haonowshaokao

Another inexpensive plaskart train took me to St Petersburg, a little quicker than I’d have liked. I managed to get to sleep around 2am. We were woken at 4.30am, a good hour before the train arrived. Fortunately the hostel reception was open, so I checked in, found my bed, lay down for a little while and woke up again at 5pm. Fortunately there were more than four hours of daylight left, so I had time to wander down Nevsky Prospekt, possibly Russia’s most famous street. At first I only wanted to find an internet cafe, but it took a journey all the way down and back again (a long way) before I found one almost next-door to the hostel.
The next two days I explored the place a little more thoroughly. Saint Petersburg is much like Moscow in terms of prices (very expensive), fashion (high boots and short skirts for women, ‘sports casual’ for men) and language, but architecturally it’s more classically European than any city I can think of in Europe. It’s only the cyrillic characters and the slightly overblown unspoiled-ness of everything that gives it away. It’s all pretty impressive, particularly the absolutely immense Hermitage museum and art gallery, which I spent most of a day wandering around. All the same, I did feel a little bored there, though mainly because the hostel was of the very upmarket and dull variety, and I really didn’t have the budget to go out anywhere at night.
On the last day I went to see the ‘Peter and Paul Fortress’, and timed it so I would be able to see the firing of the mid-day cannon, which felt like an earthquake, even from 20ft away. Walking back into the centre the wind picked up severely and at one point I found myself sprinting down the road after my hat, which I managed to jump on an instant before it would’ve blown under the wheels of a truck. That’s probably going to be the thing I remember most about the city.

This cathedral seems to suddenly come out at you from nowhere. During the soviet era it was apparently a “museum of atheism”.

One of the many, many canals, and at the end the only Russian-style building I saw there.

This…

…leads to this

Very high pedestrian density on Nevsky Prospekt.

This picture was taken after 9pm, in April.

Cool-looking mosque.

Inside the Peter & Paul Fortress

View across the river from the above.

View from the other side of the river.

I took a third class ‘plaskart’ to Moscow, which was about a third of the price of a second class ‘kupe’ ticket and a lot more interesting. Within 20 minutes of boarding I’d bumped into the Australians I’d met in Irkutsk and a Scottish girl who had shared a yurt in Mongolia with the Japanese people I’d been with at Lake Baikal. As there’s a single route across Siberia this sort of thing is bound to happen, and I wasn’t particularly surprised when I found those same Japanese people (and others too) again when I checked into the hostel, nor when I bumped into the Australians and the Scottish girl again.
My expectations of Moscow itself were a little off the mark, though. The police failed to stop me and both the hostel and the food were not quite as expensive as I’d been expecting, though neither were by any means cheap. I was still pretty sick, so unable to have much fun, but still managed to see Red Square, The Kremlin, The Cathedral, The Arbat, etc, etc. I even went to see Lenin. he’s looking well.
And speaking of dead Russian leaders, it was while I was there that Yeltsin died. Nobody seemed very bothered – he didn’t seem to be very popular, for understandable reasons, though not unpopular enough for anyone to be celebrating. I should really have stuck around for the funeral, but inertia seemed to be dragging me to St Petersburg.

The photo everyone takes when they come to Moscow.

Red Square was always empty because it was blocked off. Nobody seemed to know why. I could have asked the police I suppose.

This is GUM – where the bread queues used to be. Now strictly no riff-raff.

A monkey.

A museum.

A big cannon.

Inside the Kremlin, one of the three cathedrals.

The cathedral where I would have seen Yeltsin’s funeral if I’d been there.

Street artist in the Arbat. Why this old lady decided to draw a picture of Syd Barrett I really can’t say.

Very cool building, don’t know what it is.

The metro system was fairly impressive, but hard to take good photos of.

Ominous clouds hanging over Gorky Park (which turned out to be mainly a closed funfair).

I missed my train out of Irkutsk by reading the date as the time. It was an easy mistake to make, but it cost me dear. The next train was at 2am. My bed was in the coupe section, but in the secret compartment at the end they save for emergencies. In a sense I was lucky to have what amounted to a private room, though I really prefer to share, and a three night journey on my own in a glorified cupboard wasn’t particularly fun. I did manage to read most of Anna Karenina though, a good 500 pages or so.
The train arrived in Ekaterinburg at 4am, so there was nothing to do for a few hours but hang around in the waiting room drinking lemon tea. By the time my money was changed and my bags were locked up it was clear that I was getting sick. After a brief look around I booked into a cheap, dingy hotel and lay on the bed watching Russian TV until checkout time the next day. Feeling a bit better I took the time to see the sights, then left.
Ekaterinburg is a slightly ridiculous place, a city focused on history in an unusually unproductive way. It was here 90 years ago that the last Tsar and his family were executed. Within a year the Bolsheviks went from denying the killings to saying they were the work of ‘counter-revolutionaries’ (who they’d had executed) and finally to not only claiming responsibility but re-naming the city Sverdlovsk after the leader who had ordered the executions. With the fall of communism the city was re-named Ekaterinburg again, but it seems to have been done a little half-heartedly. The train station is still “Sverdlovsk Station” and the hotel I stayed in was the “Sverdlovsk Hotel”. The statue of Yakov Sverdlov still stands in the centre of the town.
So, a town proud of killing the Tsar? Not exactly. Whilst the cathedral has been abandoned since the revolution the orthodox church have built the huge, shiny “Church On The Blood” next-door, on the spot the family died. In addition to this they have decided to canonise the whole family, an action that to me seems beyond bizarre. Nicholas II was a bad ruler – he was a rabid anti-semite, dissolved parliament whenever they disagreed with him and led the county into the first world war, where his terrible leadership led to the deaths of more than three million Russians. In what way he qualifies to be a saint I can’t imagine.
Altogether there wasn’t much to see in Ekaterinburg. It was probably worth stopping off at, but I don’t think I’d go there again.

Church On The Blood. Very shiny.

Cathedral. Not so shiny.

Something else. Also not shiny.

On the railway. Not particularly shiny.

Shiny.

On my train into Russia I shared a cabin with a Chinese girl who refused to speak to me until she found out I wasn’t American. “I hate America,” she said, “I hate war. I love China. I love Russia. I hate America.” She spoke at full volume to make sure the East-coast American slackers in the next compartment heard her. When I’d explained that I was English and also against war we came to a truce,and I spent the next five hours helping her to take photos of her pouting face.
After a protracted border crossing and a long sleep I arrived in Irkutsk,my first stop in Russia. A mile or so walk from the train station I found a bank where I could exchange some money, and a mile on from there I found a ludicrously expensive internet cafe where I was able to locate a hostel – which,it turned out, I’d walked past an hour earlier.
Irkutsk was a nice place, full of old wooden houses, and the hostel was cosy, friendly and full of interesting people, but the only real reason for my visit was to take the bus trip down to Lake Baikal, so the following afternoon I did just that. I was joined by a Japanese mother-and-daughter and a couple of Englishers who were staying at the hostel.
Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, containing 20% of the world’s freshwater. In the summer you can go out in a boat and in the winter you can walk all the way over it. In April you can do neither, but though it had started to thaw, the view was still awe-inspiring.
There are no hostels in the lakeside village of Listvyanka, so instead we all spent the night in a guesthouse that smelled of old boiled mutton, run by an ancient babushka with gold teeth. After we’d seen the rooms she started talking to us and, unexpectedly, crying. With the help of a phrasebook we managed to translate the words “grandson”, “25 years”, “Irkutsk”, “English school”, “vodka”, “car” and “death”. Then she suddenly cheered up again and blessed us on the way out.
The next day, with the sights seen and the local fish digesting, we headed back to Irkutsk, and a day after that I set out on the longest train journey of this trip.

More photos of Lake Baikal