Russian weddings play out a little differently from in England. This particular one began with me being shaken awake at an unprintably ungodly hour followed by an unprintable amount of time on the metro all the way to the nearly unprintably degenerate station of Vykhino. If city areas were equated to body parts, Vykhino would, if I was feeling extremely polite, be the armpit of Moscow. Having negotitated our way through the crowds of peddlers, gypsies and drunks that throng Vykhino, Alisa and I eventually negotiated a 15-minute "gypsy cab" ride out into a region actually far nicer than Vykhino. Here, among the twenty-storey concret housing blocks, we waited for the groom while beautiful Russian girls used sticks of chalk to scratch hearts and kisses into the steps of the tower block where the ransom would ... read more

The main avenues of Lyachakovskoye Cemetry are lined with impressively ornate and expensive tombs - marble statues of the deceased playing harps, dancing with angels and the like. Colourful little candles have been left around their bases by Ukrainians who come here once a year on All Souls Day to honour the dead. Move away from those pristine, brick-tiled pathways and deeper into the huge, overgrown, wooded and walled enclosure that is Lviv's largest graveyard. The tombs and the statues adorning them become less pretty, less smooth and less perfectly polished. Here you find grief distraught families, spouses and children eternalised in crumbling, moss-ridden stone, the unimportant alleyways snaking their way past while in the process of being devoured by the everpresent vegetation. The emotion on some of the statues' faces is simply mind-boggling: the hope ... read more

As I arrived in Pyalma the sun, though it would never entirely disappear at this latitude at this time of year, was drifting slowly downwards in the vague direction of the horizon, illuminating the world with a magical light that I could only recall having seen twice previously on equally clear days during summer in the Far North and Mongolia. This light, which quite possibly occurs far more frequently than I realise but only sticks in my memory during moments on the road when it throws itself on places of exceptional beauty, flooded the world with the sort of glow that film directors give certain scenes to make them seem more alive, vibrant, peaceful or memorable, enhancing the colours to an intensity and warmth that is almost unnatural. As to the viewer of that sort of ... read more

Which is pretty much what Peter the Great said in 1703, according to one story, when during one of his many extreme drinking binges he decided to found St Petersburg in the middle of a swamp. However, although it may be true that he was drunk at the time of his decision, seeing as he consumed half a gallon of vodka a day, there was also some method in his madness: he was in the process of turning Russia from a relatively small, landlocked country into a major trading power, and the River Neva on which he built St Petersburg emptied into the Baltic Sea and provided a route to Europe. He ordered hundreds of thousands of serfs, at that time and for another 150 years to come regarded as mere property and passed down with ... read more

Considering the title of this blog, the fact that the crust rupture in question erupts spectacularly every year or two and not forgetting the other potential attractions in the area, such as pretty much guaranteed sightings of the Kamchatka Brown Bear (in summer), one might expect the nearby town of Klyuchi to have some sort of infrastructure, or at least be easily accessible. Not so. Its snow-buried sprawl of wooden shacks lies 600km of dirt road north of Kamchatka's capital and is located in one of the Far East's many closed areas, places where no one, Russian or otherwise, is allowed to go unless they live there or have obtained a temporary permit. Which is why, at 9am on a Monday morning, I found myself hanging around by the roadside just out of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, with Kostya. ... read more