3 December 2014

Week 114 - Olkhon Island, Yekaterinburg, Vladimir, Moscow (Russia)

Nikitas had managed to arrange for the minibus to collect us at 7am instead of 9:30am, to give us more time to make sure we crossed to the mainland and made our train. That meant that everyone else who was leaving that day (which was everyone but one person, as no one wanted to get stuck on the island if bad weather was rolling in), had to get up early too. We were given a packed lunch and bundled into the van, hoping that the ferry would run. The wind had been fierce in the night and we’d heard it ripping at the roof panels in our cabin, but it seemed to have died down. We still weren’t sure whether it would be enough, the previous day we hadn’t thought the weather was bad at all, nothing compared to some of the crossings we’ve done in other countries and this was a solid car ferry, not a creaky little Indonesian wooden boat.

We drove passed areas of the lake where the ice had advanced a few metres compared to what we’d seen the previous day and suddenly it seemed perfectly reasonable that the whole lake would be completely frozen over in a month. When we got to the ferry there was a queue to board, our driver drove straight to the front and with in no time we were on board and setting out. We clambered out of the van to stand on deck for the crossing. It was absolutely magical. The mist was swirling on the surface of the water and the sun was just starting to rise turning the sky pastel shades of pinks, greys, purples and blues. It was possibly the coldest weather we’ve faced too. Without the sun up to warm us, everything hurt from the cold, fingers, toes, cheeks, even eye balls, it was easily -35C. The Siberian winter was quickly advancing.
Worth getting up early for, sunrise over Lake Baikal from the ferry with swirling mists.
Sunrise over Lake Baikal from the ferry from Olkhon Island.
Back in the van, we huddled together for warmth. Then the radiator kicked in, tucked under the seat in front of me. Before long I was baking. There’s something weird in the way Russian’s feel the need to overheat their indoor spaces when the cold outside is so brutal. You end up going from -30C to +30C every time you step through a door, it’s just so uncomfortably hot.

We made it in to Irkutsk with 3 hours to spare before our train was due to leave. With Melanie, a french girl who’d been staying at Nikitas and had a later train, we jumped on a tram to the train station and dropped our backpacks in the cloakroom. We didn’t really have time to see anything of the city and instead perched in a cafeteria for a quick lunch. Saying goodbye to Melanie, we then had plenty of time to stock up on instant noodles for our 48 hour journey before weaving through the groups of soldiers leaving for their camps and finding empty seats at the station. 

We boarded our train only to find we’d be sharing our cabin with a Russian girl and what we presumed was her father. The cabin was ridiculously hot (the thermometer outside read 28C) and the guy had extremely smelly feet. It wasn’t as bad as our last cabin on the trip to Irkutsk but wasn’t far off. We read for a couple of hours, ate our noodles and tried to get some sleep. Although I slept ok, Rhys ended up taking sleeping tablets in the middle of the night that knocked him out until 11am the next day.
Freezing on a platform, somewhere on the TransMongolian.
The two people in our cabin left us at Krasnoyarsk and a new man climbed aboard. He didn’t smell or snore and spent much of the day out of the carriage so we had a bit of space, the perfect room mate. The heat was oppressive though, there were Australians in the cabin next to ours and they were struggling too, everyone was walking about in shorts and with their shirts off. I tried to ask for the radiators to be switched off but got shouted at and the two lady attendants were quite intimidating and didn’t want to deal with any of us since we didn’t speak a word of Russian. We finally twigged we could insulate the radiator in our room by wrapping our blankets around it, bringing the temperature down a degree or two, but with the thermometre showing 29C, it was still way too steamy for comfort.
Just after we changed room mates, we passed the halfway point from Beijing to Moscow via Mongolia. Although the route took us through a region that had had more snow than in the east, it was a less harsh environment with forests and rivers and the odd village and engine repair depot. At some spots on the route, the snow must have been over a foot deep and it looked quite festive with the branches of the neverending pine trees sagging under the weight.

Rhys jumped off the train at one of the stops to run into a canteen to pick up some lunch, potato filled doughnuts and chicken schnitzels and we stood outside watching the attendants using axes to sheer off the ice that had attached itself to the undercarriage of the train. 

During our second night, the train passed in to the Baraba Steppe, 600km of track passing through bogs and swampland. At this point we were in spitting distance of the Kazakhstan border. The train continued through Omsk, Siberia’s second largest city and on to Tyumen, Siberia’s oldest town, founded in 1586 and now important for the nearby discoveries of oil and gas. In Tyumen, we had one last chance to stretch our legs and cool off in the snow, away from the stifling heat of our carriage.
Cooling off at a station on the TransMongolian.
300km before we reached Yekaterinburg, our destination, we left Siberia and entered the Urals. The train skirted through Talitsa, famous for selling watered down industrial strength alcohol as vodka, then finally we arrived in Yekaterinburg, the largest city in the Urals, 49 hours after leaving Irkutsk.

Yekaterinburg, originally founded to exploit the Ural regions mineral deposits, hit the headlines in the 20th century as the site of the murder of the Romanov family, the location of the U2 affair, and for giving the country Boris Yeltsin. The Romanov family was moved to Yekaterinburg and imprisoned there in a house in April 1918. On 16 July, the Bolshevik government decided the continued existence of the Tsar was too great a threat to them and ordered their execution. Nicholas, Alexandra and their 5 children were marched to the houses’s cellar and murdered, their bodies dumped in a mine shaft on the outskirts of town. The U2 affair followed in 1960, when an American spy plane was shot down and denied by the US despite all the evidence to the contrary.

We jumped off the train, glad to be in the fresh air, and headed towards our hostel. After taking a wrong turn, we found the right block of flats where I had to ask a kind man with his kid to help us find the right building. The hostel was small but modern and would do for an overnight stop.

By the time we were settled in, it was about 3pm and we didn’t have many hours of sunlight left. We were hungry from living on pot noodles and biscuits for the last two days and wandered in to the centre of the city to find an international restaurant i’d read about. We ended up ordering a feast and spending a couple of hours relaxing with a bottle of wine (or two). By the time we left to walk back to the hostel it was dark outside. Rhys has always wanted to walk across a frozen river so we wandered towards the water. Having checked there were foot prints on the ice (if the locals weren’t walking on it, we weren’t), we slid down to the river and trudged through the thick snow covering, zigzagging across the river to the bridge. We scrambled back to the road and wandered back to our room. Although it was early, there wasn’t a whole lot to do and we turned in for the night.
Rhys braving the frozen river, Yekaterinburg.
We stayed in our room until the noon check out to shorten the amount of time we’d have to spend in the cold waiting for our 6pm train. Leaving our bags in the hostel, we walked in to town to see the main sights. After crossing the frozen river again, we found a TGI Fridays, around the corner from the City Administration building, grateful to be able to order lunch hassle free from an English menu. We then walked the length of the pedestrianised street, lined with some bizarre and comical bronze statues, and through a small park with birds and squirrels with extra fluffy ears.
Ice fishing on the river in the centre of Yekaterinburg.
Passed the dam of the city pond, we stopped for photos at a few small church buildings, a statue monument to the city founders and Sevastianov’s House, a green gothic style mansion. By that point, we’d reached the Church on the Blood, consecrated in 2003 and built on the site of the merchants house in which the Romanov’s were murdered, the family having been elevated to the status of saints.
Church on the Blood, the site of the Romanov murder, Yekaterinburg.
As the sun was starting to drop and it was getting colder, we hurried back to the hostel to collect our bags and head over to the train station. Yekaterinburg was a nice, cosmopolitan city but didn’t have a whole lot to offer tourists, we were glad we’d only decided to spend one night before moving on.

For our last overnight train, we’d booked 3rd class tickets, having traveled 2nd class in each of the other Trans-Mongolian legs. We were a bit nervous to see what beds we’d been allocated and were happy when we boarded to find we had two bottom bunks facing each other. In 2nd class carriages, there are rows of cabins, each holding four beds, two up and two down. In 3rd class carriages, there are no cabins but banks of beds, set in groups of 6, 2 up and 2 down like in 2nd class, then another 2 parallel to the aisle by the window. The three bottom bunks in our area were taken as were most of the bottom bunks throughout the carriage but there was plenty of room and no snoring and no bad smells. It was bliss, we even had a window we could open when it started to heat up. We wandered why we hadn’t been traveling 3rd class the whole time, it was our best train experience in Russia.

Shortly after leaving Yekaterinburg, the train rolled passed the Asia-Europe border although as it was already dark, we couldn’t see the marker. Instead we spent the evening reading, watching TV and eating instant smash.

It was a 26 hour journey and by lunch time the next day we were both getting bored. We’ve spent so much time on trains lately and there’s not a whole lot to do or see. Much of the landscape looks the same, especially since there’s a blanket of snow over everything and it’s dark for nearly 17 hours a day.

Finally, we arrived in Vladimir. We had a rough map to get us to our hostel but couldn’t find the main road and ended up walking up in to town, along the main street and then back down to the hostel. As with all hostels we’ve stayed at, it was more like being in a guestroom at a house with a family sitting in the common room watching you and making you feel slightly awkward. We showered and walked back to the main street for dinner. Completely unintentionally, we found ourselves in a British Pub and ate delicious plates of stroganoff before it was time for bed.

Although we’d only changed time zones by 5 hours in the last week, we were finding ourselves in bed early and awake by 7:30am, waiting around for the sun to rise so we could venture out and explore.

Vladimir is one of Russia’s oldest cities and until the 14th century, was the religious centre of the entire country. The main street is lined with churches and it took us a couple of hours to wander between them while the snow continued to dust the whole city. Leaving the hostel, we circled the Golden Gate, one of the only surviving remanents of the 1158 city ramparts, and continued to a view point, overlooking the Old Town. We zigzagged through town, aiming for any golden domes we could see, stopping at the Assumption Cathedral (built in 1160 and at that time, the tallest building in the whole of Russia) and the Cathedral of St Demetrius (a square cathedral, completed in 1197, covered with intricate carvings and with a small exhibition inside). 
Walking through the snow, Vladimir.
Rhys swinging from the lamp posts, Assumption Cathedral, Vladimir.
More snow covered parks, Vladimir.
We ducked in to the shopping plaza to escape the cold for a pricey canteen buffet lunch (smoked fish, urgh), then, after walking around the walls of the Nativity Monastery, we headed back to the hostel. Later than afternoon, leaving Rhys in the room with the vodka, I walked back in to town. The snow had covered the streets in a blanket of white and I didn’t have long until sun down. I stopped by an odd little antique shop and a few smaller, more run down churches before walking back to the other side of town, to the History Museum. As all the info boards were in Russian I had no idea what I was looking at but the attendants enthusiastically pointed me to certain displays and directed me around. 
Anyone who knows us will know that a Vodka aisle is our idea of HEAVEN.
In search for a Russian flag badge for Rhys, I ended up in another museum that I didn’t even know existed. Upstairs in a chapel, there was a small display of the most beautiful lacquerware, little boxes painted with miniature scenes from fairytales in exquisite detail. I got so sucked in that I lost track of time and after walking through the crystal/cut glass section of the museum I realised it was getting dark outside and I had to rush to get back before Rhys started worrying.
Vladimir Old Town view point at dusk.
That night we went back to the main street where we’d spotted another bar that looked good for dinner. It wasn’t until we paid the bill that we realised it was a sister bar of the British bar we’d been to the night before. In addition to the beautiful churches in the town, it was worth a stop over for the delicious gastro pub meals.

We had a lazy start the next day as our train wasn’t due to leave until noon. We’d bought ourselves some Heinz baked beans in the Spar the previous day and were excited to have a late breakfast at the hostel. 

Leaving the hostel we had a long walk back to the train station, along slippery roads and through the centre of town. We had a fast train to Moscow and squeezed in to our seats for the short trip. 

Once in Moscow, we jumped on the tube and followed the instructions to our hostel. After asking a kind policeman for directions, we eventually found the right building and checked in to our miniature room. As we only had two nights in the city and we were keen to visit Red Square to see it lit up at night, we popped out to grab some fast food before chilling in our room. Moscow was much warmer than Siberia at about -5C but it still wasn’t warm enough to just lose ourselves walking the streets without freezing.

As soon as it was dark, we wrapped up wearing as many layers as we could without looking stupid (bearing in mind all our thermals were in the wash), and walked towards Red Square, about 20 minutes from our hostel. Immediately we both took a liking to the city with beautiful architecture on every corner. After walking along a shopping street, we emerged at a junction with the Bolshi Theatre and the Kremlin. We found our way around the corner and in to the Red Square, hemmed in on one side by the GUM shopping arcade, filled with expensive Bond Street stores, and on the other, by the Kremlin walls. 

We wandered through the unexciting Christmas market, feeling festive with all the fairy lights and baubles anging from the trees, before spying St Basils Cathedral, built in the 1550’s to celebrate the capture of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible. Although we’d both previously seen pictures and thought the cathedral was something of a Disneyland monstrosity, we were pleasantly surprised. Some how, it seemed to work with the towering gothic buildings surrounding it. 
The lairy bbut oddly attractive domes of St Basils Cathedral, Moscow.
Heading back towards our hostel, we stopped at a basement Irish bar (all the pubs here seem to be British or Irish themed), where we ordered a 800ml, giant sized Magners each. As we didn’t intend on having a big night, we re-layered up and went back out in the cold, before finding a nice pub near our hostel that drew us in by having a Tottenham scarf in the window. Rhys ordered a pint of Welsh Brains while I treated myself to a Strongbow before we called it a night and headed to bed.

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