From Russia with Love — Again!

The State Museum at the entrance to Red Square

Well, I guess this is going to be my last blog of the trip and so I will continue from where Andy P left off aboard the Transiberian Railway as the train pulled out of Ulan Ude and headed west across the vastness that we now know Russia to be.

The train journey itself was quite uneventful but I for one did find it a wee bit claustrophobic as we spent a lot of time in our four bunk ‘apartment’, which we shared intermittently with one or two other passengers. There was a buffet car next to our carriage and we became adept at ‘nursing’ a beer or a coffee for prolonged periods of time as we were only meant to sit in there if we were purchasing/consuming, the food/drinks available. Customers were attended to by a pair of formidable looking women, one who looked like the enemy agent in a James Bond film that had knives hidden in the toes of her shoes, (sounds like a Paul Simon song – ha ha); and the other who looked like she had stepped straight from the pages of the Brothers Grimm’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’. And I’m not talking Gretel here: more like the character who eventually gets her just deserts and ends up in the oven. Getting them to smile was not an easy gig and I think it only happened on one occasion for each of them which may just have been the result of a lapse of concentration on their part, or possibly (as is often attributed to babies), a touch of wind.

Bearing in mind one of my previous blogs from Turkey, I don’t want to dwell too much on the toileting facilities on board lest I be accused of having an obsession. Suffice to say that by the end of the trip, the comfort rooms (is there ever a greater misnomer than comfort rooms?) smelt not dissimilar to those intensive poultry farms you pass on your way into Edinburgh along the A70 from Carnwath. So, quite a challenge.

Needless to say we survived and were then ripped off by the taxi driver who took us from the station to our hostel. Nice to know that some stereotypes really are based on a sound, experiential footing.

Andy P decided to ‘invest’ some of his pension pot

Andy P had booked a hotel/hostel just 500 metres from Red Square which couldn’t have been more handy. From there we were able to walk to some of the iconic landmarks such as St Basil’s cathedral, Red Square, and the Kremlin. Which was just as well since as soon as he heard we were in town, Vlad (he insisted we called him Vlad), immediately invited us over for a bite to eat, a heavy vodka session, and some bare-chested wrestling, albeit in a very ‘manly’ way as his attitude to people of a different sexual orientation is well known. Which did set me wondering as to whether he is perhaps over compensating for something? Fortunately we didn’t have far to stagger in the rather grimy and intoxicated state we later found ourselves in and I have to say that we found Vladamir, sorry, Vlad, hugely entertaining and not the overbearing egomaniac that some people make him out to be. Having said that I now wish that I’d put up a tad more resistance to having the ‘I love Vlad’ tattoo plastered across my shoulder blades but he did turn out to be rather insistent in the end and had a surprisingly strong grip for a man of his height.

Joking apart, most Russians we’ve spoken to genuinely appear to ‘love’ him and even those that don’t seem to think that he’s a good leader for the country. He certainly commands the sort of voter approval that any western politician couldn’t even dream of.

St Basil’s Cathedral Red Square

Church on Red Square

Moscow

The tomb of the unknown soldier. Moscow

Three other Mongol Rally teams we’d met previously and who were travelling home in convoy had contacted us about somewhere to stay and they pitched up late on our first night. They had done the Pamir Highway (which we didn’t), but had run out of time or money and had to turn for home without reaching the finish. Which did make us feel kind of good, hopefully not in a gloating way, that we had managed to make it to the end. Both Andy P and I agreed that we would have felt we’d let down everyone who’s supported us if we’d not got to the finish.

Second day in Moscow we braved the metro to visit a tourist market to look at what was on offer. I have never seen so many bloody Russian dolls in all my life! God only knows who buys them all, though I think I should warn you Jane that you may need to clear out one or two of your display cabinets in preparation for when the pallet that Andy P has shipped home arrives in Cornwall sometime around mid-October. I can vouch for the fact that he did choose the less garish colour schemes and also erred towards the more finely crafted examples. But I think opting for the quantity he finally settled on showed a slight lack of judgment and perspective on his part. The up side is that the paint is supposedly non-toxic and they are guaranteed to burn on the wood stove. So not a total right off.

I think you’re going to like it when this little lot arrive Jane

Andy P models for his new job as a Concierge

The things for sale that I was most fascinated in were the animal skins and fur products. I have to admit to wolves being my favourite wild animal and it did make me sad to see numerous examples of beautiful wolf pelts hung up and lifeless. I wanted to ask how much they were just to have an idea of how much a wild wolf’s life was worth in Russia but I didn’t for fear of appearing to give approval by engagement. There was also a huge range of various farmed fox pelts, either recognisable as foxes or made into hats and stoles, plus mink, sable, rabbit, racoon, and a few other things that were unidentifiable. Some of the hats were beautiful but I explained to the stall holders that wearing real fur is frowned on in Britain and they resignedly, but good-naturedly, shrugged their shoulders and moved onto the next customer. But it is the wild wolf skins that I felt most sad and helpless about.

Assorted animal furs, wolf on the left

What a lot of hats

On then to St Petersburg, on a high speed train that travels at something like 150 miles an hour. It was a very different experience to the Transiberian railway with attendants more akin to those you might find on a luxury airline. Not every passengers’ experience was as joyous as ours however as across the aisle, the guy on the inside suddenly took it upon himself to ‘throw’ his whole cup of coffee over the lap of the businessman sitting next to him. I presume this was an accident and I helpfully handed over some of my napkins on the pretext of assisting whereas really it was to confirm that the businessman’s neatly pressed jeans really were as soaked through as I had initially thought. They were.  It’s very hard to stop laughing when you start, even if it is laughing at someone else’s misfortune, and so Andy and I reinstated a little word game we’d used previously to distract ourselves which involved a play on the names of different fish. So along the lines of ‘the man who spilt his coffee should have been ‘herring’ on the side of greater caution!’ Or, ‘he should ask for another coffee or do you think maybe that was the ‘sole’ one on offer?’  You get the picture and it helped us over the worst of it because it could so easily have turned into an embarrassing situation for ourselves. At the end of the day the guy with the coffee shouldn’t have let it ‘perch’ on the edge of his table like he did. Mind you he did seem a ‘dab’ hand in what he was doing. Okay, I’ll stop now.

St Petersburg was somewhere I have always wanted to visit since reading the Ken Follett book, ‘The man from St Petersburg’. It did not disappoint. The architecture is breath taking and round every corner there is something else to delight you. We even went to a museum (I’m not really one for museums), the Hermitage Museum, which is housed inside the Tsar’s Winter Palace. And let me tell you here and now, this is what I call a palace. I have never seen such ostentatious opulence (except perhaps at Asda’s Christmas sale), with room after room of beautifully ornate interiors both in structure and decoration. Ballroom after ballroom, with intricate inlaid wood floors and glistening chandeliers, mirrors and gilded cornices. No wonder the bloody peasants in Russia decided to have a revolution; I’m only surprised they didn’t do it sooner.

The Tsar’s Winter Palace, now the Hermitage Museum

A bit like my hallway at home

A bit special

I don’t want to try and describe the other things we saw using ever increasing superlatives because it will only sound increasingly dull and exaggerated. Suffice to say that The Church of our Saviour on the spilled blood, reportedly modelled on St Basil’s in Moscow, has a stone mosaic decorated interior from top to bottom that is surreal. St Petersburg is well worth a visit.

Church of Our Saviour on the spilled blood

Interior stone mosaic decorations

Winged ‘Lions?’ guarding a bridge

To end I will briefly give you a flavour of the taxi journey to the train station this morning on our way to Tallin, Estonia. Without going into all the details, I usurped Andy P’s idea of getting the metro when, after waiting for about ten minutes at 5.15 in the morning for the metro station to open, I spotted a vacant taxi whose driver  agreed to take us to where we wanted to go (or at least somewhere the driver thought we wanted to go), for 500 Roubles, about £6. Now I have alluded before to the fact that taxi drivers so far encountered on our trip seem to have no sodding idea of where anything is but I reasoned that the main railway station in St Petersburg was a pretty safe bet. However, one of the problems is that Russian is written in the Cyrillic (no idea if that’s how you spell it) alphabet rather than the one we use in English and the two (plus the pronunciation) are completely different. Suffice to say that I wasn’t totally convinced that the driver knew where we wanted to go even though he sort of indicated that he did, (we have been lulled into this false sense of security on several other occasions and so I was naturally a little twitchy about it). Before setting off we had both repeated the name of the station to the driver in a louder and louder voice but after about fifteen minutes it became clear that he was driving around randomly in what I can only assume was the hope that we would suddenly say ‘Here we are,’ and give him his cash. Time by now was ticking on and I was starting to make alternative plans for how we would get to Tallin once we had missed our train.

Andy P was also getting a little agitated at this point and was frantically trying to find the station on his Maps.me App and show it to the driver. By now the driver was also getting somewhat het up as it slowly dawned on him that ‘lady luck’ was not going to smile on him that day. Indeed I think he was very close to stopping and tipping us out because he kept saying ‘give me money’ at the same time as rubbing his index finger and thumb together. All looked as though it was just about to boil over when suddenly, as though by divine intervention, the scales fell from the driver’s eyes and he said ‘Moscowvisky?’ and when we responded with enthusiastic relief he went off on a rant that I can only assume meant ‘well why didn’t you bloody say so in the first place.’ To which we replied, reasonably I thought, that we had been saying this, (perhaps with a slightly different accent or emphasis on a different syllable), for the last half hour. Of which, of course, he understood not a word. He now set off at fairly high speed in a different direction, muttering and cursing and indicating with both hands (God knows what he was using to steer), that he had been driving round in circles which I of course could have told him as I was now very familiar with a particular set of traffic lights that always seemed to be red no matter from which direction we approached.

Ten minutes later we arrived at the station but our driver was now demanding a minimum of 1000 roubles at the same time as doing the round and round motion with his hands. I decided to get out to negotiate from a position of increased height but he had locked the back doors and was clearly not going to open them until he had his money. His shouting got louder and I gave him an extra hundred but this was clearly not going to be sufficient to assuage him. Andy P then joined in the shouting and every few seconds I gave the driver an extra hundred and by the time I reached eight or perhaps nine hundred roubles some sort of armistice seemed to have been agreed upon. The doors were unlocked and he took out our bags from the boot clearly still feeling a bit disgruntled. In my experience there are two ways of dealing with a situation like this. You can get angry and aggressive and as a consequence have a decidedly bad start to your day. Or, you can laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation and pass it off as part of life’s rich tapestry.  Now I don’t like leaving any situation on bad terms and so once the driver had strewn all our bags across the road I gave him a big smile and offered him my hand. He responded in kind and then I think all of us saw the funny side and we had ‘a bit of a laugh’ about it. As I said to Andy P the whole experience makes a story for our blog, and I’ve no doubt our driver has had similar mileage out of the events over a bottle of vodka with his mates; telling them about those stupid bloody Americans (I really hope he thought we were Americans), who looked like Pinocchio and Father Christmas.  If only all the problems and disagreements in the world were so easily resolved.

So, I bid you farewell and will leave Andy P to have the last word. It’s been a great journey and I’d like to thank all of you who have read our blogs and said kind things about them. Most of all I’d like to thank you all for your generosity in donating to our causes on Justgiving and to let you know that put together with our other fundraising we are sitting at around £10,500 so getting pretty close to our £12,000 target. I’m confident that we can get there with one last effort.

That’s it for now and, God willing, I’ll see some of you very soon.

Cheers, Andy Coe