacked out cars speeding through the streets with an absolute disregard for any traffic laws. If you are rich in Moscow then you pay the police for the privilege of having a blue flashing light which then makes you immune from prosecution it seems. The trouble is that there are
so many blue flashing lights everywhere that they have almost defeated the point.
Whilst browsing in the Ferrari and Masserati shops, Adam and I were lucky enough to see one of these super rich going about their business. As expected he was accompanied by two leggy blondes and a whole car full of heavies all with sub-machine guns and those curly earpieces that the CIA wear. It is no wonder that this is a city full of nightclubs strip bars and casinos. They even have something in Moscow nightclubs called "Face Watch." This basically means that if the bouncer thinks that your face will lower the tone of the club them he will refuse you entry. Beautiful people only.
St Petersburg is a beautiful place and much nicer than Moscow. There is a big river and loads of canals everywhere a bit like Amsterdam. As it is summer St Petersburg has white nights which means that it never really gets dark, so we spent the night wandering the streets as many places stay open all night and the fact that it always feels like it is the evening means that you never seem to get that tired.
There is a museum here that belonged to some Ivan or other that has a collection of freaks, which is worth the trip if you are ever here. Lots of really fucked up stuff including lots of mutants like a stuffed calf with two heads.
Later that evening we went to a strip club which was bizarre as it was a Sunday night so we were the only people there. I had never been to a strip club before, but we decided that when in Rome... (I don't particularly like vodka either but i had been drinking liberal amounts of the stuff on a daily basis.) The two bored looking girls managed to keep us entertained for most of the night until some genuine punters came in and started shoving fistfuls of roubles down their pants. There was a on funny moment when Adam, while 'carefully placing' some money in a girls g-string, accidentally popped the catch and what remained of the girls modesty popped off. She was not amused and angrily told him off. Despite his apologies she refused to believe it was an accident. We managed to calm her down with an orange juice.
The Trans Siberian Express was a very pleasant five days relaxing and drinking copious amounts of vodka. We were sharing a cabin with a couple from Krasnoyarsk in Siberia who were very nice and kept on giving us more and more vodka and cold meat. The man was an anti-mafia policeman and one of the first things that he did when we entered the cabin was to give me a magazine all about guns. It was all in Russian but he went through the pictures with me telling me which were his favorites.
The more he talked about his job the more dangerous it seemed. He said that his boss had been poisoned the year before and he slept with a gun under his pillow. Although he had only been on holiday in Moscow I couldn't help wondering if he had one with him on the train. Anyway he and his wife were two of the nicest people I could hope to have met and as well as plying us with alcohol they taught us a great deal about Russian culture such as Yorsh, a cocktail of beer and vodka.
The scenery out of the train was much less breathtaking than I had imagined, just miles and miles of never ending forest. Occasionally we passed through towns and cities and over rivers and through gorges, but for the most part it was a very uneventful trip. There is not that much to do apart from read eat and sleep as everyone on the train is Russian apart from a French girl who I spent a long time talking to. Being in the train is very confusing as we were running on Moscow time but every day we crossed another time zone, so after a while the time on the train was five hours different from outside. Not that it mattered as I was always drunk by the time it got dark whatever time that was. The only food that we ate on the whole trip (apart from unwanted gifts of tongue and smoked fish) was pot noodles, all washed down with vodka.
When the train arrived at our destination in Irkutsk five days after leaving St Petersburg, we got off feeling very weird to be on solid ground again. We didn't spend much time in Irkutsk as we were running out of time to get to china before our visas expire, so after a day or two we took a bus to a small town called Lystvianka on the shore of Lake Baikal. Lake Baikal holds a fifth of the earth's fresh water and the deepest lake in the world at 1,620m at its deepest point. It holds more water than all of America's five great lakes put together, so you can imagine how big it is. Unfortunately it was really foggy when we were there so we couldn't really see that much. We stayed in a cool little house that despite being entirely made of wood had a huge underground sauna complex including a Jacuzzi with a huge table and chairs on it for schnapps drinking sessions. Unfortunately we didn't get a chance to test it out.
There was not much going on in the town apart from a whole lot of fish smoking and vodka drinking, so we joined the locals in what can only loosely be described as a 'bar' and set to work on the vodka.
One day when it was very sunny we went out to try and walk around the headland to go and explore but the way soon became very treacherous with rocks crumbling everywhere, not to mention the 200ft drop in to the lake. I climbed down to the water which was incredibly clear with the fog rolling over the surface. By the time I had scrambled up to the path, having had to press myself against the rocks many times to avoid all manner of falling rocks. By the time I got there Adam had had the great idea to do some rock climbing. He put on his shoes and started up this little overhang. Please note that the path we were on was about 200 ft from the bottom. Well he got about 8 or 9 ft before the piece of rock that he was standing on gave way and he fell on to me, then the two of us fell another 5 or 6 ft. by some amazing stroke of luck we both ended up on our feet. I was winded and Adam gauged a big hole in his thumb, but apart from that no major injuries. In hindsight it was an incredibly stupid thing to try and could have been much worse, but it was all in the name of fun.
On our way back home we stopped off at a little pebble beach and paddled around but the water was so cold that my feet had gone numb with pain after about two minutes. This was odd as we were also getting sunburned.
I would have loved to have spent more time there to explore further but we had to get back to Irkutsk to catch the train to Mongolia. Our last day in Siberia the weather was almost tropical and we had to spend the day shading our already sunburned selves from the heat.
The train to Mongolia was very different to the one we were on before. This time they had crammed all of the foreign tourists on to one carriage so we met lots of interesting people. We were sharing with a Danish couple who could not keep thief hands off each other. It was very disconcerting and I hate to think what they were getting up to when we were asleep.
The following morning me and Adam got up to be met by Virginie and Audren, two French people that we had met in the train. They had got up early and got off the train when it had made one of its routine stops to go and see a large statue of Lenin's head in the main square of Ulan Ude. The train was scheduled to top for half an hour but as we were running late it departed again after only ten minutes to save time. When Virgine and Audren returned to the station the train was had left, with all of their belongings on board. They had to pay a taxi driver $100 to literally chase the train which in Siberia meant driving through fields alongside the tracks. Eventually they managed to catch up and get back on board.
Thankfully this all happened while I was asleep. This was the most exciting thing to happen all day as we spent most of the rest of it waiting at the Mongolian border…9 hours!
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Russia's Flag
Map of Russia