The perils of the russian train system

Just a couple more things re Russian railways that I will bore you with & then we will move to more interesting things.

Russian rail tickets are really complex. You need a degree in Ticknology to understand them. They show literally everything regarding your trip & take quite a while to set up & print out at the office. Name, passport no, train no, all the price components, carriage, bed no, Towns from & to etc etc - its all there somewhere printed in Cryllic. THe other interesting thing is that all times printed on the tickets are for Moscow. And the station clocks are the same ie set to Moscow time. So you front up at 8.00am in Irkutsk & the clock shows 3.00am. You have to be very careful about time differences. Irkutsk was 4 hours ahead of Moscow but the next station (Krasnoyarsk) was only 3 hours ahead. A bit of a nightmare as we nearly made the mistake of applying the ticket time as if it was the local time.

We found the russian people to be very friendly once you sort of broke past their initial reserve. But we had a bad experience in Irkutsk which unfortunately made it hard for the first short while. Leah had her Sony video cam stolen out of her back pack whilst on a tram from the station to our hostel. We think that she was targeted by a gang almost from the moment we got off the train. There is no other way that it could have happened. The police were not interested at all ¨don´t waste our time!¨ so that did not help as well. A great start to our russiam segment.

I did not like Irkutsk too much. It seemed a bit like Uhlan Bataar - ie lots of old decrepit
buildings, empty factories & a general air of seediness. Galina our hostess in Irkutsk taught us both a little russian. She was a lot of fun. As I have already said Olkhon Island was great.

Krasnoyarsk our next stop was much the same as Irkutsk. A bigger city but again ugly apartment blocks all over & lots of empty run down factories. We walked around the town & it was all fairly ordianry. Not a lot was open & a lot of people that we passed seemed to have a bottle in their hands. Abakan, south of Kr, was a much smaller city & quite nice. We went there to try to move on to the Tuva Republic where all the throat singers lived. However we could not find any english speakers to point us in the right direction so had to give it away. It is really hard - the locals tried to help but we just couldn´t make ourselves understood.

We met our air traffic controller on the train to Abakan. She was really nice & it was amazing to meet a Russian who had been to NZ. She gave us a couple of nice Tupperware cups (yes Tupperware has penetrated the Russian heartland) as a gift for speaking to her. Well really it should have been us giving something to her. Others on the train used her to ask us questions, mainly about NZ. So it was hard to find out too much about them & they way they lived.

We travelled on to Tomsk after our abortive trip to Abakan. Pretty straightforward but I had a bed in the corridor section of the carriage. They are so narrow it is unbelievable. As I said roll over & you almost fall out. Still & all I got a good nights sleep after my standard bowl of noodles & fruit. Leah does much better food wise - tins of fish, bread, some veges & the like. You can´t take anything on the train that might perish. No fridges & the carriages do get very warm.

Tomsk was very nice. As soon as we got there we tried to book onward tickets to Nishvy Novgorod. The queues in the station were horrific & when we finally got to the front it was ¨no pluskart beds left. Kupe only for Rb 7800 each¨. And that we had to work out as no one spoke english. Disaster - we were not going to pay that sort of money. There did not seem to be any other options so we gave it away & booked into the Sputnik Hotel. Double room with share shower & toilet. Plus free breakfast. It was here that we met Andrei. A photographer who spoke good english & who helped Leah order her breakfast one morning. He photographed young army recruits who had just signed up & were taking their oath iof allegiance to Russia. Pround mums would then buy the photo from him,. He told us quite a bit of his life. Like he was training to be a dentist? in St Petersberg & was thrown into jail for 5 years by the KGB for daring to want to marry a sicilian woman. He comes out, sets up a privately run school canteen system in ther schools around Novosibirisk. It did so well that the authorities took it over & he got nothing. So he ends up doing this photography & the only way he can maintain access to all the army bases is to pay bribes to the commanding o
fficers.

We agreed to meet him on the night that he was leaving to go back to Novosibirisk. 7.00pm we said, in our room. Well come 9.30pm & no sign of Andrei so we gave it away & Leah had a shower. Guess who then rocks up 3/4 drunk with a bottle of vodka. Yes our mate Andrei. We had to help him finish up the vodka whilst he told us about all the generals whose palms he had greased. He gave me a russian military cap which was rather nice & a great momento & also invited us down to his dacha in the Altai mountains. Dates did not suit us so we had to decline. He then borrowed 200Rb from us (I think that was the purpose of his visit) so he could get a taxi to the train station. An interesting guy - he has a daughter & son. The latter is a really good mechanic & Andrei would love to get him to the West, to a company like Volvo or Mercedes etc to give him a chance in life.

So Andrei was an interesting addition to our Russian people experiences. As was Ksenia a lovely lass we met in St Petersberg. You may remember that we met an Andrei in Mongloia. Well he offered us accomodation in his flat in St Petersberg. We took him up on that & when there found our way to his place. Which wásn´t a full flat. Rather he owned a room in a three bedroom 5th floor place. Close to the CBD?? so it was great. That is the way things work there. Many places are owned by the room. His co owners were Marsha, a worker in a hair salon & Sasha an old guy who was around most of the time. And who seemed to have lots of very strange mates who came to drink vodka with him. And a huge great Rottweiler named Misha. They all share a very small kitchen & an even smaller bathroom area. There is an interesting story about Misha. One morning the old guy went out & left Misha in the corridor guarding the front door. I came out ready to take off for the day only to be confronted by this huge growling dog. It was also slavering which was the most off putting thing. It then started lumbering up the corridor towards me. Well I broke the worlds 10m record getting back intio our room. It was really frightening, i mean that it was HUGE & I thought that we were locked in for the day. Leah began an attempt to lure it into the kitchen, with me offering full support (moral of course) but the owner came home just at that moment. He had to spend some time quietening the dog down so I think that discretion was the better part of valour. I mean he WAS big.

Ksenia was Andrei´s girlfriend & really nice. She was able to point us in the right direction sofar as sights were concerned. And Sasha wasn´t too bad once we got to know him. Leah will end up as a contributor to a Hair Salon users magazine. She was interviewed on the differences beteween Russian v NZ/Ozzie women sofar as fashions are concerned. Plus a photo of both of us dressed in our backpacker finest - we certainly will not qualify for the best dressed award & hopefully they do not think that all Kiwis dress like the two of us.

So that is the people side of things. Next instalment will be someting of Moscow & St Ptersberg & our experiences (gastronomic) in Finland.