Ulaanbaatur

Better late than never, blogged from a bar in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Life is cheap here. Yes, I know that I’m lagging far, far behind…

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ULAANBAATUR, Mongolia

Me, Dave and Rich left the next day for the train to Ulan Ude, our last port of call in Russia. The train was very quiet, and we spent the journey in third class, in a cold carriage. Passing us by was the picturesque landscape of Lake Baikal, yet since we were travelling by night and there was little moonlight we could see hardly any of it. We were tired anyway, and turned in early. The next morning, arriving at Ulan Ude, we struggled in the bitter cold, in the first driving snow I’d seen in Russia so far, to make our way to the bus for Ulaanbaatur. The bus was being run by a company called ‘Buryat Intour’ who’d been difficult to communicate with by phone. All of our phone calls, as it happened, had been done through the superb Skype application on B&L’s (Blair & Leanne’s) iPod Touch (referred to as the ‘Gay Touch’), a fantastic piece of kit which, with web access, was basically turned into an extremely cheap communications device. I want one.

After accidentally paying for an unnecessary taxi ride, we were eventually (thankfully) pointed in the right direction by a Russian bus driver. A small group of people were clustered next to a round fountain, in a courtyard in front of the Ulan Ude opera house. This opera house stood directly opposite the star attraction of Ulan Ude, a freestanding, huge carving of Lenin’s head (presumably the world’s largest). It was apparently placed their to punish the Ulan Ude residents for some rebellion or other, but they believe that they won a victory of sorts, in that his eyes have an Asiatic look about them. Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to go close enough to test this theory, since we’d been rushing around like tits in a trance.

The bus pulled in, a big coach affair, and we packed our stuff on to it and boarded. Before the coach pulled off their was a brief moment of panic as we watched everyone else file on board… they all had tickets, and we didn’t. There had been no mention of tickets, and we were paranoid that we were about to be kicked off. Luckily we weren’t. We paid our 1000 roubles (roughly £20) and the coach pulled off.

We stopped at a shrine on the way to the border. These shrines are beloved of the indigenous Buryat people of Siberia, who follow a rag-tag amalgamation of Tibetan Buddhism and Shamanism. This was a shaman shrine, and exiting the bus I wandered up a fantastically sunlit hill, sparsely planted with ragged pines, towards it. It consisted of a wooden pole planted dead in the centre, surrounded by rocks, and then more small poles forming a circle around it. To the poles were tied rags, and on the stones were a few votive offerings of Chinese, Russian and Mongolian notes and coinage. The worshippers entered the shrine and then walked clockwise around the pole, after placing an offering on one of the stones. Thinking nothing of it, I followed suit, placing a few small Russian notes on one of the stones for good luck. Next to the bus, a man was kneeling in the dirt, praying to his chosen deity.

After a good few hours drive we eventually arrived at the border crossing. This took two hours altogether, with five passport checks (which begs the question: don’t they trust the last guy who did it?) and both the Russians and Mongolians forcing us to exit the bus so that they might check our bags. Finally, we bid farewell to Russia. Immediately, things changed. Passport control was a lax affair in an old thrown-up customs building. The officials half-heartedly x-rayed our bags. Everyone seemed far more cheerful, far less dour. Things looked like they’d break more easily, or had already broken. People looked better fed. The language was different. We were assailed by absurdly intricate symbols that took the form of badges and flags, as opposed to the brutally simplistic star of Russia. We were in Mongolia.

We drove endlessly across the Mongolian moonscape, flanked first by a handful of houses and unfinished, semi-constructed buildings, then by a featureless plain with the odd troupe of wild horses and cattle wandering here and there, near to our single strip of road. The trip was fairly painless although we unfortunately had to suffer a pretty awful Russian variety concert blared at us through the on-board ‘entertainment’ system. ‘Fancy’ was a particularly noteworthy act. Resembling Elton John crossed with Gary Glitter, his faux Elvis moves on the dancefloor, surrounded by unaccountably fawning, attractive dancing girls and backed by insipid guff, weak-wristed pop noise, made one wonder whether a bus crash wouldn’t be so painless. Ok, so that’s over-dramatic. But it was utter shite. The other highlight was a ridiculously gay ‘boy’ group made up of large, biker-gang, fat, baby-like men, with goatees and macho-hair (think crew-cuts and odd mullets), wearing leather and dancing like aggressive robots to angry disco music. They took themselves very seriously. I can’t remember exactly what the music was, because I was too busy laughing.

So, after enduring shite Russian pop music, we arrived starving at a stop-over called the ‘Nomad’ restaurant, before the final leg of our trip. This place offered a ‘Business Lunch’, for approximately £2 (perhaps less, even) and gave some spicy, grainy noodles (very tasty) with bits of stir-fried beef and beef fat, some extremely milky, salty tea and some vegetables. This was our first introduction to Mongolian cuisine, and after the poor fare in Russia and the long trip, we absolutely wolfed it down. As so happens, it also provided a pretty comprehensive introduction to Mongolian food, for its main components (milk, meat, fat, salt and carbohydrates, with few fresh vegetables) seem to be very well represented in any traditional dishes on offer. The salty milky tea, with its nuance of tea flavour which is overwhelmed by salty milk, especially requires some getting used to. I still prefer a cup of Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon or English Breakfast to it, if I’m honest.

We arrived at UB in the evening. UB is for all intents and purposes an oasis in a sea of nothingness. The explosion of hotels, Karaoke bars, massage parlours and restaurants that screamed at us for custom along the main drag, and singularly in English (with the odd exception), was quite surprising, especially considering we’d primarily encountered near-Anglophobia and the staunch use of Cyrillic in Russia. Here lies a city overtly directing its attention at the Dollar and the Euro (and perhaps also the Pound); a scruffy, loud and obviously quite poor home to a huge proportion of Mongolia’s population, yet far friendlier and more pleasant than the ascetic, indecipherable cities of Siberia. It felt, in some areas, quite metropolitan, as though it was wired into a global network, the global culture and marketplace. These might simply be the trappings of a capital city, but regardless it certainly felt good to no longer feel so isolated from the outside world. Furthermore, the food was absolutely excellent compared to Russia… pork dumplings and beef noodles were the order of the day, and the price was dirt cheap. Alcohol, luckily, also remained superbly cheap.

It was very, very cold when we arrived at the bus station and, freezing, we worked our way to the ‘UB Guesthouse’. I remember my fingers feeling frozen to the bone, lugging my bags, and I was half tempted to stick my hand out to wave down a taxi (and as we were quick to discover, this is not difficult, since most Mongolians are extremely keen to siphon small amounts of money from you, two to three pounds, to take you halfway across the city… you merely have to stick your arm out near a main road, and someone, near anyone, will soon pull over). Resisting the urge, we eventually found the hostel around the back of a block of flats, with steam (although initially we thought it was smoke) pouring out of the doorway and into the stairwell. After dropping our stuff off, we tried to find somewhere to eat. Unfortunately, we hadn’t reckoned with the H1N1 virus, which had forced the Mongolian government to enforce an 11pm curfew on all shops, bars and restaurants. Viruses don’t spread in the daytime, apparently. We luckily found a 24 hour supermarket that hadn’t shut, and grabbed some awesomely spicy pot noodles for dinner.

The UB Guesthouse wasn’t a bad hostel, although it was somewhat basic and fairly outmoded in facilities and beds. The next day, however, we decided to move to the ‘Golden Gobi’ nearby, primarily because of a hot water problem at the Guesthouse: there was no cold water, the water was scorchingly hot. Far too hot for a shower, anyway, unless you planned on spending your holiday receiving skin grafts at the local A&E. The Golden Gobi, as it happens, was excellent. A homely, friendly, clean and cheap venue, we quickly settled in and were immediately offered a cup of tea and some fantastic steamed pork dumplings cooked by our patron’s grandmother (affectionately called ‘mama’ by the hostel staff and guests). The beds were very soft, and were ready-made for us (an unexpected luxury considering it was a hostel), and it was quite cheap for us to do our laundry.

Next up we jumped straight into booking a tour of the Mongolian countryside. The Golden Gobi run a number of tours within Mongolia, offering the opportunity to stay in a Ger and do some horse riding, with all the equipment, food, guide, and so on, included at a decent price per person. There was variation in destinations based on the time you spent on the tour (up to 21 days), with the longer tours providing a wider exploration of Mongolia, especially allowing you to visit places like the Gobi desert in the south, which require a great deal of driving to get to.

The tour which we eventually organised after chatting via dirt-cheap Skype text messages to Leanne and Blair (who were currently on the bus to Ulaanbaatur which we’d just taken), and to Steve, who by now had now arrived in UB by train and joined us at the Golden Gobi, was exactly this:

“Five Day Golden Gobi Tour:

$182, £110 (per person, for 6 people) – 4 nights, 5 days

Includes: I) Driver and petrol, II) Food – breakfast lunch dinner, III) English-speaking guide, IV) Accommodation, V) Camel/Horse-riding, VI) 1,5 litres water per person per day, VII) All equipment (sleeping bag, linen, beds, boots)

Itinerary:
1st day – Khustai national park, stopover – continue drop to Semi Gobi area; Elsen Tasarkhai; stay overnight (in a Ger, nomadic family)
2nd day – Horse/camel-riding practice (horse riding shorter time, 1-2 hours). From Semi-Gobi drop to Karakorum, stay overnight. Ger Guesthouse (not a family). Steve to take local bus.
3rd day – Drop to Orkhon Waterfall – possibly frozen. Hiking,
4th day – Remain at waterfall. Horse trekking (5-6 hours).
5th – Return to Ulaanbaatur, long drive.”

The tour basically went much to the plan as laid out above. Steve had to leave on the second day, due to other commitments, but apart from that myself, Dave, Rich and L&B stuck it out for the long haul.

Following a successful booking and payment, and awaiting the arrival of L&B, we went for lunch at the ‘Altai Mongolian BBQ Grill’. A pretty good all-you-can-eat of Mongolian food, the highlight was the opportunity to create a DIY Mongolian stir fry, choosing from an interesting selection of meats (the enigmatic ‘Sheep’s Fat Tail’, and Horse), vegetables, and sauces (Coca-Cola Special Sauce being a highlight). It was good food, and we ate a lot of it, especially the dumplings, for which all of us had developed massive obsessions. At the end of the feast the desserts were quite disappointing, however we were introduced to another (seemingly) Mongolian delicacy: instant powdered tea and coffee. This was unsurprisingly not great. A highlight of this meal was the fact everyone kept cracking up every time someone referred to a Mongolian person as a Mongol.

L&B eventually arrived, and we went to do some gift shopping for the nomadic families at the State Department Store (a relic of Soviet times). The hostel recommended that we buy matches, candles, clothes, sweets, and other luxury and/or practical things to give to our hosts, and our combined gifts made for a formidable haul, including a couple of bottles of vodka.

We awoke early the next day for our tour. The family kindly provided us a breakfast of fried eggs with toast and some exceptional quince jam, and upon the arrival of an our English-speaking guide, Alma, and our driver, Baiyra, we packed ourselves into our Soviet-era minibus, devoid of seatbelts and all modern technical frills, and set off. Alma we found to be highly educated, she having studied and become fluent in English and Russian. She made both a living and past-time of leading the Golden Gobi tours around Mongolia, whilst her husband made his money trading horses (she told us he once went out in a Land Cruiser and came back riding a horse!). Chatting to her about Mongolia and her job was cool… she told a number of good stories, including one about a particularly difficult tour with a guy who refused to take off a synthetic sweater that he’d been constantly sweating in to, and which thus smelt horrific. This, in a tiny minibus, in scorching temperatures, was near unbearable. When asked to remove the sweater he refused, and implied that the reason why she was pissed off at him was because he was black! At one point (due primarily to a misunderstanding) he threw a bucket of shit at her… and in the end they had a kicking fight. Very strange. She told us that she was currently writing a book about her experiences, and that this story would definitely be in it. Further, she told us that she’d recently been filmed by Channel 4 for a documentary yet to be aired in the UK, where she acted as a translator both of the Mongolian language and culture for a wealthy English family (a lawyer, her husband and their kids), and the cameraman following them around. Apparently the ambition of the programme was to see how they’d cope living as Mongolians. It didn’t go down too well, funnily enough…

Further, she told us about Mongolia and the state of the nation. Apparently you can buy your citizenship for around £300 if you’re a foreign national. Although, you might reconsider, for she also told us of the somewhat extensive corruption within the system, and especially that the big mining companies (Rio Tinto in particular) were making themselves, and a handful of Mongolians, very rich from the metal deposits in the south, seemingly at the expense of the population.

Our journeys were spent playing card games (with ‘Last Card’ and ‘Presidents & Arseholes’ being the star attractions) and chatting/having heated debates. Our 4WD beast of a minibus, tamed by our large Mongolian hillbilly-type driver who spoke very little (although he did apparently understand and speak quite good English, but was shy of tourists) bumped, shook and bounced around the Mongolian landscape. It had very little suspension, if any, and we often had to hold onto the handles to stop ourselves flying into each other’s laps. There were no seatbelts, and we quickly understood why the ceiling of the vehicle was padded! There was no roll cage, no airbags, and the driver sat in a nest of knobs, buttons, pipes and dials, mechanical and exposed for view. You could almost imagine the thought process of the communist designers and their officials: why waste resources on beautifying a functional tool? It was undoubtably functional, however, and our driver threw it around dirt-track corners, over humps and into bends, and it kept on going like a tank, only once requiring a ‘back-up and try-again’ style manoeuvre.

We drove for a number of hours on tarmac roads out from UB, surrounded by the snowy, desolate Mongolian steppe, before turning off-road onto a dirt track and bouncing our way up a hill towards a group of grazing wild horses. We stopped to take photos, and they cantered quickly away, their light pastel colours good camouflage against the whites, greys and creams of the wintery landscape. We then drove on further to the Kushtai national park, where we were learnt about the Przewalski’s Horse, a particular type of wild horse unique to Mongolia and living at the national park, which was somewhat endangered. We had to watch a film about them for an hour, and most of us fell asleep for parts of it, due to a mixture of tiredness and, unfortunately, boredom at the narrator’s droning voice. We then drove for a number of hours across ever more desolate terrain, in the freezing cold (although a powerful heater next to our feet kept the vehicle very warm, and made a particular ‘hot seat’ a bit too warm for comfort). Eventually we stopped for food, the standard fare of fried beef (or was it horsemeat?), grainy noodles, salty milk tea, and some vegetables. It was good carbohydrate, salt and fat-laden fuel, and exactly what we needed. Some of us also tried out the first ‘long drop’ of the tour at this place, which had a frozen shit-pyramid in the pit. It seemed also that a number of prior users had failed to accurately aim, with the evidence clear to see on the rim of the drop. This we all found very amusing.
We then drove further, spending much of this time discussing the differences between the Antipodean and ‘New World’ English dialects, and English as spoken in the UK. It turns out that ‘lollies’ refer to what we would call ‘sweets’ in New Zealand and Australia, and lollipops refer to… well… lollipops. Thus ensued arguments over the correct terminology, not that I can remember who the victors were (I believe it was a stalemate). We did eat sweets though. We were quickly off-road again, and somehow I managed to sleep a fair portion of the way.
Mongolia is most definitely a third world country. The road infrastructure peters out to off-road dirt tracks a few hundred kilometres outside of UB, and access to petrol and water becomes increasingly difficult the further away you get from town. There were a number of two-lane highways under construction around and about, but even these didn’t cover any major ground, and we drove 90% of the time off-road. Poor infrastructure is an indicator of economic poverty.

We eventually arrived at our first Nomadic family, near to dusk. The final drive was off a reasonably beaten track, onto an even less well beaten track, towards a range of stony hills in the distance. We rounded a rocky outcrop beneath which a couple of gers were planted, complete with a corral containing a number of goats and some Mongolian herdsmen working away at their respective tasks, past an abandoned ‘camp’ for tourists in a state of some decay (the main building was door-less, windowless and roofless), and finally stopping at a handful of gers with a large corral and a some outhouses. This was our family. Pushing through a demonic throng of bleating goats, and a couple of big guard dogs (to ward away wolves, we were told), we were immediately shown to our sleeping quarters; a ger with 6 beds placed around the edges, at the centre of which was a large furnace and a box of dried goat dung. The ger was wooden floored, the walls were coated in thick cloth, and there was a (not unpleasant) musky smell culminating from the burning dung and the animal hair and skin that had been used both as building materials and to weave our sheets. The size of a ger is judged according to the number of ‘sections’ it has, and ours was of a medium size, with probably around 6 sections. The roof was low and conical, with the metal chimney poking out of the covered hole at the top. Our beds were low, hard and short, and we were told to layer ourselves up with sleeping bags because the night would be cold (this was obvious, it was freezing already). The toilet consisted of the stripped chassis of a van, converted into an open-to-the-elements outhouse, sat above a decently constructed long-drop… although it was about a 50 metre walk from the ger, down a slope. This was one of the smartest long drops we’d seen on the trip so far… although one of our party wouldn’t get much use out of it, since he was unable to go to the toilet for the entire trip (an epic feat of the bowels I think).

After settling ourselves in, we were summoned by Alma into the family’s living area. This was in the ger adjacent to ours, and was sparsely decorated with a hanging tapestry of Chingis (Ghengis) Khan at the back, next to which was a Buddhist shrine (we were hastily informed not to sit with the soles of our feet or shoes facing it, since this implied disrespect), some family photos, and strangely enough a television set and fuse box connected to a car battery (this also powered a small electric light). We’d previously noted a satellite dish out front, and apparently the government had set out a programme of communication investment in the countryside, part of which involved buying TVs and satellite dishes for gers. It was an odd juxtaposition, a medieval lifestyle and home, with (Mongolian dubbed) Korean soaps blaring out in the corner.

Our hosts consisted of an elderly couple, both nomadic farmers, who had lived in the area for their entire lives. They were considered a wealthy family, since they had around 700 goats. As nomads they emigrated to another area of the country in the summer (I presume for better grazing) however it seems that they flitted between some set areas regularly rather than moving to random spots at each changing of the season. I’m not personally sure, however, whether that actually makes them semi-nomadic, but they’re certainly nomadic to a decent extent.

The grandfather, a wise, old but somewhat devilish looking guy, was apparently a sheep-rustler and local hell-raiser in his youth, and he alternately gave us compliments and interrogated us over, especially, our respective marital statuses. Rich in particular got a grilling, being the eldest bachelor amongst us, although L&B got a lot of respect for their early wedding (but some criticism and perhaps bemusement over not starting on the baby-making ASAP, as is the custom in Mongolia). The grandmother was quiet and reserved, but friendly. We were told that they married when she was 14, and he 21, and it was hinted at that it would have been arranged. It seems odd to us that they were so young (she especially, it would be very illegal in the UK and the West), however they did appear to love or at least greatly care about one another.

Alma showed us how to make dumplings for tea that evening. Everyone got involved, and it was funny to see some of our efforts (especially mine, my fingers are too big I think) once we’d pinched the thin flour and water pastry around the mincemeat and herbs. They then were steamed, and served with a chilli sauce from a bottle. They were delicious. Before our cooked meal, however, our hungry driver produced a bowl of boiled meat pieces (we soon discovered that it was horse) of various shapes and sizes… with some particularly interesting, slightly suspect pieces to boot. He then proceeded to slice the meat up with a knife, grasping it in his bare hands, and passed bits around to us. We had also been provided with some milky, salty tea (this we received at all of our stops at nomadic family gers), and we had been informed that smelling food or drink was considered an offense, implying that it was bad, and thus we tried hard to avoid doing this! It was difficult. Anyway, in the centre of the table was a small soup bowl filled with a salty, watery liquid flavoured with garlic, which I presume was some of the stewed juices of the boiled meat. We were told to dip the meat bits in the juices. It was interesting, and quite tasty, once you got over your inhibitions about the gross lack of hygiene involved (there were no guarantees, indeed it was highly probable, that our driver didn’t wash his hands after going to the toilet… and he certainly had no qualms about licking his fingers and sucking meat off the bone in front of us). We were passed some interesting stuff: I for one am fairly sure that I ate a piece of intestine stuffed with meat (it was rubbery and quite chewy), we definitely got a chunk of heart each (very strong), and there was lots of fat being passed to us. The salty, hearty meat was filling, and actually quite tasty and addictive, strangely. In truth, I ate a lot, despite initially being concerned about the lack of hygiene. I felt like a gruff, burly man: no wonder the Mongols carved out such a massive empire, if they were fuelled by such man-food.

After this meat-fest, we sat down for our proper meal of noodles, meat and our dumplings. We then helped wash up, and settled in to be taught a Mongolian equivalent of a family board game. The game involved playing with the dried knuckle bones of goats, produced from a delicately woven, colourful bag, tied off with a gold-laced drawstring with the knuckle bone of an unfortunate goat hanging at the end of it. There were around 30 knuckles, and we were taught two games. The first was a game called ‘Horse Race’. We were each give a knuckle, then four were set aside as the equivalent of ‘die’, and the remainder were laid in a weaving line across the table. When playing, your piece stands parallel to a knuckle on this line. According to Alma, each knuckle has four sides to it that roughly correspond to the shape of an animal. The lumpen top looks like a sheep, the depressed underside like a goat with two curled horns, the indented side like a camel, and the bossed opposite side, with two reddish patches, like a horse. To play the game you shake the four knuckles and lay them down. If you roll them and you produce all the animals, then you can progress 10 spaces (I believe), if you roll 4 of a kind, you can progress one space. Otherwise, you can’t move (or start, if you’ve yet to start).

The second game is called ‘Archery’, or something like it, and the game starts with the knuckles divided equally amongst the players. Each player places two knuckles in the centre of the table which are rolled and then placed down, and this becomes the pot (like a ‘blind’ in poker). The rolled knuckles now represent different animals according to the way that they have landed. Again: goat, sheep, horse, camel. The knuckles are rolled at the beginning to determine the order of play, with the person with the most horses going first, I think. The aim of the game is for one player to amass all of the knuckles. To this end, you acquire knuckles by choosing a particular ‘animal’ knuckle projectile and flicking it with your index finger so that it directly hits a corresponding animal knuckle, e.g. flicking a goat at a goat. The knuckle once flicked must not fly off table, nor touch any other knuckles either en route to, or after hitting the corresponding animal knuckle (unless these are also the animal which corresponds to the knuckle-projectile animal). Once the knuckle has successfully hit its target, both the target and the knuckle-projectile can be collected, however they may only be collected by the other hand… not the hand that was used to flick, and you must not touch any other knuckles when you collect them. Otherwise, your success is null and void. A successful play means another go until either the pot is won entirely, or there is an unsuccessful play – in which case the person next door gets to go. Eventually some people will be forced out of play, with one person the victor.

I’m pleased to say that I won the Horse Racing, however I did get royally thrashed at the Archery game. It was all good fun though, and we finished the night in good spirits (but with no alcohol consumed from what I remember). Returning to our ger, the night sky was incredibly bright with stars, as though God had spilled white paint on satin. The plain with its gers bathed in moonlight resembled to my mind something from Star Wars, perhaps the home of young Luke Skywalker. The silhouettes of the odd-shaped huts, surrounded by both the complete desolation of the plain and the silent rocky outcrops, commingled with the noises of the night, the wind, and the barking of the dogs, The feeling of isolation and otherworldliness was strong, and moving.

The night was very cold, and we woke up a number of times from the cold itself and from the grandmother kindly coming in to fill the dung basket (…with the dung of goats), and stoke and load the furnace. The night was filled a number of times with the sound of dogs barking and, tellingly of the day and age, the odd low drone of high altitude aircraft. In the morning we ate a quick breakfast, and then took part in horse-riding and camel-riding out in the freezing cold for a couple of hours. This was fun, and we were led by the grandfather, who hummed and sang to himself throughout the short trek. After this we gave the couple some of our gifts for which they were very pleased, and left fairly early, heading for the area of Karakorum, the ancient Mongol capital and its Buddhist Monastery. The journey was long, and again very bumpy. When we arrived we visited the Monastery, a huge walled complex, with Stupas (holy stone towers, of great significance to Buddhists) both inside the grounds and at short intervals along the walls. It was constructed from the stone ruins of the original capital, and was one of the few Monasteries in the country not completely devastated by the Soviets, in their shocking persecution of Buddhists. Inside was colourful, with giant, very old, painted papier-mache and clay representations of this particular Buddhist sect’s Gods. There are three such sects, apparently, and the Mongolian Buddhists happen to be of the same sect as the Tibetan Buddhists. Some of the statues were particularly wild, especially a gigantic, armed, blue monster-goddess. After visiting the monastery we drove around the area and visited a massive hilltop monument to Chingis and his warriors, and then (amusingly) a ‘phallic stone’ which did look rather phallic, and which was directed at a valley that resembled a female organ of similar function.

It was getting towards dusk, and Steve had by now departed by bus to the city, to catch his flight. We turned now to the outskirts of this bustling little town/village (of considerable importance, since Mongolia’s population is so small) to our ‘ger guesthouse’: a fenced off area filled with a couple of holiday-gers, for the use of the tourists. We quickly settled in, although Dave immediately got told off by Leanne for walking around in muddy shoes, even though it was completely futile to stop getting dirt and mud inside! Funny. Before that we’d had similar ‘confrontations’ over the ger door getting left open by Dave, with all the cold rushing in. You could say they were having a ‘cold war’… *Badumtish*

So yeah, part of the evening was spent with a comedy argument. We also discussed our bowel movements. This basically became the main topic of the conversation for the trip, running the gamut from those who lacked movement, to those who moved too much, to plain simple discussions about the pros and cons of various types of movement. This happens a lot in situations where hygiene is poor. You just can’t help discussing it, since a lack of basic toilet facilities is so alien to what we, as Westerners, are used to.

After dinner we were informed by Alma that a local musician (a member of a prestigious Mongolian folk music association) was willing to perform for us, in our ger, for a small fee per person. We all agreed, apart from Rich. When he arrived, we found that he was a well-combed man of his late 60s, quite well-versed in English, his face deep-lined, with a thin beard, wearing a colourful, traditional cloak and hat. His instruments were strung with horsehair and included a rectangular harp, a vertically-held violin (similar to a small Double Bass, with one string and a horsehair bow) and another instrument of which I can remember little (it may have been a small guitar, or a flute). The music was jaunty, upbeat, unique, sometimes discordant, and definitely of folk origin. He changed instruments between songs, and the common theme was the celebration of Chingis Khan and horses.

We were also lucky enough to be treated to Mongolian throat-singing, of which he was apparently an expert. He demonstrated to us the various types of throat singing, which included that from the chest, nose and stomach (and, of course, the throat). They each had different, resonant sounds, although some did seem very similar. He told us that he had been a musician from his youth, that it was his lifelong profession and that (very impressively) he had built all of his own instruments. After this short concert, we were allowed to touch and practice with his instruments, which was great fun. The horsehair vertical violin was my favourite, the sound it made being wild and quite unique, unlike the refined notes of a piano or violin.
He soon left after we had paid, and we retired to bed. Finally, before sleeping, me, Dave and Leanne had an interesting (albeit perhaps pretentious) conversation about philosophy and stuff. Mainly about objectivity, science and religion. This happened frequently before bed on the tour.

That evening our ger was heated by a wood fire, and by very early the next morning it had already gone out. I woke up, and the ger was freezing… truly freezing. It was so cold I (very melodramatically) wondered whether or not I would die. Wood seems to burn far quicker than dung, and since we were so unused to a heating system that requires you to add fuel by hand (coming as we do from a ‘convenience culture’) we forgot to get up in the night to keep it going. So, me and Dave got up and re-lit the fire, and after a time the ger was baking hot. Thence followed another comedy argument, this time about the fact that Dave had added all of our wood to the fire, which had made the ger uncomfortably warm! Indignation on both sides led to a stalemate.

After another breakfast, we set off to another nomadic family who would put us up and take us horse riding to a frozen waterfall. On the way we stopped to take photos of a fantastic gorge. When we arrived much later in the day, we found a small group of gers, a small corral and a man driving around on a motorbike. This family were somewhat poorer than the elderly couple, and they consisted of a father, mother, one son and two daughters (all very young, the son only a baby). They were very welcoming, and again their ger had the shrine, the chingiis tapestry, as well as the TV, fusebox, electric light and satellite dish. Baiyra once again sat down and demolished a bowl of various bits and pieces of horse meat, again offering it around, again with little care for hygiene. Again, me and Dave merrily ate, with Rich taking a few bits, and Blair and Leanne generally abstaining. We then had our main dinner. Soon it was late, and we retired to our gers.

This night was not so cold for us. In fact generally it was too warm, for I was closest to the furnace and I roasted. The next morning, after breakfast, we saddled up to head to the frozen waterfall. This was an awesome ride. It was the first proper horse-riding I’d done (I’d only ridden a camel at the prior family’s ger), and the horses were also intriguing. Firstly, Mongolian horses are much shorter and stronger than normal horses, so they’re quite low to sit on. Secondly, Dave’s horse was an interesting one. It had an eye missing, the socket was exposed and leaking some tasty looking juices, and it was generally pretty rebellious and sullen. It was very slow, always trailing behind. However, Dave was proud of it, empathising with its plight. Why would you want someone riding you, when all you want to do is chill? He felt a kinship with the horse, reckoning that its outlook on life was in line with his own. It preferred to be a maverick, doing whatever it wants or feels like doing. When it became later apparent to Dave that his horse was blind, he felt even more proud of it. Our horses by contrast were pretty standard and well behaved, and eventually I got the hang of riding and trotting/cantering alone after initially being led by the father (this with Leanne’s guidance, she having ridden horses all her life).

We eventually reached a spot near to the waterfall after our horses had, with some effort, been coerced to plod the snowy track away from their home, away from food and rest. We dismounted, with Dave’s one-eyed steed plodding in a tad later, before we crunched and
cracked our way over large porous volcanic boulders, covered in ice and snow, around the edge of the vertical splash-pool. As we walked around this large, cliff-edged pit, we trod through the frozen river at the top of the waterfall, solidified and captured in ice as it shot over the edge and into the abyss below. Finally working our way around, we had a perfect view of the waterfall, captured and unmoving, frozen solid. The sun was setting and it was beautiful to see it bathed in the orange light of dusk, the sky crisp and clear above, surrounded by the black lava boulders and the skeletal figures of the leafless trees. After some time spent photographing, we led our horses away from the waterfall and they gladly, quickly, took us back to our ger.

The next day we left in the early afternoon, bidding the family farewell and leaving them a haul of gifts, including vodka for the father and a couple of big bags of sweets for the children (we felt bad that we had nothing of luxury specifically for the mother, apart from some cleaning products which were admittedly gratefully received). We left the kids alternately watching cartoons and soap operas, and running wild from the sugary sweets, (they having a day off from school) and drove back across the frozen scrubland to our first family’s hostel. The previous day we had to unfortunately sack off doing the hiking planned in favour of the horse-trek to the waterfall, which had been delayed until quite late in the afternoon. So this morning, to compensate, we did a little walking around the camp, up a hill towards an expanse of black porous boulders and sparse trees, and then across to a view over a spectacularly frozen river, turquoise blue and crystal clear.

After seemingly endless driving, and a stop at a convenience store, we eventually arrived at the couple’s ger. Once again our sumo-esque driver, Baiyra, settled down to demolish some meat. We then spent the evening with the family, and eventually broke out a bottle of vodka (much to the grandfather’s delight) to share round, learning how to toast in Mongolian. The Mongolian toast is very simple. You wet your index finger in the spirit, and then flick it. This is done three times, and at the first you say ‘one to the earth’ and flick to the ground, at the second ‘one to the people’ and you flick the air, and at the third ‘one to the sky’ and you flick upwards. Then you drink. Further, the etiquette for passing drinks is to pass with your right arm, supporting its base (at the elbow) with you left. The receiver takes the drink with their right hand. This implies respect. The same principle goes for giving and receiving food, I believe, although I’m unsure whether for food you need to support the base of your arm when it is given.

Anyway, after a good evening we again retired to bed, and the next morning we bid a fond farewell to the couple. They invited us to come to stay again in the summer, for which I’ll gladly take them up if I can (the weather is meant to be much, much better, for one). We then started the long return trip to Ulaanbaatur. This was fairly uneventful, although it is worth mentioning that on the outskirts of UB there are a huge number of Chinese construction firms, which goes to show the level of investment China has in this country. This is perhaps worrying, considering China’s poor humanitarian record and its clandestine ambitions, and one wonders why the West does not look more to invest and win over this surprisingly stable, neutral, and reasonably democratic outpost.

The rest of our time in UB was spent visiting a Cashmere Factory Shop and buying some very cheap cashmere scarves and some Mongolia souvenirs for Christmas presents, and also
visiting the ‘Black Market’ (which we refused on point of principle to pay to get into, it being full of rip-off illegal goods!). The Black Market, on the outskirts, is absolutely huge and was known to us already, for Rich had bought a couple of completely genuine ‘North Face’ gloves from there before our tour (with Gore Tex written on each index finger, like he was a Power Ranger or something) for a ridiculously cheap price, around a dollar or two. They were made almost entirely of cotton, so obviously completely waterproof. It’s also worth mentioning for comedy value that the ‘genuine’ North Face stand was next to a ‘South Face’ stand selling similar gear! Gotta love the Black Market.

Not much happened in UB after this. At our hostel we had a comedy run-in with a (possibly) Russian guy who seemed to be both constantly pissed and mentally disturbed, asking us to go for a night out and then immediately, insistently demanding that we ‘hurry up, hurry up’. We later found him crawling like a beetle up the steps in front of the hostel, pissed as a fart. We also went to an overpriced Irish bar which sold absolutely no Irish drinks. It didn’t even sell Guinness. And we all went to the cinema to watch the laughably shite ‘2012′ (in the VIP section, which was dirt cheap), ate some cheap food, and eventually saw L&B off. I decided at that point to book a flight from Beijing to Hanoi, since my money was running quite short and I couldn’t afford to visit all of China, as well as Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand on the same trip. Early the next morning, me and Dave left on the early morning train for Beijing, leaving Rich in UB trying to sort out visas and transport.

Irkutsk

I write this in the early hours, from Hanoi, Vietnam, camped in a hostel dorm room which I have all to myself. Not sure why I stayed up… probably because I have so much catching up to do. Anyway, bon appetite…

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IRKUTSK, Russia

The train to Irkutsk was a long one, and another open cabin affair. The landscape was taking an odd turn, as was the vibe. It became more easterly and less European as we moved closer to the ‘Sinosphere’, the area of Chinese and Asian influence. Things seemed wilder out here, less controlled. In many respects, it was refreshing. From the heavy Eastern European decor of the west, we began to move to pockets of wood-frame constructions, their roofs and eaves heavy with snow, silent against the background of endless pine forests. Small towns and villages litter the edge of the Trans-Siberian at this leg of the journey, occasioned by the odd dirty old factory still churning out whatever anonymous product it is allotted to produce. They hug close to this thin iron vein of immense commercial importance, and out in this wilderness one wonders how they would survive if one day it inexplicably disappeared.

We had bought stuff for the train from a decent local supermarket, mostly dried noodles, and some fruit. We started eating immediately after we’d pulled out of the station, surrounded by a group of old women who, upon seeing our mediocre fare, instantly began producing food for us (motherly instinct kicks in for most women, I think, when they see a couple of young guys not eating ‘properly’). The first produced a beetroot and potato salad, which was really tasty, and also gave us a large pickled gherkin each. Another gave us half a loaf of bread. We were also offered some beautiful sweet cakes filled with something like caramel. This sort of generosity is so typical of the Russians; there are some that are wonderfully friendly and generous, and yet there are others that seem irredeemably cold and reserved. It is, fundamentally, a country of incredible extremes. We were very grateful to the women, and although we could not speak much to them, we could communicate our gratitude, and we shared with them what we could, our tea and sweets.

On the train we bumped into Steve, the Australian, who was pleased to return a good quality knife to Dave, a knife which he’d misplaced at Napoleon Hostel in Moscow. He thought it was permanently lost, but it turns out that a woman at their reception had found it after we’d left, and passed it on to Steve, since she thought he’d be heading our way. This was a stroke of luck. That evening we went back to his cabin and played cards with him, Richard (who coincidentally had also caught this train) and an Italian couple who were following the same route that we were. The game of choice was El Presidente, or Arsehole, or Presidents & Arseholes, or whatever you might choose to call it. It’s a fun game, anyway.

Eventually, after a long, long journey across a barren landscape, we pulled into Irkutsk and set off to find our hostel, Baikaler, which was easily discovered after a quick hop on the tram. As per the usual, we’d booked a couple of nights there using HostelBookers.com. This is a superb website, as it happens, and far superior to HostelWorld.com, which charges a small (but not inconsiderable) service charge for each booking. HostelBookers provides a rating system complete with user comments, and we’ve found that most of the places we’ve booked through there have generally conformed to the ratings on the site.

Anyway, scattering our stuff about the place, we settled in. One thing I’ve noticed about hostels is that although the quality of the staff does not necessarily dictate the quality of the stay, the more engaging and friendly and helpful they tend to be, the more likely it is that the hostel is traveller-on-a-budget friendly, rather than plain exploitative and money-grabbing, such as I felt Napoleon Hostel to be. The staff were very friendly, right from the start, and there were no ridiculous arbitrary charges. It was also pretty cheap. Plus, the staff were good conversation… for example, I chatted to a Russian girl who worked there, who spoke excellent English (and French too, it seemed), about jazz music (pretentious? moi?) and her life in Uzbekistan for a fair while, and she didn’t charge me once.

Irkutsk is a very cold city in late November. Most days hovered around -15°C. That said, the weather we experienced gave us clear blue skies, and this meant good photography for the photographers (Steve, Dave and Rich), and pleasant walks for myself. The city itself lies on a large river, which was in part frozen over. There is little beautiful scenery around the river, however, for it is ringed with factories and smokestacks, belching out heavy grey clouds. Smog hangs over the city for the most part, as with most cities in Russia… manufacturing economies, especially ex-socialist ones with strong utilitarian, functionalist traditions, will not skimp on profit or productivity for the sake of aesthetic pleasure. Western tourists are not expected in the middle of nowhere, and their good opinion of the scenery is neither sought after nor catered for. That said, around the city there are lots of wonderful old wooden buildings, their eaves and gates decorated with carvings, to take the wandering eye. Most of these buildings seem to be a good century old, apparently lacking decent heating and plumbing, and yet many appear to still be inhabited. A lot of them look near to collapse, the walls buckling and some slanting downwards in dangerous fashion, but no-one seems to care very much. Such is Russia, really.

Our stay in Irkutsk was not a dull one. At the very first we were engaged in planning for a trip to Nikita’s Homestead on Olkhon Island with the New Zealand couple, the Italian couple, Steve and Richard, and also Karla, a girl who was staying in Irkutsk and who was keen to come along. The idea had first been mooted in Moscow by Leanne & Blair, and we’d been planning via email since then to get to Nikita’s and stay a couple of nights. Nikita’s sounded like a fairly cheap, pretty authentic way to experience the Siberian lifestyle: spending time on an isolated island at the homestead of Nikita, an ex-Soviet ping-pong champion (no joke), in the middle of the immense Lake Baikal, with very little running water or electricity, eating family-prepared food and generally slowing the pace of life down considerably. Unfortunately it was not to be.

We’d arranged to travel separately by bus to the island, and the journey was to take 8 hours. To get there at a reasonable time, whilst it was still light, meant getting up at an early hour and being at the bus for its departure at 8am. Anyway, we were told to split into two groups: Steve, Karla and the Italian couple in one, and myself, Richard, Dave, and Leanne & Blair in the other. Both groups had different spots to leave from. Ours was near the market. So, we left the next day, very early, but for the life of us we couldn’t find the bus. The streets in Irkutsk were very cold, caked in mucky snow, and wild with traffic and random shoddy-looking taxis and buses. With no clear idea what we were looking for, where we were exactly to be looking for it, and no bus number, we were doomed. Trudging back to the hostel after the appointed leaving time of the bus, we were informed by the staff that the other ‘team’ had left already. Myself, Dave and Richard gave up at that point because we could only spare three days, and two days wasn’t enough to reach the island and see it properly, i.e. we’d arrive one day and return the next, and the thought of 16 hours driving in the freezing wastes over two days wasn’t an exciting prospect, nor a fun way to spend one’s time in Siberia. Leanne & Blair, however, decided to try again the next morning.

Somewhat deflated, we planned to console ourselves with a good dinner. To this end, I chatted to the girl at the hostel about cheap places to eat, and she recommended a Chinese restaurant that was quite well hidden. Hidden to such an extent that it was ‘behind a door’. I’m not sure whether she was being deliberately ironic, or deliberately cryptic, but lots of things are ‘behind a door’ and its quite hard to narrow down a restaurant with that sort of information to go on, especially in a city where an open-air restaurant would be an extremely unlikely find. But anyway, with further instructions we eventually found the restaurant which we believed she meant, which did indeed reside behind a door, and it was dead cheap for Russia… 800 roubles between 5 of us, so roughly under £4 each. Appetites sated, we returned to the hostel.

The next morning Leanne & Blair decided to have another plug at finding the bus. They succeeded this time, but we were under the impression that they hadn’t when they trudged back through the door at 10am. It turns out that buses in Irkutsk are partial to ramming as many people in as possible, regardless of the number of seats, and since they were such small buses (barely classifiable as a mini-bus, more like a people-carrier) the prospect of spending 8 hours squashed into a tiny space with some stranger’s arse in their face didn’t appeal to them, strangely enough. So, they resigned themselves to missing the island.

Thoughts now turned towards the future. Myself, Dave, Rich and Steve (as far as we knew) were set on travelling onwards to Ulaanbaatur, Mongolia. We’d already booked our train tickets at the station with the help of an exceptionally useful note given to us by one of the members of staff (for free) telling the cashier exactly what we wanted. Now, having examined the sightseeing fare in Ulaanbaatur, and after chatting to the staff at Baikaler, we were discussing the possibility of going on a tour to the Mongolian countryside/outback through the Golden Gobi, a hostel recommended to us by the Baikaler staff. The website fired our imaginations, especially the idea of staying in a Ger (Russians and Westerners often refer to them as Yurts) and doing some horse-trekking. Upon sharing our possible intentions with Leanne & Blair, this immediately caused a seed of doubt for them about their travel plans. The horse-trekking appealed to Leanne especially, she being a prolific rider, and I think both of them weren’t so keen on spending more time in Russia than they needed to, it being expensive, cold, and also in some important respects quite miserable. Eventually, after booking and then cancelling some tickets, they had decided to join us and come down to Ulaanbaatur rather than completing the Trans-Siberian for the sake of it (taking the train to Vladivostock before flying on to Beijing).

We also made a number of changes in our plans over these few days. Originally we were booked to take the train from Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatur, which cost around £80. Now we were astutely advised by the extremely kind and helpful Russian girl not to do this, as it would be much cheaper to go by train to Ulan Ude instead, a bit further along the Trans-Siberian line, and then catch a bus for 1000 roubles (around £20) across the border to Ulaanbaatur central. We changed tickets, and this saved us around £50 altogether, for which we owe her a big debt of gratitude.
After the return of Leanne & Blair from the bus myself, Rich and Dave took a wander around the city. It was a pretty unremarkable walk, apart from the interesting presence of large iceblocks stacked up near the entrance to a park (apparently for the building of an ‘ice city’, which sounds cool), but it is worth mentioning for an odd Irkutski, or perhaps Russian Orthodox, tradition that we stumbled across upon the way. We’d been wandering near to an attractive Russian Orthodox church, and coincidentally there were for some reason three to four weddings going on at around the same time. Wandering past the church and towards a footbridge that led towards the rivers edge, over a small highway, we noticed that a couple of newlyweds with their entourage were attaching something to the railings of this bridge to much encouragement, via honking and beeping, of the cars and trucks below. Intrigued, we waited until they’d walked further over the bridge to get a closer look. It turned out to be a standard lock. The symbolism of a lock in this respect is fairly obvious (i.e. it reflects the couple’s desire for a secure marriage, for security for the future, and it perhaps also is symbolic of the unbreakable seal of their love) but to have a tradition whereby one attaches a lock to this specific bridge is oddly quaint, and quite sweet. Their’s was a fairly standard lock by contrast to the others, and it seems that a minor industry has been geared up towards this tradition; locks of various sizes and age adorned the railings, some rust-free, some weathered with age, but most came with engravings naming the bride and groom. One was even shaped like a heart.

We took lunch at ‘Am-Bar’, a self-service restaurant that was very cheap by Russian standards, and with relatively good food. The fact that we didn’t have to pay for food by weight was a welcome relief, and we were pleased to be able to get a good feed for around £3. Food in Irkutsk, it seemed, is a lot cheaper than the rest of Russia. That evening, after dinner, we got exceptionally drunk on vodka with a young Japanese guy who’d just finished a Masters at Dublin University, and who was now travelling from Ireland back to Japan. He was destroyed after a few shots. We carried on, chatting between ourselves, and after a good few bottles (which even saw Rich airing his supposed ‘Marijuana Vodka’… of dubious narcotic worth), time, tiredness and the physical effects of alcohol eventually forced us to bed.

The next day was spent wandering around the city. I ambled up to a pretty awesome park, and a large, attractive orthodox church, both overlooking the city, to stretch my legs, get some fresh air, and take some photos. The park was nice, coated in snow, and near to the church were clusters of wooden houses and a large bombastic monument to the Revolution, with greenish, ruddy-faced Comrades carrying a red-painted stone flag high above them. This was cool. There was also a small cemetery, complete with Soviet stars on gravestones, including the only gravestone with an aircraft-propeller for ornamentation that I’ve ever seen. That evening, to make up for missing Olkhon Island, myself, Dave, Leanne & Blair and Rich planned to visit the Lake Baikal the next day.

Rising early, we headed out to the Lake by a bus which, luckily, was quite easy to find. The bus also wasn’t completely rammed, thank god, and after driving for 2 hours we arrived at our destination. Next to us stood Lake Baikal, an immense flat sheet of metal, the opposite shore impossible to view, holding 20% of the world’s fresh water supply. It was huge, and magnificent, and an obvious photo opportunity for the peeps with cameras. That day we planned to do some husky riding in the morning (sledging, not literally riding a dog… which in most cultures would be considered cruel), and then spend the afternoon in a banya (banya is the Russian word for sauna). With our awesome itinerary, and after stopping for a quick coffee at the roadside café, we headed down a dirt track past some impressive looking wooden houses towards the husky riding centre. Upon arrival all of the dogs (they were definitely dogs, not huskies, although this didn’t seem to matter much) stood up and started barking in unison, perched on top of their kennels. Thankfully they were chained to them. The place smelt gamey and musky, with overtones of dog shit, but what else could one expect? It also provided our first experience of a ‘long drop’, an outside toilet dug into the ground, where one relieves oneself and tries not to look at everyone else’s relieve-ings beneath them. If you do look, however, be prepared to see a construction not unlike the pyramids at Giza… except in this instance, made out of shit. Yep, a frozen pyramid of shit. My immediate fear was falling in and then being impaled on that shit. In that instance I’d not envy the police officer back in the UK charged with informing my mother that I’d died in Siberia after being stabbed to death by faeces. Actually I’d not really envy myself in that situation, either. A messy way to go.

Musings aside, we each took a turn at riding the ‘husky’ sledge (except for Rich, who opted out). This was an experience, a very good one as it turns out. I can’t say that the UK heath & safety inspectors would approve, but as far as I’m aware none of us died or were seriously maimed, so that wasn’t much of an issue. The sledging was incredibly fun. You speed along at around 15-20 mph, trying to maintain balance and to not fall off as they drag you over the ruts, bumps, and lumps in the snow-covered track. We sped through a beautiful forest, the crisp sunlight coming down through the trees and on to the pure white snow, and with the wind rushing past and the acceleration of the sledge it was quite exhilarating. Admittedly I did bounce off the sledge once, although I kept a hold of the handles and managed to quickly run back onto it whilst it was still being dragged along, and get my feet back in to position. More than once the thought of how to explain away a broken leg to my insurance company popped into my head (random fall in a forest?), but nothing untoward happened and we rushed back, after what seemed to be an incredibly quick five kilometre run, into the camp. Altogether only Dave and Blair properly went for a tumble, with no injuries, although admittedly Dave’s fall was due to the dogs going ape and fighting one another towards the end of the run… which was funny to watch. Dave didn’t seem to mind much either really.

We finished up the sledging, and then spent the afternoon in a banya. Rich abandoned us to take some photos, so we all changed into swimwear and braved a (relatively cool) 70 degree sauna together. It felt good to feel some proper heat, and we even managed to get some birch-tree action going on (in saunas, birch leaves act as a form of natural fragrance, and open up pores, or something, when they’re smacked against your skin). Sweating like a mother, I walked outside and quickly lowered my now well-raised internal body temperature by rolling around in the snow outside. This starts to get very uncomfortable very quickly (the feeling is similar to having thousands of needles pressed in to your skin), so you have to run back inside to quickly feel the warmth again. Refreshed from the banya, with a feeling of warmth, we left Lake Baikal in a shared taxi (the buses were too busy to catch), and returned to Irkutsk. That evening, me and Dave shared some smoked fish from Lake Baikal. We had to gut it ourselves, which was a messy business, but it was all cured and so the insides didn’t have much left to them. We ate the fish by chopping in into segments and pulling the flesh off from the skin with our teeth, which is the only real way to eat the fish since the skin is incredibly difficult to peel off from the flesh by hand. It was very tasty, but far too messy to eat regularly.

On mine and Dave’s last night in Irkutsk, much to our surprise, we found for dinner a reasonably priced Russian restaurant selling bona fide, tasty Russian food, to which we went with Leanne & Blair. I ate a tasty bowl of Solianka soup, which is meaty and oily, and grilled Omul, a native fish of Lake Baikal that I later (embarrassingly) discovered is being fished to extinction. Well, you’re only human… and considering I’m a Westerner, I’ve already donated my fair share of existence to screwing the global ecosystem over, so it’s probably a drop in the ocean as opposed to the straw that broke the camel’s back. If God’s a fish, however, I’m screwed. In the evening we drank vodka and watched Dr. Strangelove, my personal choice and one of my favourite movies, which I had the pleasure of introducing to Blair and Rich. Dr. Strangelove is a comedy about nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The fact that it’s bloody funny, and yet it concerns nuclear war, is testament to its genius. It’s Peter Sellers at his best, and I recommend you watch it if you haven’t already (watch it again, in that case). Sitting in Irkutsk, watching a Cold War nuclear comedy, was a gloriously surreal experience.

Moscow, Ekaterinburg, Omsk

A big one again. I seem to only have time to write extra-long summary posts and drop them on here, due to the hectic life of being a sight-seer, and the time required to be set aside for boozing and socialising (which, sadly, one cannot escape from…). Anyway, I’m writing from Beijing this time, which means that I need to talk about Irkutsk, Ulaanbaatur and (eventually) Beijing in order to be up to date with this ‘ol travel-me-blog thing. This will happen eventually, I promise. Hope this suffices for now, anyway.

Cheers!

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MOSCOW, Russia

The staff at Soul Kitchen helped us to book our train tickets by providing us with details of our chosen journey written in Russian, which we took to the station. Staff at the station were reasonably helpful, although there was little chance, we found, of ‘service with a smile’ (especially, it seems, when they know that you’re not a Russian). Yet we got the tickets booked, and that’s all that mattered. Leaving, we bid farewell to a very friendly New Zealand couple we had met (Leanne and Blair), and an Australian guy (Steve) and New Zealand guy (Richard) both travelling alone, whom we had chatted to and generally hung out with whilst there.

The train to Moscow was a 12 hour affair, and our first experience of the sort of trains we’d be travelling through Siberia on. Travelling third, we were invariably sharing our berth with Russians on a budget, and the ‘national service’ conscripts of the Russian military on their way to and from active duty and training. It was an interesting atmosphere, and the trains varied according to their quality. Some ‘Firmenny’ class trains are higher quality trains with newer facilities. This first train was an older train, and so the facilities weren’t quite so up-to-date, however it was an overnight stop and the difference in price between third and second class for the equivalent journey made ‘roughing it’ more economical.

I’ll now diverge slightly to discuss the quality of the Russian Railways trains in general…

In terms of facilities for third, the toilets, for example, are pretty basic. I brought alcohol gel to ensure personal sanitation, which proved very useful. When flushed, the toilets open up onto the track beneath. This seems unpleasant, but since the distances are so huge, and often through countryside, it makes sense. They are closed (for obvious reasons) 10-20 minutes before, during, and after stops.

In terms of the third-class sleeper carriages’ beds, they are pretty short in terms of length. I’m around average height and my feet hung over the end of the bed if I stretched to full length, and you tend to get cramp and muscle aches and pains after a night in them, but since we tended towards travelling in stages, staying for a few days in cities along the Trans-Siberian, we bore this out and recovered in our hostels. They are not particularly comfortable, but you are provided with a thin mattress, pillow and a wool duvet, and also prepackaged sheets to cover them (which is reassuring), which you return to the attendant after you reach your stop. For journeys longer than two consecutive nights then I’d recommend second class. Two nights were bearable in third, but three would have been a killer.

On the plus side, a really useful, free facility is the provision by the train company of cups, cutlery, and boiling hot water from a fantastically complicated-looking boiler situated near the front of each carriage. This means you can bring dried noodles, Cupasoups, etc, and be guaranteed a meal or snack. Also, the attendants wake you an hour before your stop (which is very helpful), so you don’t (necessarily) need to worry about oversleeping (although I set an alarm, just to be sure).

Regarding security, we found that third class tends to be safe and secure as long as you remain reasonably vigilant and ensure that your valuable stuff is either with you or being watched by a friend. The third class carriages are laid out as a number of open cabins containing four beds, or bunks. There are two upper and two lower bunks, facing each other, with a small foldaway table in the middle. The lower bunks serve as seats during the daytime, so you have to clear your bags away if you’ve got company sharing the cabin with you. These open cabins have no door, and so during the night and day you are constantly aware of people passing to and fro along the carriage. This can be annoying if you’re near to the toilets and thus can hear the doors banging. There are also upper and lower bunks along the passageway, running lengthways down the carriage, with the lower bunk transforming into a two-seater table. In the open cabin, if you stay on the lower bunk, you can lift the bunk up to store your bags underneath in a metal compartment. The bunk itself provides the ‘lid’ to this compartment. If you stay on the upper bunk, you can store your baggage overhead, making it awkward for potential thieves to sneakily steal your stuff.

The main thing in terms of personal security in third is, I think, your faith and trust in the strangers whom you will be sharing your berth with. Although it sounds a tad unscientific, I would in general say that, if they seem untrustworthy, don’t risk taking valuables out (i.e. putting them on show) or leaving stuff lying around… especially at stops. The best course of action is, of course, to not show your stuff to anyone, but a common-sense vigilance should suffice. Most people we’ve shared berths with have been decent and kind, so unless you’re certain they’re a shifty bugger, don’t go in expecting a fight!

I think, in fact, that the people, the strangers, whom you share a berth with tend to be the main decider for your quality of life on the trains. If they smell rank, mangy, like a wet dog, or snore like a pig, or are drunk and disorderly, or aggressive because you’re English, then you’re likely not to feel comfortable, however nice the facilities are. On the other hand, if they share food and talk to you, are clean, smile and are pleasant, and yet are not too over-friendly (and thus seem a bit dodgy, perhaps) then you will have a good time, unless the facilities are truly appalling. So, be aware that even if you book a nice second-class cabin with a door, and lengthier beds, then there is still a danger that you will end up being penned in for a number of nights and days with an unpleasant, sweating, rank individual who refuses to open a window to cool the carriage down (we found that most carriages are over-heated, often reaching around 27 degrees Celsius, and this is exacerbated in third, where there can be up to 50+ people in a full carriage). This awful episode unfortunately happened to the New Zealand couple we met, and needless to say that they were feeling pretty ill and pissed off by the end of it (they even went to the lengths of offering a decent bribe in roubles to the attendant to help facilitate a cabin-change, but sadly no other cabins were available).

Anyway, back on topic…

We arrived at Moscow at 6am, bleary eyed and quite tired. First impressions: outside the station a homeless man lay in the gutter, in a pool of piss and alcohol. The architecture had a foreboding ‘Gotham City’ (the infamous hometown of Batman) air about it, in the half-light of the pre-dawn. What seemed like a looming Communist castle stood off in the distance, a relic of the Soviet functionalist-socialist building style, no doubt housing a current government department. It was also cold, in the negative degrees I’d say.

We quickly realised that, foolishly, we had made the same mistake as last time… we had no map, and no idea where to find our hostel. So, as before, we set out on an epic quest to find WiFi and thus get an idea of where we needed to go. We soon found a SubWay restaurant, and downloaded some maps and details of the hostel location.

To get to the hostel required taking the Moscow subway, which we found was very similar in style to St. Petersburg’s. Queuing to get a ticket at the ticket office was a joke, especially to Englishmen used to orderly queues! Lines intersecting lines, no particular order, dog-eat-dog… in short, chaos. The subway in turn was crowded with stony faced people, and we were getting some odd looks with our big rucksacks. The trains were old but functional. One thing worth mentioning is the lack of maps of the underground and the city anywhere, it seems, in Moscow underground stations. It’s an obvious reminder, I think, of how difficult and expensive it is to get hold of useful information in Russia. Information is power, and therefore even trivial information is withheld so that the withholding entity can charge access, or simply deny access, to that information, depending on their opinion of you. This sounds paranoid, but I can’t shake off this impression of Russia as a dog-eat-dog country.

We exited at the correct subway stop (Kitai-Gorod), and headed upwards to Moscow street-level. Unable to orienteer ourselves using the cryptic maps I’d hastily downloaded, we wandered off towards what we later realised was the bottom of Red Square, and the back of St. Basil’s Cathedral. We turned back and made our way up towards Lubyanka (the square with the infamous ex-headquarters of the KGB), stopping in at a McDonald’s (itself a potent symbol of the West’s economic Cold War victory) to recheck the maps using their WiFi. So, we discovered that the our hostel, Napoleon Hostel, was just around the corner, and we found it behind a large metal door, at the very top of an exhausting stairwell.

Napoleon hostel is not the greatest hostel I’ve stayed in. Compared to Soul Kitchen, is was actually a bit of a dump. The staff weren’t as friendly as they might have been (for the most part sullen and somewhat rude, apart from some notable exceptions), the facilities were just about adequate, and the attitude towards customers was cold, in the sense that one felt that they simply saw you as cash-cows ripe for milking. Sitting alongside odd, arbitrary charges for not washing your dishes, for example, we found that upon entering Napoleon’s we were immediately informed that it was necessary, nay, mandatory, that we paid 600 roubles (around £12) for our visas to be ‘registered’ in Moscow, in order to let us stay. As it happens, registration is another bullshit Russian formality, alongside providing you with an easy to lose ‘Migration Card’ that you can get fined for if you don’t have it. We had a valid visa, and so it was simply another way for the Russian government to arbitrarily take money from you as a foreigner. But anyway, this mandatory registration took us aback, for we were under the impression that, firstly, we should be able to choose whether or not we want to register our visas, secondly, that you only needed to register a visa in a Russian city if you are there for more than 72 hours, and thirdly, that our choice to register or not register should manifestly have no bearing on our choice to stay at their hostel! But we quickly learnt that choice is not a free thing in Russia. We had to register.

In Moscow, we were informed, all travellers must register regardless of their time spent in the city, and regardless of whether or not they had registered before, e.g. in St. Petersburg. I don’t know about this latter point, but we were aware that if we were caught without registration by a Moscow policeman, we would be in deep shit. Probably, we would have to pay them a bribe for them to overlook it. I imagine we would have to pay them a bribe regardless, since Russian police are notoriously corrupt. We’d heard a number of bone-chilling stories involving Russian policeman and passports. One story, for example, concerned a pair of French nationals who were held in a police van, with their passports withheld by police demanding ridiculous bribes to return them, until stalemate forced them to be freed. Another awful story was of a guy who had his passport taken from him by a policeman who, doubting its authenticity (or simply because he was an arsehole), decided to see whether or not it would rip in half. Luckily it didn’t. Speechless horror don’t cut it. These were just a few choice examples of the dicey-ness of a foreigner’s status in Russia.

Fears over document trouble and corrupt officials aside, we spent a while wandering around the Russian capital. We walked from the hostel towards the former KGB (Soviet Secret Police) headquarters at Lubyanka. The structure emanates evil, imposing dominance over the Lubyanka square, squatting like a black cloud of repression. From there, we wandered over to Red Square and the Kremlin walls (Kremlin being the Russian word for citadel, which is a walled fortification). Historically, the place is of great interest, and yet the existence of large shopping centre (catering, it seems, for the Russian super-rich) on one side of the square, directly opposite the oddly underwhelming Lenin Mausoleum and the walls of the Kremlin on the other, with an under-construction ice rink planted directly in the middle, made one feel a tad uneasy. In a sense, the historic importance of this small patch of Russian soil was shifted into a surreal light. Red Square was the focal point of the bloodbaths of the Revolution and Stalin’s purges. The unmistakable scent of stale blood, less intense now and yet undoubtably present, still wafts here, and there is something quite unnerving to witness this troubled spot transformed into a playground for the rich, a place of carefree entertainment rather than a silent monument to human suffering. Again, one feels the weight of history.

St. Basil’s cathedral sits at the far end of the square, and having previously seen the back of it, we now got the full-frontal view. I couldn’t help, I admit, but feel a tad underwhelmed by it. Although fascinating, historically and architecturally, it did not win me over aesthetically. It seemed too polished, and not nearly as impressive in detail as the magnificent ‘Spilled Blood’ church in St. Petersburg. The view of belching smokestacks in the background also left me a little disappointed, giving the impression of Russia as a country, or at least Moscow as a city, steamrollering an uncomfortable past with the forces of industry and capitalism, rather than coming to terms with it. St. Basil’s alone has its aesthetic value compromised significantly when one becomes aware of its awful history. Tsar Ivan the Terrible burnt out the eyes of its builders and architects, we are told, so that they might never build a sister cathedral elsewhere. The inhumanity of such an act casts the place in a shadow that cannot be easily lifted.

Do the Russians choose not to answer the particularly awful aspects of their past out of fear of repetition, an active attempt to ignore it, or out of silent awe and respect for those ‘strongmen’ who enforced the atrocities? I wonder whether it is the latter. The impression one gets from most Russians is a stubborn belief that their country is inviolable. That most aspects of their history, especially, it seems, the acts of barbarism, were done for the right reasons at the time. Right with respect to the context in which they were performed. Stalin’s purges were horrific but necessary, Ivan’s excesses a logical extension of the need to keep Russia’s culture strong and unique. Excuses for bloodshed are often easy to find.

Continuing, we wandered around the Kremlin walls, next to the river, alongside which ran a long, wide motorway, full of cars, belching out smog. The grass embankments were blackened with oily soot, adding to my impression of Moscow as a dirty, polluted city. Air pollution is a significant problem it seems. Finally, reaching the subway entrance on the other side of the Kremlin, we took the line back to our stop.

On one of our nights in Moscow, we met a variety of Russians at a ‘cultural exchange’ event organised by ‘George’, a spiv-like have-a-go entrepreneur, who played some role in the running of Napoleon’s. It was a chance to speak to some young Russians about their opinions on Russia’s place in the world. I chatted to a girl about the (now mothballed) so-called ‘Star Wars’ Eastern Europe-based US missile defence programme, and specifically her opinions on it. Her views echoed Marsha’s, from St. Petersburg. Russia, she felt, must remain stubbornly opposed to the missile programme, and be suspicious of the West, and not be taken in by supposed Western safety concerns, which are merely excuses to point bombs at Russia. Such are the new, confident youth of Putin’s Russia. They want to learn English, they are savvy to the free market, they are educated, up and coming and friendly. But they are not necessarily open to all that the West has to offer, and are tinged still with the suspicion of its intentions; a hangover from the days of socialism, perhaps.

Spending time in Moscow reinforced one major impression I had received in Russia so far. Namely, that it seemed to distinctly lack a middle class. There were excesses of poverty and excesses of wealth, and not much, it seems, of a middle ground. Food is a distinct example of this. Everyday food in Russia, bought from local shops, such as cuts of meat, sausages, cheese, and fruit and veg, tends to be expensive and of poor quality. One needs to spend a lot to get high quality food, especially for high quality cuts of meat. The lower class suffer from poor diet, instead spending money on dirt-cheap bottles of vodka and beer, and obscenely cheap packets of cigarettes. Most people seem to smoke and drink, with few if any abstaining. There are no ‘Tesco Metros’ and ‘Sainsbury’s Locals’, with decent quality food at a reasonable price, there are merely shabby corner shops where food is of poor to average quality, and at unreasonable prices. The convenience culture that the UK revels in, and Russia seems to pointedly lack, could very well be a symptom of a large, well founded middle class. This established Western class arguably began to develop, as a prototype, in late-Tsarist Russia, following the abolition of Serfdom. This class, known as the kulaks, were a wealthy class of peasant, and were infamously liquidated and/or collectivised by Stalin and his protégées, being marked out as capitalist stooges, petty bourgeois, enemies of socialism. So ended that experiment. Perhaps if they had been left alone, convenience culture would be more prevalent. The middle class would then dictate demand, and hence prices. Anyway, we found a decent supermarket in the end, behind the ex-KGB headquarters (an ironic touch, perhaps?), and picked up some nice food at fairly reasonable prices (for Russia). Perhaps such supermarkets are the indicator of a new, developing middle class… who knows.
Our last night in Moscow was spent with a guy called Nigel, a really fascinating and exuberant individual, who had spent most of his life working in Moscow’s casinos. He gave us the lowdown on Russian internal politics, the Russians’ attitudes and lifestyle, and their recent history. He had been there on and off since 1993, post-Perestroika, following the end of Communism, and saw with his own eyes the last spasms of Red dissent in the abortive Russian Parliament (White House) coup. He shared with us stories of the ‘wild’ 1990s, when Russian state apparatus was effectively auctioned off at ridiculous bargain-bin prices, and gangs fought for territory and control of factories, etc. It was Thatcherite denationalisation on steroids.

He was a Manchester boy. Intellect and luck earned him the opportunity to run with some major Russian oligarches, living what amounted to a James Bond lifestyle. Through the evening, into the night, as we kept on steadily drinking, our conversations completely changed my view on Russia. I initially felt Russia to be an oppressive society, where people were tightly controlled by the state. Yet he challenged this. Why? Because, for example, you can pay off the police if you get caught speeding or drink driving. He paid an officer the equivalent of £600 for drink driving, and they gave him an escort home.

Money, it seems, buys you anything in Russia. And I mean anything. In that respect, it is perhaps the freest society in the world, simply because the state effectively operates as a private entity and does not enforce (for enforcement’s sake) the communal norms accumulated, especially, through jurisprudence. Britain and American are markedly different in this respect. This is not so much crony capitalism as rather a libertarian wonderland, where the state forgoes responsibility in the name of ‘corruption’ (i.e. prostituting itself to the free market, and politicians turning politics into a career), and individuals who have wealth automatically have power. This isn’t corruption of politics, since no body truly and overwhelmingly enforces norms in Russia… it is merely taking advantage of those who happen to pay taxes (which are instead treated as voluntary donations to the state), and either cannot avoid paying it, or are foolish enough to believe that their money is going to be justly spent rather than absorbed into a Dacha (a Russian country house, built for leisure pursuits), or a speedboat, for example. There’s no class system here, since the rich are of such a minority that they barely count as a class: they are oligarches. At the same time there is effectively no middle class, and the general poor make up the vast majority of Russians. The poor are exploited, and have no recourse to complain, and so perhaps it’s not so much the case that people don’t want to strive for a just society here, it’s merely that they cannot. If you lack wealth, then you lack a voice, and perhaps this explains the stagnation in Russian politics, where people fail to care that United Russia consistently win elections since it, as ‘government’, is merely an exploitative private entity that fails to enforce norms or values in Russian society. This is life of the “nasty, brutish and short”, to quote Thomas Hobbes, but not so nasty, brutish or short as he felt it would be. There is no ‘leviathan’, merely a passive entity that calls itself government yet presides over free market near-anarchy. Russia initially seemed controlled, but after chatting to Nick, no longer.

At 7am we stumbled, pissed, back through the Moscow streets. We had booked a train at 1pm that day, and hadn’t planned on getting so drunk. I somehow managed to navigate us home, even though we were at least a couple of kilometres from our hostel, and we arrived at 8.30am and went straight to sleep. I woke at 12.30pm. The horror. We’d missed our train, and both of us were still wasted. Thankfully, the girl on the desk kindly helped us to re-book our train to Ekaterinburg for the evening, amongst other trains for later on, and we went back to bed for the rest of the day. It was a pretty stupid move, but it turned out to be worth it.

EKATERINBURG, Russia

Having bought some food for the train from the decent supermarket, we boarded at Moscow and settled in to our third-class berths. This was an interesting journey. We shared our cabin with a mother and young child, and a man called Sergei, who spoke very little Russian. There’s no point recounting every last detail of the journey, but we ended up sharing food (sweets and fruit) and drink (tea) with these great people, and also chatting to a young translator girl called Anya. We taught her English slang, whilst she helped us brush up on our Russian… all with the help of a couple of excellent English-Russian Berlitz phrasebooks, bought in St. Petersburg, that gave us quick references and guides to the Russian language. We also had the pleasure of witnessing a fight, a proper fight, between one very pissed Russian lad and a randomer. The randomer won. I also personally got propositioned for sex by a drunk 40-something Russian women (I was in the middle of making tea, so obviously I had to decline…).

The journey ended early in morning, on a dramatic note, as our stocky carriage attendant forced us to cough up 150 roubles for a missing bed-sheet from my linen. I don’t know where it went, and unfortunately it was impossible to get around paying for it, so I had to pay. It sucked. But on the vastly more positive side, by the end of the journey we had made some good friends, including a strategic missile cadet in the Russian army, who had just served his national service, spoke not a word of English, yet gave me a couple of Strategic Missile Corps. lapel badges as a souvenir. It was a very entertaining journey all round.

We parted at the station, in the freezing cold and with the platform deep in snow.

Hanging around from 5am until daylight in a fly-ridden, dirty bar-cum-convenience store, we waited. We had originally planned, and booked, to stay the night at the Europe-Asia Hostel, but that was before we missed our train, and this train got us in at such an inconvenient time that it wasn’t worth the expense of trekking there.

After dropping our bags into the luggage storage area, at dawn we set out (once again) to look for WiFi, so that we could book accommodation in Omsk, whilst we waited for our connecting train that same day, at 4pm. This proved fruitless: there seemed to be no free WiFi in the whole of the city! So, we hopelessly went by subway and then by foot to try to find the Europe-Asia, where we assumed we would find WiFi, and might be able to use it. It took us ages to find it, and after trudging around, cold and miserable, for what seemed like an age we finally found the dingy place at the top of an unpleasant flight of stairs, in a dirty, graffiti-ridden Soviet apartment block. The unreasonable manager refused to let us use their internet, except if we paid full-whack, which we obviously refused, and so we set off again to find internet. Finally, we found it, at a place which (sod’s law have it) we had passed before. It cost a few bob, but we managed to log on and book a night at the Ibis Siberia, in Omsk. Why Ibis? It was pricey, but unfortunately there seemed to be no hostels in Omsk, and so we had to go there. It turned out to be a good call, all the same.

We returned to the station and awaited out train. Ekaterinburg had left a bad taste in the mouth. Things took a surreal turn whilst we were waiting, however, when we began to share some beers with a couple of bona fide Russian military personnel. One was an officer in the Strategic Missile Corps., the other a member of the Spetnaz, the Russian paratrooper force. The former was less drunk, and he spoke in broken English about his hope for continued peace between Russia and the West, and his particular eye for American girls. The latter seemed more unstable, and he ended up spilling his drink on the table. So, time marched on, until eventually we had to leave. They ended up escorting is (in a friendly manner) to the train that we needed, but only after the drunken paratrooper had gone for a piss near the station platform (soldiers in Russia, it seems, can do what they want). We found the train, and boarded, leaving Ekaterinburg, a strange town, behind.

OMSK, Russia

The journey was uneventful, apart from our sleep being interrupted by an unpleasant guy, sharing our open cabin, who started eating gherkins and slurping soup noisily around midnight, sitting on Dave’s bed. This aside, we gratefully arrived in Omsk, and were surprised to find a KFC (I kid you not) directly opposite the station. Popping inside, we each grabbed something to eat, and then we bought a map and headed towards our hotel.

Omsk is a fairly pleasant city, although quite quiet. We spent the next day washing our clothes in our room’s sink, drying them. We wandered around town in the evening, and slept early. The next day we had a train to catch at around 3pm, and so we ambled to the station at about one o’clock, after grabbing some lunch. There was a brief drama, as a couple of police stopped us as we headed to the station and asked for our passports (such things happen when you least expect them to) and we thought we were deeply in the shit. We’d been provided by the Ibis with a phone number to call if we were hassled by corrupt policemen, strangely enough, but luckily we didn’t have to use it. They saw our documents were in order, and perhaps because we peppered our responses to their questions with a smattering of Russian words, especially prasteetye (please, or excuse me) and spasiba (thankyou), they let us carry on.

We wandered down the long straight road leading to the station, stopping at a large park dedicated to the Second World War. We were behind the Urals now and this was where, for the Soviet Union, the war was won. Here they safely mass-produced and then sent west the tanks and guns necessary to fight the Nazi invasion, and in the park there was, notably, a large decommissioned (T34… I think) tank on a pedestal. A symbol of the war.

We wandered on to the station, and boarded the train to Irkutsk.

Helsinki & St. Petersburg

HELSINKI, Finland

We crossed overnight the Baltic Sea, from Stockholm to Helsinki. The ferry was a somewhat bleak affair although we shared our berth with a sound Indonesian guy studying in Holland, who spoke a number of languages

We were staying in the very cheapest cabins, which, whilst quite comfortable and well provided for, were situated both below the waterline, and below the car decks, to remind us of our place and perhaps also to serve as punishment for being conservative with our spending. But we were well advised to choose the cheapest, because the ferry was expensive, and the products for sale, again, prohibitively expensive, e.g. shaving gel for the equivalent of £6. Pricey.

Why gel? My beard was getting longer and longer, and ever more uncomfortable as it did so… so basically I was pussying out from growing a full-on TravelBeard (TM) by that point. So, I had to make do with Dave’s beard trimmer thingy which was alright, if a bit metrosexual. It felt quite odd not to get a really ‘close’ shave, and it left my chin beard not properly shaved but luckily I’m not a fashion model so it doesn’t really matter.

But anyway, we were fine in our cabins. Altogether the rumble of the engines served as a throbbing heartbeat cradling its passengers to sleep, surrounding us with ambient white noise.

Before turning in, we took a wander around the entertainment areas of the ship, and a turn on deck, to gauge its amenities and feel its general vibe.

In terms of shopping and culture, this was our first experience of Russian, or rather perhaps Eastern European meets Nordic culture, beyond the typical examples given on television, video games, or experienced through contact with Eastern European émigrés. I feel unsure about making snap judgements about these things, generalisations (although I do often resort to it out of mere intellectual laziness), however the fare and the entertainment on this ferry was quite strange and contrived. They had decided on a French theme. We wandered into the theatre/music hall and witnessed a ‘French’ burlesque act, all singing all dancing. The thing was, none of the performers were French, they were almost certainly Eastern European (Latvian or Estonian, we guessed), and the fake smiles made us, but not (it seemed) the audience, feel slightly uncomfortable. Like I said… contrived. Cliché seemed lost on our fellow passengers, unless they simply weren’t as dry as the English.

So, we arrived the next morning in Helsinki, Finland.

The first thing to happen to us was very surprising and, we were later told, a rarity in both regards. Basically, we were taken aside by two fairly army-looking policemen for a passport check (the second to happen on our trip so far in Europe, the first being a plain-clothed policemen on a train in Germany, at Aarhus, coming up to us to check our passports… specifically mine, in fact, which makes one wonder about their perception of my intentions abroad).
So, they checked our passports (they spoke English with Nordic/American accents, which was interesting) and we fell into conversation with them about our travel plans. Then, totally out of the blue, they offered to provide us a lift to the train station in town in their police car.

We accepted, obviously, and took the ride in the back of the van. We didn’t know whether we were being stupid and risking being carted off to the local police station off our own back, but it was fine, and we were dropped at the station, no harm done, and so left on excellent terms. Proper fun.

Our hostel in Helsinki was the Hostel Stadion, which was built into a section of the old Olympic Stadium, where Finland held its Olympic games (presumably around the late 1950s/early 1960s). It was quite a nice place, but quiet. The showers were ace, fast and powerful. We bought food from the local supermarket, making sandwiches for lunch, since the restaurants and bars were ridiculously expensive (more so than Stockholm), e.g. around £6.50 for a pint.

The public transport in Helsinki was great, very efficient, although a tad expensive (so perhaps comparable to London). We took a trip around town on the tram, and the bracing dry coldness of the weather was refreshing. During the evening before, and the day of, our departure by train to St. Petersburg, we spent our time in M-bar, a really fantastic spot doubling up as hip music venue cum bar by night, and internet café by day (although you could use the internet whenever). A local guy, DJ Daddy Pales, mixed some ace stuff, Arabic beats meets ambient sound, during the evening. The cost of alcohol meant we could only order a couple of rounds and a shot, all of which we were forced to nurse (again, because of the cost), but this wasn’t so bad.

The shot was bloody great, and worth a mention. Basically, the (pretty much) national drink of the Finns are a couple of packets of Fisherman’s Friend mixed and dissolved into a bottle of vodka. It’s a really minty, aniseed-y shot, and it tastes great. Why it’s not popular elsewhere beggars belief, and although it cost around £7(!), it was worth it. Dave unfortunately spilt most of his over the bar, but was quickly consoled with beer.

There wasn’t much to see in Helsinki, apart from the Suomenlinna Sea Fortress (built by Sweden to defend against marauding Russians in the mid-Nineteenth Century), which was recommended to us by a Finnish girl at the CityBackpacker Hostel. Unfortunately we missed our chance to visit this, since we both felt a tad run-down, and it meant a boat ride across the bay. A shame, but something to visit if either of us returned.

So, leaving the next day, we caught the train to St. Petersburg.

ST. PETERSBURG, Russia

We were shooed onboard the train by a middle aged woman wearing high leather boots Dominatrix-style, with a Carry On-type air-stewardess get-up, blue and with the silvery winged wheel pendant of the Russian Railways train company pinned to her lapel. The trains look old, their sides seemingly fashioned out of a material that similar to corrugated iron, and immediately the general vibe shifts from the erudite fashionista modernity of Helsinki, to the heavy functionality of Eastern Europe. They are comfortable, though.

The first thing to notice was the sudden appearance of the Cyrillic alphabet. Dave had a copy of the RAF training pack on teaching basic Russian to RAF personnel (in the event of war? I wonder if there would be many people left to speak to…), which sounded out the alphabet and helped decipher some words, e.g. ‘СТОП,’ which is ‘STOP’ in Russian (the ‘C’ sounds like ‘es’, and the ‘П’ sounds like ‘P’). Many Russian words look and sound similar to their English/Latin counterparts, but many are also vastly different. A definitive gap in comprehension had now opened between our cultures, and for the first time in the trip I really begin to feel like a foreigner abroad.

Neither myself nor Dave have been to Russia before, so we had little idea what to expect, but generally there were three main stereotypes of the Russians that we had heard before and tentatively thought might be true. Firstly, that they mostly wore fur and leather, second, that they drank a lot (especially vodka, which they drink like fish), and third, that they were tough as nails, stony faced.

I’d say we weren’t far off the truth. For starters, we were immediately provided with a free can of Russian ‘Baltika’ beer (which is good, as it goes), and our first encounter with a Russian was a chat to an English-speaking Russian women on her way back from Helsinki who was very, very drunk. Quite why she decided Helsinki was the place to drink is baffling, since it’s so expensive and Russia is so cheap, but this point aside she told us that this winter in Russia would be the coldest since 2003 (very cold, apparently), and that we were basically crazy to be going to Siberia. She was hammered though, so we took her warning with a pinch of salt. It did leave us a tad nervous though, to be honest, but also provided an adrenaline rush.

We had our passports checked and re-checked by the Finnish and Russian authorities, were provided with a Migration card (basically a piece of paper that’s deliberately easy to loose, so they can fine you), and asked if we had anything to declare (the drunk women advised us to say no, so we did).

We arrived at the station some hours later, exhausted and excited. At St. Petersburg we were greeting with nationalistic music, pompous and played over the station loudspeakers. We had arrived.

Then we discovered that we had made our first strategic mistake. Neither of us had thought to download maps for the hostel, nor had we thought to get Russian Roubles out to pay for stuff. So, we rushed around trying to find WiFi and a cash machine. In sum, we were in the middle of a foreign city, near midnight, where few people spoke English, freezing cold, with no idea where we were and with very little cash on us. Great planning on our part.

Anyway, the cash machine we eventually found, and following a rough knowledge of where the hostel was, we began a long walk with our backpacks over the bridge and down towards Moscow Station, near where I believed the hostel was located. En route, we stopped at a Hotel called Hotel Sonya to ask for directions, and thankfully they gave us a printout from Google Maps showing us where to go. I will stay there again as a thank you if I return to Moscow one day. As we walked onwards, drunk Russians roamed the streets, staring at us with our backpacks, for we had arrived on a weekend and most people were out on the piss.

The hostel we stayed in was called ‘Soul Kitchen’. Hostels are technically illegal in Russia, however we later discovered that the police can be encouraged with a monetary incentive to turn a blind eye towards most things, including hostels, and so many operate quite comfortably in old apartments in the major Russian cities. This makes them quite difficult to find, however, and especially at night, since they inevitably fail to be advertised on the outside (and if they are, the advertisement is usually very small) and are typically behind plain metal doors, hidden in apartments at the top of stairwells.

Eventually we found Soul Kitchen, and on the trip so far I’d say that this particular hostel is the best I’ve stayed in. It was superb, and we had an excellent time there. It was tiny for a start (basically, a converted apartment) which made the atmosphere homely and forced you to socialise with your fellow hostellers and the staff. It was also well planned and well provided for, e.g. plugs in lockers, so you could charge your stuff and keep it safe. Plus the management, who seemed to be an arty, hippy-ish couple, had decided to invest some time and effort into giving the place a bit of quirk and character by, for example, providing some interesting pictures for colouring-in on the inside of toilet cubicles, as an incentive to stop people drawing on the walls. Not a major piece of innovation, but certainly an interesting one.

The people who worked there were very friendly. I spoke to one woman, Marsha, who is a media student at the top university in St. Petersburg. She gave me her opinion on the current state of politics in Russia. She was very much proud to be Russian, and claimed to be a supporter of Putin and United Russia (although in Russia it seems (e.g. according to The Moscow Times) that United Russia is considered solely Putin’s party, a vehicle for his political ambitions and his ego). Russian history suggests that the people seemingly always hold a soft-spot for strongmen with egos and ruthless ambition. Perhaps the vastness of their country is perceived by its population to demand the use of an iron fist, to solidify the power of the central authority, be it based in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Her preference was for ‘Russian Democracy’, i.e. a loose sort of democracy, not especially representative, that is strongman-led and hence represents an independent, rebellious, stubborn-spirited Russia; albeit as a minority.

Marsha also assured me that the media was quite free in Russia. This was later challenged, we found, by another Russian speaker (albeit an Englishman), however up until that point I hadn’t spoken to anyone about Russian politics, so this was my first impression. I remained somewhat unconvinced, although having later wandered around St. Petersburg I certainly got an understanding of why Russians would be proud of their history, heritage and culture, even though the late totalitarian regime attempted to sterilise and/or manipulate it for selfish and/or ideological purposes.

We also got chatting to a guy called Ilya, who made electronic music, and another guy called Anton and a Russian girl, whose name escapes me. They were really great people, very friendly and talkative, and we spent a good evening drinking extremely cheap (in comparison to the UK, i.e. 0,5l costing from around £2-4 for a decent bottle), wonderful tasting bona fide Russian Vodka with them. They introduced us to their drinking customs, which are well respected and invariably practised in Russian society, such as the common salutation ‘Nas De’roviya!’ (‘Here’s to us!’), as well as other less family-friendly salutations. We ate gherkins with our shots (snacking whilst drinking being a common practice in Russia, especially eating gherkin, which seems to basically be the national vegetable since we’ve found it appears in nearly everything), and generally got hammered. The vodka was fantastic, far less rough than the equivalent priced UK vodka, and nicer even than Smirnoff, the costly premium UK brand. It was sippable, sweet and with a slight perfumed flavour.

Breakfasts at the hostel were also good, and provided free from 9am until midday. These were simple but tasty: miniature slices of bread, spread thickly with a jam made from apples, which tasted sweet… having a strangely revitalising effect upon a recovering drunk. Filter coffee was provided, which was excellent (I love filter coffee, it reminds me of diners in the US), and milk and cereal.

We spent the couple of days we had in St. Petersburg exploring the city by foot and public transport, but generally avoiding paying for museums, apart from famous Hermitage, which is widely considered to be unmissable (and I’d have to say I agree with that statement). We used the Metro rather than buses or trams, mainly because signage, and especially maps, are often distinctly lacking from most bus and tram stops, and also because the Metro in St. Petersburg, although the stops are often fairly distant from one another, is easy to use and efficient.

The interesting thing about Russian Metro systems is that they seem to be, near invariably, distinct throwbacks to Soviet paranoia, propaganda, and the cold war. The stops are often dedicated to ‘Heroes of the Revolution’ or ‘Heroes of the Soviet State’, and they are often like museum pieces of their age, and are fantastically designed, with modernist architecture, marble panelling, murals and stained glass windows. Many of the subways are decorated with Soviet imagery, the murals and stained glass especially still bearing the emblem of the hammer and sickle, with stone reliefs of workers and labourers, iron workers and farmers, Lenin, and other such Communist decoration. Further, it becomes clear when one descends down the steep escalators, past the tickets booths and through the open stiles, that they were built to provide ersatz shelters for the population, in the event of nuclear war. The blast doors are hidden in the walls, covered by iron panels, and present a chilling reminder of that not-so-distant past. Seen in this light, one imagines the panic and rush of a maddened public down into these absurdly decorated tombs, and the terror of watching and counting as the blast doors would shut upon those latecomers, to seal the coffin, as it were. I think I’d rather stay on the surface.

Beyond such maudlin fare, a walk around St. Petersburg is a truly wonderful experience. The route which we took, and a route I’d recommend, was a wander up Nevsky Prospekt (the main avenue in St. Petersburg) from Moscow Station, towards the Admiralty and the Hermitage. The buildings and streets were snow covered, which made the scene picturesque, and along the way we were able to appreciate the immensity and grandeur of the architecture. We stopped to gape at Kazan Cathedral, the Singer Company trade building, and in particular the ‘Church of the Saviour On Spilled Blood’, a beautifully decorated, impossibly detailed church, on the banks of a canal. The presence of water in the city gives the impression of a frozen Venice, and the magnificence and detail of the painted panels and architecture of the ‘Church of the Saviour On Spilled Blood’ I found to be quite overwhelming. Personally, having later visited St. Basil’s in Moscow, I would argue that this church outshines it in beauty and stature, even though it is smaller. Every panel on the outside was decorated, and the garlic-bulb roofs seemed like confections, as though they would taste sweet if eaten. The gold leaf shone brightly, too. It was stunning.

We walked up towards the immensity of the Admiralty, and the snow-covered, mysterious park before it. To our right, we saw St. Paul’s square, and alongside the river, the imposing, grandiose Hermitage. We took a wander around the square, and then passed over the river to walk alongside the Peter & Paul fortress, which famously fired upon the Bolshevik revolutionaries as they crossed the river to storm the Winter Palace, to bring millennia of monarchy to an abrupt end. The weight of history felt heavy upon the shoulders here.

Doubling back on ourselves, we walked over another bridge and past the Winter Palace, and through some beautiful, snow-covered gardens. It was evening now, and we met Nevsky Prospekt again, again walking past the beautiful Spilled Blood church, now lit up, stopping to browse at a craft market filled with Russian dolls and paintings of The Hermitage, pitched, it seemed, specifically for tourists. We then returned to the hostel.

Food being expensive, and of a generally poor quality, we shopped at a local mini-market for both nights. This saved money, and meant we could socialise in the kitchen. During the day we would eat at the Russian equivalent of a fast-food restaurant, called ‘Topemek’, which would serve large blinis (pancakes, or crepes, to you and me) filled with savoury stuff like gherkins & goose liver foie gras, or ‘Bryzna’ (sour cream and herbs) and ham. These were ok, although you certainly felt sick of them after a while. Meat in Russia seems, especially, to be of a poor quality, and processed. We also tried Borsch, which is basically a beetroot soup with minced meat or pieces of bacon in it, which was ok, and buckwheat with boiled pork. Again, the meat quality let the meal down, and the overall impression I get is that Russian food is ok if it’s of high quality, but such quality is prohibitively expensive to buy, even as a one-off.

But poor food aside, the drinks were interesting. We tried a drink called ‘Kvass’ on a number of occasions, which seems to be a wine-based soft-drink of a very low alcohol content (around 0,5%) that tastes somewhat like sarsparilla. The cheap vodka also softened the blow of having to suffer crap food.

We visited the Hermitage during our last day, and the sheer scale of the place and its collection is overwhelming. Of course, it was built by individuals who used the Russian state as a purse from which to draw money to fund such projects, without care for the individuals generating that wealth; however it was still magnificent. The inside of the building is magnificent, almost worthy of a visit on its own, in particular a vast marbled staircase surrounded by columns, which was incredible. Generally speaking, I would say that I was disappointed that they were so lax on allowing people to photograph old paintings with their flash on, and that they didn’t ensure that all natural light was blocked out from entering into their more ancient collections on display, such as their Ancient Egypt exhibit. That said, the collections on display were fantastic.

In the evening we went to a ‘left’ (i.e. politically left-wing) bar nearby called ‘Moustache Bar’ (its symbol was a moustache, which was pretty cool). The interesting thing about Russians is that they seem extremely stony faced and closed if you encounter them in the street or purchase something from them, and yet they open up magnificently when you drink and socialise with them. Such was the case at this ‘left’ bar, at least. We began sitting in a quiet corner, but soon we met the owner, Alex, an immense Redwood of a man, who beamed ear-to-ear when he chatted to us, speaking heavily accented but good English, and offered us a free shot of vodka (on top of the one kindly provided to us by the hostel, one for each day of our stay). The shot consisted of a grenadine base, with a half shot of vodka, and some Tabasco sauce added. It had an excellent kick to it, and I’d recommend anyone to try it. The people at this bar were lovely, and the flow of alcohol continued well into the early hours. At the end of the night, snacks such as olives and dried fish were brought to the bar by the staff, and were freely provided to everyone still present. I disgraced myself (I think) by singing God Save The Queen when provided with a Union Jack, although the Russians found it very funny, and I had a fantastic chat about Russian history with a young guy from St. Petersburg. All in all, it was a superb evening.

Before leaving, we tried some shots of a fantastic cherry spirit with Ilya and the other guys, and exchanged contact details with everyone we had made friends with, including a great couple from New Zealand, travelling a similar route to ours. We then made our way to the train station, which was not very far from where we were staying, and bid farewell to St. Petersburg.

At last… Brussels, Cologne & Stockholm

OK… it’s been a busy week. I’m currently sat in a fantastic internet cafe called ‘MBar’ in Helsinki, updating and browsing and all sorts of exciting things.

We’re just waiting on a train to St. Petersburg, leaving in 2 hours. Exciting. I’ll keep you posted on that.

So, anyway, here’s the story so far…

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Waking at 4am, slightly hung-over, we depart for London St. Pancreas. I thought we were OK for time, but it turns out that we only just made it before the ‘arrive 30 minutes before departure’ clause (of which we had no prior knowledge) kicked in. We arrived by bus, two journeys at £2 a pop. Passports at the ready (for such are the necessities of these paranoid times) and tickets in hand we herded ourselves through the stainless steel barriers and x-ray machines beneath the grand spiderous structure of the station, into the departure lounge. No sooner through, and the journey towards unknown experience begins, filtering through yet more barriers onto the station platform. Bidding farewell to London, through whose streets we had sauntered the night before, exploring Canary Wharf (close to where our kind hosts lived), the embankments, the Eye and a bar near to the National Theatre, we boarded; and just gone 6am our Eurostar pulled itself from the platform and started the two hour leg to Brussels.

BRUSSELS, Belgium – Monday 9th November:

Our train arrived around 9am local time. Feeling hungry, and quite tired (I’d caught only 2 hours sleep the night before, and Dave even less so, since we had spent a fair while finalising what we were to take in our bags) we set out to explore the most politically contentious city in Europe, home to a working population of foreign nationals, not employed as cleaners or bus drivers, but filling posts as bureaucrats, diplomats, officials, Right Honourables and politicos. Before doing that, however, we stored our heavy bags in the station’s electronic lockers for 4€ (roughly around £4, since the Euro is near equal to the Pound, and so is now about as pricey as the UK, or more so, even). Very useful, very convenient. And in terms of price, Brussels is equivalent to the UK for most things.

We were taken to walking distance of the sights by the Brussels underground, a fast and quite clean network. Getting off fairly at random, we took a stroll and visited a huge arch in the Parc du Cinquantenaire which strongly resembles the Brandenburg gate, before doubling back on ourselves and walking past the ‘Palace of the Nation’ and through the Parc de Bruxelles Warandepark, ending up facing the Palais de Bruxelles. All quite pretty and ornate, but also somewhat bland, but then again Belgium, sadly, is bland. It exists as a neutered, neutral common ground, a meeting point between nations that for the most part traditionally were in conflict, and therefore must lose all character to be the blank political canvass of the European continent. Or at least that’s what I reckon, but maybe I didn’t give it enough time. If you’re a European politics geek, however, you’ll love it. I’m not. I like other things.

The maddeningly poor signage, the dullness of the sky, the sparse and unhelpful nature of the tourist maps and guides convince me of my belief that Brussels is, on the whole, a city akin to purgatory: aseptic, uninspiring, and awash with the faded pomposity of an ex-colonial power. Around its streets young career politicians and bureaucrats scuttle to and fro, and the heavy imposition of the grey slate clouds provide a fitting seal above the whole affair. The general impression was a feeling of limbo.

[Dave suggests it’s a gigantic meeting room! Haha.]

But in all fairness, I did have a fantastic sandwich there. Dave considers sandwiches one of his favourite types of food (their creation is both an art and a science, he says), and I’d have to agree. They’re just so versatile, and they’re stunningly tasty when they’re built with care, and some attention to flavour diversity, etc. Anyway, after walking some way we stopped at a small café, and for 6 euros we had a few medium-rare slivers of roast beef with mayo, salad leaves, Parmesan and tomato slices within a warmed square-roll of ciabatta, and a cup of Lipton’s Yellow Label Tea. Why you can’t get ‘proper’ tea abroad still baffles me, but it was acceptable all the same, and the sumptuousness of the sandwich, the cool succulence of the beef and its fitting filling accompaniment pushed that sort of complaint out of my mind. Mmmm… sandwiches.

So anyway, we returned to the station to claim our bags from the luggage lockers and to (thankfully) board the train to Cologne (or Köln in German).

COLOGNE, Germany – Still Monday…

I sort of get the impression that, in general, the Germans don’t like the English. Or maybe they just didn’t like us, our faces, or our clothes. Either way, unless I was being paranoid, I can’t say that the people of Cologne were especially friendly. It’s not that they were rude, just cold, perhaps. Or perhaps I’m mistaking forthright efficiency for curtness. Dunno. Anyway, we arrived in the late afternoon and stored away our bags in the station lockers. Then, we headed out towards the old town.

The old centre is very near to the station, which was extremely useful (how thoughtful of the Germans) considering we were only there for 5 hours. Obviously the first major sight is the Cathedral, which is frankly stunning and very gothic. The vertical columns and the huge vaulted roof gives the place the impression of a gigantic leering cliff face, bearing down on you. It’s imposing, and it makes you feel very small (which it was, I assume, what it was meant to do).

After leaving the Cathedral and having a quick look (there’s not much left to see) at the ancient 2000 year old Roman gate to the city, in the square facing the Cathedral, we popped into one of their locals for a pint and some food. The local pubs in Cologne are known as ‘brewpubs’ (or at least according to this fellow who seems to know a lot about them), and are typically under a brand (I think it’s a brand) called Kölsch, which seems to be the specific beer type brewed in Cologne. For more details on Kölsch and Cologne brewing I’d recommend a visit to the above web page.

Pubs in Cologne also seem to be split into varying categories of alcohol, so, for example, we saw a place that specifically sold wine, and another place that appeared to specialise in the Früh (fruit) beer, that has recently proven itself very popular in the UK market.

We dined in what seemed very probably to be a beer hall, where blue-jacketed waiters known as Köbes serve the beer. Cologne was heavily bombed in the war, and apparently there aren’t many of these places left. Rarity increases value, especially touristic value, so the chance to dine in one was decent. I had a Currywürst with fries (literally, a curried sausage) and Dave had a mashed spinach, fried potatoes with bacon and fried eggs dish that seemed to be a local delicacy, if not really very delicate, which he greatly enjoyed. My Currywürst was a tad dull… but the chips were nice. In many respects Dave’s meal looked better. But moving on…

When one thinks of beer halls, you think of tankards of ale or beer served by oompah band men in lederhosen and curvaceous Fräuleins with pigtails. If you come to Cologne expecting this, be prepared to be disappointed. Instead, there’s a handful of weird idiosyncrasies here concerning beer. Firstly, it seems that, in contrast to English pubs, beer is only ever served and sold in 0,2 litre (or 200ml) quantities. This was explained to us when we asked for half a litre of the local brew, with a slightly disapproving tone, by our stony-faced waitress. Why this is the case appears to be founded on reasons of tradition, as opposed to social engineering ambitions (e.g. stopping people getting wasted in parks), or reasons hinging on how much we’d had to drink (honest injun’).

A second idiosyncrasy seems to be that these glasses are handed out to you as and when it appears you’ve neared the end of your current drink, by waiters and waitresses carrying hand-held cylindrical baskets with 8 slots to carry them in. These glasses are filled from barrels of Kölsch winched up from the cellars. It’s a nice beer, and alongside this, in some places, they serve sippable Kölsch spirits (which I thought tasted a tad rough). Be warned though, things can get pricey if you fail to recognise that you are basically drinking half-pints, and you don’t stop the waiter (or waitress) nonchalantly passing you more!

We left and returned to the station: pissed. Steaming. I’d not been planning on getting drunk, but ‘what the fuck, why not?’ was the attitude of the hour. I think we saw the 0,2 litre glass restriction as a bit of a challenge, and so set out to prove to ourselves to the Germans. So, we sat in a bar watching the Berlin Wall falling, again and again, on a German news channel (it being, coincidentally, the 20th anniversary that very day of the event) sipping beer.

Then, on to the platform. Following a chat with a Finn on her way to Copenhagen, we madly panicked for a couple of minutes once the sleeper train pulled into the station. It was apparently segmented into separate trains travelling to Prague, Warsaw, Amsterdam, Moscow and Copenhagen respectively, and we had to find ours. Running to the end of the platform (of course, nothing is simple) we rushed into our cabin to find four tired, open faces inquiring at us. One welsh environmentalist guy, two Dutch women (a mother and daughter), and a Finnish woman. They proved good company, even though we were both hammered and now in possession of a bottle of Jim Beam whiskey. We didn’t crack it open (poor show), but collapsed onto our beds (three pull-out beds to each wall stacked one above the other). The only down side was that I had to shell out three euros for a bottle of water, as you could get no other fresh water on the train. The cheek. But you live and learn, anyway, and if I travel by sleeper train again I shan’t forget to bring bottled water with me! Anyway, it was a good nights sleep had, and 12 hours later we pulled into Copenhagen.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Tuesday 10th November:

Hmmm… can’t say much about the place as we only stayed there for an hour before catching the X2000 fast-train to Stockholm. What I can say is that a) the girls are nice, and b) the prices for food and stuff were of similar extortionate ilk to those found in any ‘good’ WH Smiths at your regular UK city train station.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden – Still Tuesday…

Tuesday evening we rolled into Stockholm following a comfortable journey across the vast, pine-coated Swedish landscape on our fantastic speedy train. Snow fell at one point, the first snow of the journey, the first I’ve seen in a fair while. It was five hours from Copenhagen to Stockholm, or thereabouts, and as a bonus (or rather, a necessity) we crossed a magnificent feat of engineering, a bridge built over the historic straight that leads to the Baltic Sea, connecting Denmark to Sweden.

We spent two nights in Stockholm, both at the excellent CityBackpacker hostel (booked through the efficient and helpful HostelBookers.com) on Vasagatan in the Norrmalm district (which appears to be the modern city centre). Stockholm is everything you would expect from a Nordic city: clean, efficient, and full of young, attractive women. Literally drop-dead stunningly gorgeous young women. But enough on my leching (seriously, you should see them…).

Anyway, CityBackpacker was great for a number of reasons. Firstly, everyone there seemed extremely friendly, especially the staff, who were all very willing to help with questions and concerns, or advice on decent night venues or attractions in town. Secondly, the cost of the place was very cheap for Sweden, 20 euros a night for a berth in a room with 12 other people. This might sound dodgy, an invasion of privacy perhaps, but in reality it’s like having a sleep-over with a load of your mate’s friends whom you don’t really know but merely have to introduce yourself to for a conversation to spark up… if you know what I mean. The nice ambient temperature, comfortable beds and the well maintained toilets, equipped kitchens, warm powerful showers, lounging areas (they even have a sauna!) and lively atmosphere make the hostel a really cosy place to stay.

Speaking of atmosphere… on our second night we had a really fun, funny time at the hostel taking part in their much trumpeted Swedish Meatball Experience. This was quality, and not just for the stupid amount of ball jokes that were thrown around the room. It was a genuinely fantastic crowd of people, a mix of Australians, Belgians, Americans, English, Finnish and our Swedish coach Lena, all just bantering, basically. It really beggars belief how far the ball-joke can be pushed (or should that be ‘touched upon’?), especially in a meatball experience, before it starts getting tired. Plus, the meal also offered a fantastic chance to try mixing Jim Bean with their festive soft drink Julmust (which tastes somewhat like root beer) AND I got final definitive proof that Helan går is a bona fide Swedish drinking song, which we sung around the table before our meal. All in all, a great evening.

FYI… What the Swedish meatball dish should include:

- Loganberry relish… basically loganberries mixed with a lot of sugar in a bowl
- Boiled potatoes
- Meatballs – (Made with Reindeer mince(!), mince beef, breadcrumbs and milk (mixed), fried onions, and savoury herbs)
- Sliced Gherkins
- Special Knorr-brand sauce (not sure what this was…)

Altogether a very tasty dish. Loganberry relish is a bit like cranberry sauce, so it tastes good with savoury food, although it sounds odd, and the meatballs were pretty good considering the amateur nature of the ‘chefs’.

I’d be hard pressed not to recommend Stockholm to a prospective traveller or day/weekend-tripper. We unfortunately lacked the cash to really take advantage of the place… and to be honest it is very bloody expensive! But, that said, in many ways you don’t have to spend much to enjoy yourself. We took a pair of the hostel’s hire bicycles out on the first day, for example, and biked around Gamla Stan, the ‘old town’ and one of the many islands that make up the Swedish capital, upon which it is built. Anyway, unfortunately lacking cash we had to return the bikes quickly because the hostel allow you to use the bikes free for the first two hours, before you have to pay. This was a shame, because biking Stockholm is an excellent way to get around, as the bike-path network is extremely well integrated into the road network, and the pedestrians and vehicles seem bike-friendly.

After biking, we spent the evening taking part in the above mentioned meatball experience. We’d had a fair amount to drink by the end of it, and we then set off to the Nordic Sea Hotel for the Absolut IceBar experience, which we had booked online just a few hours earlier for 170 SEK (around £15.50) per person. This was awesome, and well worth the expense. Wrapped in special coats, we stepped inside. The walls and bar were both made out of ice. The tables were ice. Even the glasses were made of ice. Very special. We both received a free Absolut Vodka cocktail served in an ice glass, and stood in rapt wonder trying to get our heads around the place. Truly worth a visit.

After the IceBar we were stuck for things to do, so we asked at the hotel for some inspiration as to bars and events that were worthy of a visit. We struck gold with this one. We were recommended to go to the Glenn Miller Café on Brunnsgatan. This was an incredible experience. Stepping in from the Swedish cold, we were immediately confronted with a full-on Swedish jazz band called, I later discovered, H3FK, who were fronted by an incredible saxophonist, Fredrik Ljungkvist, and made up of Salem al Fakir, Mats Karlsson, Filip Augustson, Fredrik Rundqvist and Ola Bothzén nearly all famous faces in Sweden, apparently. We were told we were lucky to see them playing by the locals, and they frankly blew me away. It was lively as hell, and the passion was on show, obvious for all to see. We drank some excellent (expensive) ale, and chatted and made friends with some friendly art-scene Swedes. I even managed to exercise my drunken philosophical pretensions and discuss French and Danish existentialism with them.

The prior night had ended on a high note, and so the next day we decided to chill out and head in to Gamla Stan again by foot. The architecture in Gamla Stan is stunning, speaking of the sea and suffused with Nordic and Germanic influence, grand and domineering. Little cobbled streets filled with (expensive) boutique stores, art shops, cafes and fantastic little pubs make it a really cool place to visit. You can’t bike through these streets, so to look around the historic old town you need to be on foot (it’s easier). Unfortunately we didn’t get to see inside the Royal Treasury (too expensive, 10 euros for entry… which I presume helps keep their coffers full), but we saw the outside of it, and the palace, and the parliament. We also managed to cough up for a beer and a dram of whiskey (very rare but reasonably priced, according to Dave) in a fantastic little pub at the end of the main street.

So, aside from the cost, which is, have no doubt, steep, Stockholm is a grand, inspiring, refreshing city. The cool air matches the clean-line living, Ikea-designed lifestyle exuded from the many glass-plated shopfronts of the swish, smooth furniture and clothes stores on its litter-free streets. It seems like a Nordic utopia, too good to be true.

… In some ways it is, perhaps. We ended up chatting to an art dealer on Gamla Stan about the Swedish monarchy, the British monarchy, politics, art, restrictions within society, and the relative contrasts between Sweden and the UK. He wasn’t full of superlatives about Sweden, rather he was of the opinion that, first of all, the existence of quite a decadent monarchy in Sweden is unfair, and doesn’t benefit their economy. He also felt that Swedish society is quite restrictive, and raved about the UK. Sweden does seem a tad restrictive, perhaps. Alcohol sales are restricted by high tax, and beers are expensive. Spirits can only be bought from government-run monopoly stores. And perhaps the people are quite reserved, keeping themselves to themselves. But, all together, you wonder whether it’s not so bad… is it worthwhile trying to eliminate drunk and disorderly behaviour, to benefit the wider aims of society? It’s a tough one. People love their freedom. And restrictive attitudes run the other way, as well. I’ve noticed much more how lax the Swedes’ attitudes are to security, compared to the British. People aren’t paranoid, aren’t scared, and so, for example, passport checks are few and far between (we’ve hardly had ours checked since we left the UK, apart from a surreal incident on our train to Cologne where a German plain clothes policeman picked specifically me and Dave out for a passport check, from a carriage of at least 70 people). This, I think goes beyond geopolitical reasons (i.e. Sweden’s lack of controversial history in the middle east)… the attitude is far less paranoid and jumpy. There just seems to be more common sense efficiency in their social policy design, from what I can gather.

So, we left on Thursday night for the ferry to Helsinki. Again, the friendliness and generosity of people took us aback… we got onto a bus, but couldn’t work out how to pay, and had no real idea where to get off for the SiljaLine ferry port. The bus driver waved us on without taking any money, and when we got to the stop he actually got out of his cab and walked to the back of the bus to tell us, very cordially, that this was our stop. Could you imagine a bus driver treating foreigners that way in England? Probably quite unlikely.

A fitting end to Stockholm.

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More soon…