So I'm pretty sure everyone who will read this will know that the entire Manchester Bioinformatics BSc class of '09 (me and Pete) are going on a long glorified holiday. Just in case anyone cares what we are up to I will try and write a diary (bear in mind I am a scientist and so not blessed with the ability to write in an entertaining fashion). Pete has his photo blog (peterbenphotography.blogspot.com) so this will probably be more wordy and less arty.
We caught a train at just after 1 in the morning, heading for Krasnoyarsk another place no one has ever heard of and yet has a population of about 1 million! When it got light we found ourselves in completely baron and dead looking countryside (where the background photo was taken). We made another Russian friend on this train and though she spoke no more English than the murderer attempting to talk to her was much more comfortable! Pete's great luck struck again as we made Russian pot noodles for lunch. We got them back to the compartment and before he could take a bite he tipped the entire pot across the table, his bed and his (white!) jogging bottoms.
There are no hostels in Krasnoyarsk so we stayed with a Russian family in their flat. Their place was right on the edge of the city in a crappy apartment block surround by crappy apartment blocks. After a scary ride in the smallest lift I have ever been in to the top floor we discovered that the inside was actually nothing like the outside and had been recently renovated. We went for a look around the city and met our first English person since Moscow; Charlotte, a girl 6 weeks into her year abroad for a language degree. We arranged to try and meet the next day for a night out at a DJ competition, a bit difficult when we have no phone and access to the internet only in internet café's.
On the second day we went to the Stolby nature reserve, located around some massive granite rock formations. On the bus journey there a local woman (rocking Nelly-style grills) asked us if we were going to the nature reserve and helpfully told us when to get off. As we were trying to work out where we had to walk (the bus stops 7km from the rock formations) she grabbed two Russian students and told them to help us! So we had a couple of tour guides for the day! At the top of one of the rocks it snowed really intensely and we both ended up with frozen hair for the rest of the day. The weather did clear eventually and we found some amazing views after climbing to the top of some scarily icy rocks. We went around quite a lot of the different formations and must have walked over 25km by the time we got back to the bus stop. We even had a snowball fight with some Russia school children and got the in trouble with their teacher!
When we got back in the evening we had a quick change and went straight back out to meet the English girls. The night involved plenty of vodka and actually some very good DJ'ing. However the night took an unpleasant turn when we went to leave as Pete discovered he could not find his passport! He managed to get back in the club and searched for a good half hour to no avail. When he finally returned we were pretty stressed as this would probably spell the end of the trip! I put my hands in my pockets and found something there that I didn't expect... the passport had been in my pocket all along! Neither of us have any idea when, why or how I ended up with Pete's passport but we were glad to have found it!
Overnight it snowed quite heavily and in the morning our hungover bus ride to the train station was taking forever and we quickly realised we weren't going to make it. We jumped out at the next stop and managed to get a taxi that got us there with 5 minutes to spare! So we have nearly missed 2 out of 3 trains so far, both whilst hungover... I'm starting to see a pattern.
Thanks to the race for the train we had not bought food or withdrawn cash for the journey. Luckily it worked out we had just enough money for the cheapest item on the menu, Goulash all round! We sat with a Lebanese man working in Russia on his way to a film festival and learnt how to drink vodka the Russian way. After a while we met our first Russian “character”, a man who it transpired had recently been released from jail after 15 years and was returning home. He seemed nice enough and we had a good laugh drinking vodka until the early hours (afforded thanks to a dash to a cash point at a station). The nights sleep was hindered due to the large Russian in our carriage (who turned out to be the premier tenor opera singer of the Perm opera) who snored constantly through the night.
We woke late and met our previous nights friends in the carriage and went for a drink in the restaurant car. At this point we discovered the reason for our Russian friends imprisonment... murder. Of course after dropping this bombshell our translator arrived at his stop and left us! An awkward few hours were spent trying to (read: failing to) converse with the murderer. Eventually we realised he was hammered, not immediately obvious when he is speaking Russian, and decided we should part company with him. This was not so easy when he was constantly trying to close the cabin door and was making gun gestures at our faces. In the end Pete lured him out of the cabin with the promise of a smoke and we managed to lock the door with him outside. Cue the remaining 4 and a half hours of the train journey spent cautiously looking at the door at every sound! We left the train at Yekaterinberg but whilst packing up realised that Pete had either lost or had his mp3 player stolen at some point during the trip.
We finally managed to find the hostel hidden on the 3rd floor of a small apartment block with no sign. The inside looked a lot like the owners grandparents had died and she had just stuck 6 beds in it and called it a hostel! One of the guests we were sharing with turned out to be a blind Polish guy which was quite intriguing. He was a very nice guy but had a habit of wandering round in the night and then just standing in the middle of the room for extended periods... quite disconcerting.There wasn't too much to do in the city, we had a little walk around to see the sights, including a small dam and a large Beatles memorial! On the second day we visited a zoo (apparently the most successful zoo per meter squared in the world). We weren't expecting much but they had literally anything that you could have thought of; Elephant, Hippo, Lions, White Tigers, Bears, Monkeys and all kinds of rare big cats. As we packed to leave Yekaterinburg it turned out Pete had lost yet another possession; his woolly hat.
The first leg of the trip should have been easy; a quick flight to Moscow with no Russian needed. However 10 minutes out of Pete's house and just after we have boarded the tube I realise we have left the laptop charger plugged in back in his room. Luckily thanks to Pete's dads great knowledge of London he managed to run to a PC world at a tube stop and pick us up a universal charger. The rest of the trip went without any problems apart from having to stand on a freezing cold bus at Riga for half an hour just so we could be driven across a road!
We spent the morning of our first day in Moscow attempting to visit the Kremlin only to find that it is closed on Thursdays! We settle for Red square and Lenin’s mausoleum. A bit of confusion about where to leave our cameras so that we can get in leads us to what we think is the Moscow state museum. We ditch our bags in the cloakroom (much to the confusion of the staff) and head back out to see the dead communist. A very surreal experience you go down into a darkened room and he is just lying there lit up in a glass box sporting quite a fashionably goatee (apparently they dust him every 3 days). After this we wander around Red square and then back to the museum. We pay for our tickets and go inside only to realise we have been had! Rather than the state museum we have paid for a tiny museum currently housing an exhibit on Napoleon (of course all of the signs are in Russian), so we spend a quick 5 minutes walking round and leave. In the evening we get chatting to 2 Italians and they tell us they are heading out to a club, on the walk it turns out it costs about £12 to get in and they are taking £100 each for the night! We decide to head off by ourselves to a club we had heard about called Propaganda. When we finally found it (after Pete stopped to take a piss in sight of the former KGB building) the inside looked more like a cafe/bar than a club. After a few beers however the tables were cleared and a DJ appeared and began to play very Sankeys-esk music.
We woke on our last day in Moscow about 20 minutes before check out thanks to the large hangover earned the night before. Managed to get up and out in time. Spent the day trying to get a headphone splitter from a massive electronics market somewhere on the outskirts of Moscow, we eventually succeeded and were suitably ripped off. On the way back we decided to visit Red square again because the sun was shining. A bit of a mistake, we ended up getting the wrong metro on the way home and ended up an empty station. When we finally realised where they had hidden the line that went in the opposite direction we were pressed for time to catch our first train. We made it to the station with only 5 minutes to spare and eventually found our train (it wasn't listed on the main time board) hidden at the end of the station on it's own separate platform.
