Since the last blog, we have traveled to Irkutsk, via Moscow and a number of other places. Moscow and St. Petersburg were both great cities in their own ways but I’ll let Tom tell you about them (he says he really is going to write). Lots of lovely culture – I wouldn’t like to say it out loud but after a short while the museums bored me and I think we went to about 15.
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There was a bit of an issue with the train from St. Petersburg to Moscow, time got away from us and we arrived at the station with just 2 minutes left before departure, we were ushered on the train by the conductor and then kicked off again when she showed us how we were there a day early. Fortunately it was possible to pay an on-the-spot fare directly to her to be allowed on the train. On that subject, one place where we anticipated a bribe was on the train journey to Irkutsk because we knew our bags were too big. But on that occassion we only had to pay a genuine fine of 4 pounds between us when if the conductor had been a bit more experienced she would have spotted the oppertunity to rinse us (about 7 pounds). The journey was good fun although quite quiet, other than the ch-ch ch-ch ch-ch ch-ch choo choo.
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I think I mentioned that Noah has joined us for a while, he’s still with us. Yesterday I went with him to lake Baikal while Tom stayed in Irkutsk. Lake Baikal is the biggest freshwater lake in the world. I have to say ‘lake Baikal’ and not just ‘Baikal’ because Baikal is the name of the dog that lives there and I don’t want to confuse anybody, Baikal is medium sized for a dog. When we got there we met a group of Russians who were going to camp for a few days and they invited Noah and me to join them for the night. They cooked our dinner, which we ate at 3pm, by which time we had finished the first bottle of vodka. We then moved on to our donation to the party of Absolute vodka, which wasn’t Russian but they graciously drank it with us anyway before going back to the real thing. We decided not to tent because we had notions of a starry night, as it was we were too drunk to pay attention and anyway it rained all night on us. We just about managed to get to the station on time this morning having woken up at 4 (quite wet) and hiked for about a couple of hours to get there. It didn’t go all the way back to Irkutsk, but Noah and I didn’t know that and so after sitting there for 15 minutes at the last stop we were kicked off by a policeman. I then took a photo of the trains and the same policeman came over and demanded to see our passports before frog-marching us to the station. Apparently taking photos of the tracks is illegal. We were there for over an hour, not really being interrogated, just having a chat. They did probe to see if we had any money with questions like ‘what work do you do?’ and ‘you have lots of money?’, our answers were ‘we have no jobs’ and ‘no’. So we were allowed to go, no charge, no bribes. Result. I was told I had to delete the photo and all others of trains but I didn’t because I am naughty.
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This evening we are leaving Russia, I’ll miss all this attention from the authorities, I wonder what Mongolia will be like?