Yekaterinburg

---

Ye better all read this as we are rewriting it for the second time after "Technical difficulties".

We arrived in Yekaterinburg late in the evening. After a getting some dinner we took an early night to catch up on the sleep we had been denied on the train. The next day we had a city tour with a local guide Kirill. Yekaterinburg is best known as the place of murder of the last Czarist family, the Romanov's. On the site of their murder a beautiful Commemorative church has been built and we got to visit it. During World War 2 production of the T-34 tanks and "Stalins Organs" rocket launchers was moved here as Yekaterinburg was too far east to be threathened by bombers. We missed out on seeing the piece of the U2 spy plane (From where the band took their name), which was shot down over the city in the 60s as the museum was closed for the day. Although apparently its not all that exciting as it only meausres 10cm squared. We got another early night as we knew we had a trek to look forward to the next day.

After another dreadful Russian breakfast we were collected by our guide Seva and our driver Dennis (Pronounced Denise). We had to drive 150km into the Urals (and back into Europe) west of the city. The new Moscow road wasn't exactly new but we got the genuine Russian experience in our Lada 5 (Not to be confused with the Lada 7 which has a tiny grill on the bonnet apparently). On route we got to stop at the Europe-Asia border and one of Stalins Gulag camps. We reached "Wild Deer Stream Park" where there are actually no deer and got set for our hike. After a 2km trek we reached the river. We were handed paddles and pointed in the direction for our 2 and a half kilometre raft ride It wasn't exactly white water rafting (The rivers name was "River Calm" which was just as well as well as it took us 2km to figure out how to row in a straight line. We also got to visit two beautiful old caves and trek through some spectacular scenery before returning to the city. Our guide had near perfect English and was good fun. We were quite chuffed with ourselves that Seva didn't have to carry us back to the car.

We now get to look forward to 50 hours on the train which is where we will first enter Siberia.

---

Photos

Nicholas the First
Back to jumpers and hoodies I'm afraid

Europe/Asia Border
Ronan in Asia -Ciaran in Europe