The last few days of our travels were a hectic trek across Europe by boat, train and bus. We took a incredibly scenic ferry from Bergen to Hirtshals in Denmark, which we were both able to enjoy as the water was calm. It was full of people just getting from A to B, so we had the deck and the views of the fjords to ourselves most of the time.
We didn’t see much of Denmark, except a small house where Hans Christian Anderson may or may not have lived (the tourist information office says yes, the man himself said no), but we saw even less of Germany (a darkened station when we woke up in the night).
As we were in Denmark for less than a day (on our way to board the sleeper train through Germany to Amsterdam) we attempted to survive with no currency, thinking we could just pay by card. I’m fairly sure I never have any cash in the UK, but it turned out to be nearly impossible. We got around the bus fare by persuading the driver to take Euros (we’d only ended up on the bus by following the crowds of boat passengers like sheep anyway) and the first train by accidental fare dodging. We still didn’t take the hint and find a cash machine, but were eventually defeated by cash-only pay for toilets.
When we arrived in Amsterdam (St Petersburg’s older, scruffier, more studenty sibling) we realised that, in comparison to Norway, everything was ON SALE! Our primary occupation was walking around commenting on the price of things (“this is very pretty… hey, did you see the prices on that menu?!), with eating a close second (“This waffle is only 1 Euro! Lets eat it! Even though we already feel sick from all the other bargain food we’ve eaten!”). We also spent a while admiring the world’s most narrow house (3 1/2 feet) until we noticed the residents smirking at us from an upstairs window, and went off to eat more bargain food.
We made it back to the UK by completely subverting the Hull-Rotterdam P&O mini-cruises. This system is not designed to be used by one-way backpackers and it’s nearly impossible to find the bus stop to get the Amsterdam-Rotterdam transfer, and when you do get to check-in they are baffled by your lack of outward ticket. The north sea was, of course, a bit choppy so we tried to distract ourselves in the onboard cinema. Unfortunately we saw Robin Hood, which had a surprisingly large number of shots of seasick crusaders crossing the channel.
We were greeted by my Mum and Dad, who we waved to manically from the deck of the boat while all the mini-cruisers out for a smoke looked on in bemusement.
The ferry to Bodø was a bit dodgy but my travel sickness tablets also seem to be pretty effective sleeping pills so I was fine! After that we took a train to Oslo where we had somehow managed to reserve seats in a really old school carriage where we had MASSIVE seats which was pretty fun! We spent the day watching Norway go past which was pretty cool. Having just come off the ferry around the top it didn’t seem that impressive though and made me think we’d been on MegaTrip for too long as awesome scenery was not impressing me as much as it should have done!
That evening we made it to Oslo which a Norwegian friend of mine had advised us not to visit claiming it was a bit rubbish so my hopes had been lowered. It came as quite a surprise when it turned out to be a near perfect example of a clean, friendly city. The centre of which seemed completely devoid of the usual ugly concrete buildings which plague large cities.
While in Oslo we visited the Nobel Peace Center to see the announcement of this year’s winner (which actually happens in the Nobel Institute) but was being shown on a big screen where we were. There were several youth football teams from around the world there and a famous Norwegian footballer who used to play for a UK team but, not being football fans, we didn’t know who he was (though we did later see him in a Norwegian TV advert!)
Soon after we arrived we were approached by a journalist who wanted to interview us, apparently for a Norwegian national newspaper, though it didn’t go that well as we explained we’d just happened to be there and hadn’t made the trip specifically. I think we got slightly more interesting after the winner was announced and we got to tell her about our recent experience in China. We then got to hear all the stories about the prize being censored from Chinese media and the Chinese government’s response and the winner’s wife not being allowed to collect the prize which were all good examples of what we’d said. The journalist did seem a bit bored by the whole thing though so I doubt we made it past her notebook! We did ask her why someone would say Oslo was a bit rubbish as it seemed so inappropriate but she said that everyone in Norway thought that, and seemed to agree too! We decided it must be just that everywhere in Norway is so beautiful that Oslo is relatively a bit crap!
We also visited a proper fort which put the one in Helsinki to shame! It had towers, high walls, loads of canons and even had royal guards with silly outfits (who we also saw outside the king’s palace). The story of the Norwegian monarchy is a bizarre one too. Apparently in the early 1900s the Norwegian people voted to instate a monarchy (as they didn’t have one and wanted one!) they then voted to have a Danish prince as their king. He was rightly pretty chuffed by this and so the Norwegian royal family was created!
Oslo also has a really cool opera and ballet theatre with a sloping roof which you can walk up starting at the water front.
We visited a Viking museum with some restored Viking burial ships in it. We also spent a lot of money as Oslo is expensive for Norway (like London is for the UK) which, as Norway is already the most expensive place we’ve ever been, makes you feel like you’ve got holes in your pockets. The 10 minute bus ride back from the Viking museum cost us about £7.50 and we struggled to get any lunch for our £20 a day budget, eventually opting for making our own ham and cheese sandwiches which still cost £15!
We took a train from Oslo to Bergen which was truly spectacular. We passed ice fields and glaciers and even went up into the clouds at one point. We also took a detour onto the Flåm (pronounced Flom) railway. That was also spectacular as it weaved down the valley through tunnels in the cliffs and occasionally out on the cliffs as well as over a waterfall and below another one where the water has a 100 metre free fall drop. I realised that I wasn’t bored of scenery, it’s just that my standards have gone up! It was great on the train too. Half the fun was just listening to everyone (ourselves included) going ‘ooooh!’, ‘wow!’ and, after a brief exchange I’d had with a group of Malaysian tourists where I’d said it was lovely which they thought was a fun word, I kept hearing them saying how lovely it was too! The railway ends at a small town (called Flåm) by a fjord where we saw another seal!
Most people get on a boat from there but we went back up the railway and caught the next train onward to Bergen.
Bergen is a lovely place! There isn’t much to do there (especially off season when all the attractions are closed – making the Bergen City Pass, which includes entrance to all the museums, seem pretty bad value for money). But it is fun just to look around. It’s almost entirely made up of painted wooden houses, many of which, including our hotel, are perched on the side of a very steep hill meaning we had a very impressive view over the city.
One thing we did do is take the Funicular train up the mountain for some awesome views of the town. We then walked back down which was fun but was all downhill so, I thought, would have been more fun with one of those push scooter things which, Laura says, are for kids!
Bergen is also a bit cheaper than Oslo which made the whole thing a bit less scary!
Also, I think this is very funny but the look Laura gave me when she saw me taking the picture makes me think it might be slightly immature humour:
After the craziness that was the first day on the M/S Lofoten (ferry) and the strange daze that was the second day (including a dream about joining some society of polar bears and the odd few minutes on deck after being woken up to look around) I was very surprised to find that I felt absolutely fine on the third day. It was a good thing too because the scenery was amazing, a lot more spectacular than anything I’d seen earlier while on the boat. We sailed through narrow channels with rocky hills/mountains on each side and then finally, just before we arrived in Svolvær, the captain told us that we were going to take a small detour into Trollfjord which we thought we weren’t going to get to see as they normally only do that while travelling in the other direction and only during the summer months. It was one of the most spectacular things I’ve ever seen. A narrow channel, about a kilometre long, with sheer rock faces and steep mountain sides on all three sides. I took a few pictures but none of them really do it justice. The boat then did a three-point turn in the narrow channel, which was fun to see in itself, and we headed off on our way. It was so incredible to see and easily made the boat trip worth it just for that, despite the sea-sickness! We also saw quite a few sea eagles while we were there.
So then we arrived in Svolvær and despite our best attempts to discover where the cabin we had booked for our stay here was had almost no idea (the web-site gave no directions!). I had found a likely location which we were going to get the bus to but as it was getting late (and we were planning on taking the bus to somewhere pretty remote) we decided not to risk it. It’s a good job we did too because the taxi driver took us to the camp/cabin site we were staying at and it was nowhere near where we thought it was (and seemed to be nowhere near anywhere!) It turns out that it it about 4 kilometres away from the nearest town which isn’t too far to walk, unless you’ve got a massive back pack on! We discovered a while ago that about 2km is the furthest we can walk with all our stuff in one go!
The taxi driver dropped us off and said, “well here you are, it looks like there’s no one here though. Bye!”. By this point it’s dark and we’re nowhere near anywhere with seemingly nowhere to stay, a packet of biscuits to share, and our ride back to civilisation driving away! I wasn’t sure what to do but fortunately Laura’s special power of reading every bit of writing within 30 metres paid off and she found a phone number. We rang them and, after a pretty long conversation where the guy on the other end seemed to have no idea who we were or why we’d be there, he sent an old man with a torch down to meet us. He looked confused and had seemingly no idea who we were either (they’d already forgotten our booking once when I rang up so it wasn’t that suprising that they’d forgotten it again) he fumbled around for a bit saying things like “no that won’t work”, and “now where did I put it…” before handing us a key and saying he hoped it was ok and that we’d have to sort it out in the morning. I was pretty worried at this point! Fortunately the camp site reception had some food for sale so we bought a few essentials to get us through to the morning. He showed us where it was on a map and then headed off onto the darkness. Eventually we found our cabin.
It had been empty for a while and was freezing cold. We turned all the heaters and lights on and discovered a really nice, if a little cold, cabin. Things were starting to look up! Then we discovered that the three items we’d bought from the site’s shop were some gone off eggs, a half drunk carton of, going off, milk and some bread that claimed it didn’t go off for the best part of a year!
Fortunately, we had some jam so decided to risk the unbelievably long life bread with it. It turned out to be some kind of sweet bread but we hadn’t got anything else so decided it was ok. I used my phone (Offmaps) to work out where we were and we came up with a plan for the next morning before going to bed.
The next morning we discovered that our cabin actually had an incredible view and we walked to Kabelvag, the nearest town, to do a supermarket shop. We also had some amazing fish soup for lunch in the pub in Kabelvag.
Since then we’ve had a really nice stay. We found a seal, coincidentally called Boris, swimming in a bay nearby and watched it for about 30 minutes as it dived down to look for food and generally looked like it was having a good time!
We had a couple of clear nights so stayed up to try and see the northern lights. One night we saw them, though they were very dim and hard to see (not like the Scandinavian tourist boards want you to think they are!). We’ve been inside the arctic circle for over two weeks with, luckily, about half of the nights being clear (or with clear patches) and have only seen the Northern lights once, very dimly! I think we’ll have to come back when the sun is a bit more active…
Yesterday we visited the aquarium and saw three more seals, tentatively named Norris, Doris and Horace, a couple of really cool otters, who even managed to look cute while ripping dead fish to pieces, and loads of fish in tanks which mainly looked a bit scary. We also saw a video of shots of the area set to a folk/dance soundtrack which claimed to be in 8 languages but had no words so could really have claimed a few more!
We also read a whole rooms worth of blurb about how awesome it is that Norway is almost carbon neutral despite being one of the world’s biggest oil producers (25% of GDP). I’m not sure about that though as they can only say that because they’re not the ones actually burning the oil/making it into plastics – it’s mostly exported. Someone is, so they need to acknowledge that the profits they make from selling the oil have an associated cost to the environment (as the value of oil is a direct result of it’s uses, most of which are harmful to the environment).
We also went back and got some more yummy fish soup!
I also took this picture which I think should be on a packet of some ‘mountain fresh’ washing powder:
Today is our last day in this cabin and, as there’s a storm going on outside, we’re mainly going to be sitting about doing nothing!
Tomorrow we’re staying in Svolvær (hopefully the weather will be better or we’re going to get pretty wet on the way to the nearest bus stop!) and then we’re taking the ferry (gulp) to Bodø!
The task of writing a blog about the Hurtigruten ship, which we are taking from Kirkenes to Svolvær in the Lofoten Islands, has fallen to me because Ben has been largely a) seasick, b) drowsy or c) seasick and drowsy while we have been on board.
Before anyone worries too much, though, Ben is really OK now. He’s even off the drowsy medication. It was just the first day (1 of 3) when he was unwell, and then yesterday I just woke him up to feed him, if we were somewhere particularly picturesque, or if we were at a port and had time to look around.
The Hurtigruten runs up and down the extremely scenic Norwegian coast from Kirkenes to Bergen, and is a cross between a ferry and a cruise-ship, depending on whether you are a Norwegian trying to get somewhere or a retired tourist doing a two week return journey with fancy meals included.
I think we have been unlucky because when we first got on the ship they were announcing warnings over the speakers, cancelling meals and drawing pictures of terrified seasick people to illustrate the weather forecast printouts.
We are travelling on the smallest ship of the fleet, MS Lofoten, with only 150 berths, to reduce the cruise-contingent and because we were late in booking by Hurtigruten standards! This has also reduced the amenities (notably, no stabilisers…) but it’s exciting to be on such a small ship. When we pass Hurtigruten ships going in the other direction they tower over us like skyscrapers.
Yesterday we visited the northernmost point in Europe, Nordkapp or North Cape, and joined The Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society, something which can only be done in Hammerfest, the world’s most northerly town. Neither of these are quite what they seem.
Nordkapp is forced to qualify its claim by saying ‘mainland’ Europe, because otherwise Svalbard, last stop before the Arctic, wins hands down. So it was quite surprising to discover it is on an island which has only recently been connected to the mainland via a 7km tunnel. And, in any case, it turns out the next peninsular along is slightly more northerly, as the British Explorer who discovered it a few hundred years ago made a mistake (he was also aiming to get to India, so all in all the trip was not a great success). Anyway, as the actual northernmost point is inaccessible to cars and so is quietly ignored. Nordkapp is, nonetheless, very beautiful and we were there at dawn to see a gorgeous sunrise.
As for the Royal and Ancient Polar Bear Society, it was founded in 1963 so it’s actually rather recent!
Since we last blogged we’ve also been staying in a little wooden cottage in a small place in Northern Finland, Inari, where we learned more about the local Sàmi people, who probably came from Mongolia about 8000 years ago. This wasn’t a big surprise as you don’t encounter all that many nomadic, animal-husbandry enthusiasts living in circular tents these days.
We went on a boat trip on the beautiful Lake Inari (pleasingly pronounced Inari-yari in Finnish) and hiked to a wilderness church built in 1752. It was quite amazing to find a wooden church in the middle of a meadow surrounded by dense forest, and the hiking facilities were quite something. As well as regular shelters/toilets and marker posts along the trail, there were day huts with cooking facilities and wood-burning stoves, and even a sauna! The marker posts were so frequent that we started trying to find spots where you couldn’t see one. This almost invariably went “I can’t see a post! – oh no, wait, actually I can see one… no, two”.
We also went to Kirkenes museum and discovered that Norway had also been quite thoroughly screwed over in WWII. I don’t think we can take any more recent history museums and can quite authoritatively state that pretty much everyone was miserably screwed over. We can confidently state that the whole of northern Scandinavia was utterly destoyed, and perhaps this goes some way to excusing Santa for the sorry state of Santa Claus Village.
Since we left the UK we’ve been having encounters with all sorts of people. Apart from meeting Michael the Wonder Guide in Xi’an, the encounters with people outside the tourist industry have been some of the best.
Here’s my Top 5, in ascending order:
5. The Russian woman on the train from Irkutsk to Moscow
I’m sure some of the Trans-Siberian trains are touristy, but we were the only westerners on that one and seemingly no-one spoke English. My longest encounter was late at night with a woman outside the toilet. She said many Russian words and did quite an impressive mime. Sadly, it was lost on me… But I did establish the important part was something to do with kicking the toilet door.
4. The Mongolia little girls in Sukhbaatar Square, Ulaan Baatar
They came up to us on our first morning in Mongolia as we sat watching some brides in large dresses pose in front of Chinggis Khan.
The first couple of times they ran up, giggled and ran away. The next couple of times they ran up, we said hello, and they ran away. I then consulted the guidebook and attempted the Mongolian for hello, which caused a good 10 minutes of hysterical laughter. Eventually Ben detected a ‘bonjour’ through the laughter and we managed a few minutes of conversation in French. Aged about 6, their French was better than ours.
3. The Russian family on Olkhon Island, Lake Baikal
Mum, Dad and daughter, about 8, were visiting Olkhon Island at the same time as us from nearby Irkutsk.
We visited a number of beautiful, steep, treacherous cliffs where the little girl repeatedly (so it seemed to us) ran a very high risk of falling to her death. This was of course fine – except when she decided to walk along with us, chatting merrily in Russian, before climbing steep cliffs, chatting merrily in Russian, and not coming down, chatting merrily in Russian. At one point she showed us some large rocks she had hidden in her pockets, and I don’t think they were improving her balance.
Fortunately her parents caught up eventually, and told us they once found kilograms of rocks in their overweight holiday luggage. Happily she only gave us a small rock to remember her by.
2. The Chinese teenage girls in Shanghai
They were visiting Shanghai for the Expo and wanted to practice their English when we were all sightseeing on the riverfront.
They explained which province they were from, and because we didn’t know where it was, told us it was where the Shaolin Temple is. ‘Ah yes’, we said, but they were not convinced we had really heard of it. ‘Shaolin monks’, they said, ‘ah yes’, we said. ‘Kung fu’, they said, ‘ah yes’, we said, but they were still unconvinced. Eventually one of them said ‘Bruce Lee!’, and they believed us when we said we had heard of him.
1. Nikita on the tram in Irkutsk, Russia
We met Nikita as we attempted to cross Irkutsk with all our stuff. We were the only westerners on the tram, and the only ones Nikita had ever seen on an Irkutsk tram. He’s studying science at the local university and was on his way to a birthday party with a guitar on his back. This turned out to be a birthday present which he and his friends had clubbed together for and then disguised as Nikita’s own guitar to surprise the birthday boy. What a nice guy!
When we told him we were from London he said “wow” and when we told him Ben’s name he said “woooow” and looked astonished. Still not exactly sure why.
Well Finland has been quite an exciting time for us so far, though not exactly how we expected.
We started in Helsinki. It’s a lovely, quite small, city with few tourist attractions other than generally walking around saying things like ‘well this is nice’.
Fortunately we were staying in Hotel Glo which was our favourite hotel of all time. Our room was REALLY cool but the main attraction was the extras you could get for free. One day we borrowed some Glo-bikes and cycled around the city but my favourite was the PS3 I managed to have brought to our room so I spent quite a while playing Ratchet & Clank. Aaah, games! I had to give it back when we checked out though :-(.
On our second day we visited Suomenlinna island, the ‘Fortress of Finland’ which could be listed alongside The Great Wall in an Epic Military Fails Top 10. It was built to protect Finland in 1748 (at the time under Swedish control) but the fort has almost no military advantage over the adjacent, unfortified, island which provides plenty of cover for boats from cannon fire leaving the fort with almost zero value as a naval stronghold. As we discovered more about the island things just got worse. The ‘fort’ has a very large and palatial mansion for the governor and extensive gardens which were regularly re-landscaped. Finally we discovered a sign next to a pond which finished off any fort credentials it may have had. Apparently the pond was originally supposed to be a moat but they got bored of digging it and made it into a pond instead.
One of the coolest things on the island was a WW2 U-Boat which was great. There were also some cool cannons which I was surprised they bothered to add (expecting they would have rejected them in favour of more flower beds).
We watched a large passenger ferry sail between the island and its very close neighbour while we were on the ‘battlements’ which was fun. We waved manically at the passengers who mainly looked disapprovingly at us. Not deterred by this we carried on and eventually had almost everyone on the back of the boat waving back at us!
Unsurprisingly, the fort was all but destroyed the first time it was actually attacked.
On our last day in Helsinki we took a tram around the city with a leaflet provided by the tourist information office as a guide. This was possibly the single most boring hour of my life and left us both with a deep inner void. It took us about a further hour to get over the boredom but finally we managed to drag ourselves into Fazer which is a bit like Betty’s tea room only more chocolate based. We had chocolate and ‘chocolate tea’ which perked us right up. It turns out Fazer chocolate is very, very tasty and well worth trying.
A sleeper train called the Santa Claus Express took us from Helsinki to Rovaniemi where we are now.
The town is almost empty at the moment. We’re not sure where everyone is but we know they aren’t in any of the cafes, restaurants, supermarkets or roads we’ve visited. One person we have seen is Santa though!
We visited ‘Santa Claus Village’ yesterday and met the big man himself. It didn’t, however, go quite as my childhood dreams of meeting Santa led me to expect.
Firstly, as it’s September, there’s no snow. I’m willing to accept that this is beyond his control. Also, probably for the same reason, there was hardly anyone there. This is also beyond his control and makes me think he isn’t fully appreciated. Santa is for life, not just for Christmas.
The things which were within Santa’s control however, were the large number of, not very good, souvenirs on sale. The large empty square in front of his office with loud tinny Christmas music being piped through a large speaker system which gave it the feel of some kind of low budget, Christmas themed, Day of the Triffids knockoff and the unexplained ‘house of horrors’ style corridor leading to his office (which we later discovered is supposed to be a magical clock that he uses to stop time while he delivers all the presents).
When we actually got in to see Santa he seemed displeased that I didn’t support a football team and was offended by Laura’s observation that he didn’t have many people visiting him that day, quickly pointing out that he’d actually already seen 200 people. I tried to make it up to him by thanking him for all the presents over the years to which he replied “yes, I remember” as if making a mental note to give us both a lump of coal this year. Santa then gestured to an, unusually large, elf who took a photo of all of us before Santa sent us on our way. The photographer elf then led us through a door to another oversized elf who showed us the photo and explained how it would cost us 50€. This was a surprisingly large cost and got me started on a train of thought that Santa was taking advantage of his status and that maybe the whole delivering presents to the whole world thing was just a front for his village where he extorts money from visitors. I’m still not sure it makes good business sense though. Instead of buying it, I took a photo of the photo of us and Santa on the screen outside and was promptly told off by an elf which was probably the highlight of the trip to the village.
After meeting Santa we went to his post office and sent some post cards. Laura also bought this advent calendar which pretty much sums up the whole experience:
Is that child on the sleigh laughing or crying?!?
Fortunately all this has been made up for by us visiting a really cool reindeer farm and several hundred very friendly husky dogs, some of whom took us along a trail in a husky powered quad bike.
Probably the most minor accolade for Rovaniemi is that it is home to THE NORTHERNMOST McDonald’s:
We also visited the Arktikum Museum here and really enjoyed it. It’s mostly about the geography of the area and the lifestyles of the indigenous population but there was also a small but pretty convincing section on how Finland was royally screwed over during WW2. Having been invaded by the Russians and promised help from the allies which never came they were forced to ally with the Germans for a brief time after single handedly defending themselves against the, much larger, Russian army before finally managing an agreement with the allies to fight the Germans (and surrender some of their land to the Russians). During this time most of the country seems to have been generally blown up.
So I’ve been looking for Batman based things and more specifically Batman: Arkham Asylum / Arkham City based stuff since we left the UK and have to say it wasn’t going too well for quite a while. In China I saw a person with a Batman T-shirt in the Forbidden City in Beijing but that was about it. As they were a tourist I figured they probably didn’t count anyway.
Interestingly there was almost no presence of games at all. I managed to find a stall in a market with a Wii and a PS2 for sale but that’s about it. I didn’t ask if they’d been chipped but think they probably were (that would explain the lack of games shops!)
In Mongolia I found a small selection of PC games in a supermarket in Ulaan Baatar but again no Batman. In the toys section I did find these ‘generic’ super hero figures though:
I couldn’t find any games in Russia either which surprised me, especially in Moscow and St Petersburg which are both full of very rich people. Maybe I was looking in the wrong places?!
However, we’re in Finland now and Batman is back on the scene!
Firstly games shops exist again and I had no problem finding a copy of Batman in one such shop in Helsinki:
That particular shop sold electronics, games, DVDs and cosmetics which I thought was pretty strange combination.
We also found this picture in a media photography museum (it also had a Moomin exhibition, which is what we had actually gone to see!):
I have no idea what it says but he appears to be selling some kind of ‘Bat-juice’?!
Finally while we were in a supermarket (also in Helsinki) we found this:
Result!
Woohoo go Rocksteady! I couldn’t understand the words but the pictures looked good (especially the massive close-ups of Jamie and Sefton – Rocksteady directors!) I thought Harley’s pig-tails looked particularly physically realistic in the screenshots too! I’m really looking forward to reading up on the game’s progress once we’re back in the UK.
Since we first saw that magazine cover (shortly after getting into Finland) we can’t seem to get away from it as it’s for sale in just about every shop with magazines in it!
Is was interesting to see that games aren’t yet as truly global as film and music but, as pirated copies of most CD’s and DVD’s are readily available in all the Asian countries we visited, I’m not sure how much revenue the film/music publishers are actually getting from the region anyway!
For example, in China where IP and copyright laws exist but are largely ignored. While showing us around a busy market full of fake goods, mainly clothes but also things like ‘VAIO’ laptops, our guide was proudly telling us that the fake goods manufactured there were of a higher quality than the originals so most people preferred them! With attitudes like that stopping piracy is going to be pretty difficult.
We’ve just had a fantastic few days in my new favourite city Moscow, and a pretty good few days in St Petersburg (where I spent quite a lot of my time trying to forgive St Petersburg for not being Moscow).
To do St Petersburg justice, it is a beautiful, grand, aristocratic city with lovely buildings in pastel shades and picturesque canals and bridges. Even the sky looked a sophisticated shade of grey. And there were quirky cafes and restaurants and some frankly crazy concepts (like the gym in a large mock pirate ship across the river from the Winter Palace).
But it was all just not quite Moscow! A bit less quirky, a bit less cool, a few less potential secret service agents for Ben to follow round…
Moscow’s architecture was spectacular. The Kremlin is amazing, especially with the large numbers of military uniforms wandering around. And Stalin did some terrible things (and we spent a stomach-churning, heart-breaking hour at the Gulag Museum learning exactly how terrible they were…) but he certainly had a way with towers and the ‘Seven Sisters’ are spectacular!
And best of all is St Basil’s, which is the most insane, fabulous example of religious architecture, and surely the only cathedral in the world to take it’s primary inspiration from an ice-cream sundae.
And everywhere you go there are quirky bits of graffiti and art, and wacky shops and cool cafes. We spent a brilliant few hours at the Art Muzeon where, alongside the modern statues there are a lot of old Soviet statues of Lenin and Stalin and general Communist propaganda!
The sculpture park was overlooked by an incredible statue of Peter the Great dressed as a pirate, which is described in the guidebooks as controversial but which is actually quite wonderfully hideous and truly in the ‘worst paaassible taste’ (But you couldn’t help but love Moscow for it. No half measures. If it’s going to be tasteless, it’s going to be The Most Tasteless. And huge. So huge. At first we thought it was a Gorky Park ride. It is so much bigger than everything else it has aircraft warning lights on the top).
And last but not least, there were brides and weddings everywhere! This goes for St Petersburg and in fact Irkutsk and Ulaan Baatar too, but Moscow takes the lead because it has the most brides, the biggest dresses (although this was a tight contest and all the dresses were enormous) and the brightest red stretch limos. The newly-weds go on photo tours around the city in their red stretch limos, sometimes with entourages including accordion players, stopping at a range of city locations. Some of were quite normal – St Basil’s, the Kremlin – but they also included statutes of revolutionary heroes and The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow (which has a giant stone soldier’s helmet and a three foot flame on it).
Here’s a St Petersburg bride:
Best of all was the padlock bridge, which we stumbled on as we were walking to Art Muzeon. Overlooked by Peter-the-Great-as-Captain-Hook, the happy couples attach a padlock with their names on to the bridge or to a metal sculpture of a tree and throw the keys in the river. Then they have photos, drink champagne and drive off in their stretch limo. At one wedding we saw the bride’s older sister and her husband posing for photos with their padlock, which was buried under layers of new padlocks.
We’re now in Helsinki, which is pretty good so far because it’s the only place where we’ve splashed out on a decent hotel!
So we’ve arrived in Moscow after a mammoth 83 hour train journey from Irkutsk. It took us through Siberia and over the Europe-Asia continental divide. There is an obelisk next to the track marking the divide which we couldn’t see because it was 3am!
Crossing the continental divide in the dark:
What the obelisk would have looked like during the day… in winter (taken from our guide book!)
During the journey totalling over 5000km, each of the (~1 metre diameter) wheels of the train rotated about 1.5 million times, that’s a lot of revolutions!
This has been our longest individual train journey ever (our Canada trip was split into two train journeys taking two days each). It’s been pretty much as fun as living, eating and sleeping in a small room for 4 days can be (without a games console). Having said that, Laura’s been putting a in lot of hours driving trains in Zelda on the DS during the trip – it turns out that not only does the microphone not respond very well to you actually blowing into it (as required by the game) but it also often mistakes the general noise of the train for being blown into which has made some parts of the game near impossible (but has only made Laura more determined, if a little light headed)! Apart from that we’ve been reading and watching the scenery go past. The views from the train haven’t been as spectacular as those in Canada but have certainly been worth taking the trip for.
In the countryside it’s mainly flat or rolling hills with forests and lots of cute wooden houses with brightly painted shutters, impressive vegetable patches, and sometimes enormous satellite dishes on the side. We’ve been stopping in towns of varying sizes along the way where people try to sell you junk food or fish (I’m really not sure what we’re meant to do with a fish on the train but someone must think it’s a good idea because sometimes they’re the ONLY thing available from the platforms).
The guide book told us to expect people selling cooked russian food like potato bread on the platforms at every stop but we’ve only seen that once so it’s a good job we didn’t rely on it. The restaurant car exists and has an extensive menu featuring many dishes from all around the world which they hand to you when you sit down. The waiter then leaves you for a few minutes to choose what you want to eat before telling you that it isn’t available and that you might prefer one of the three things which are available instead. We went through this ritual twice!
The Restaurant car
Getting between the carriages was a little crazy!
All the trains have a constant supply of boiling water provided by some seriously old school technology (coal fired samovars) which we’ve been using to heat up different types of pot noodle from each country we’ve been in. The results of our extensive testing are that Mongolian and Russian ones taste pretty much exactly like chicken and mushroom pot noodles (whichever of the many available brands or flavours you eventually decide to try) whereas the Chinese ones are all really spicy (whichever brand or flavour you go for). We’ve also been making oatmeal for breakfast and drinking a lot of tea (without milk).
A coal fired samovar
Noodle-tactic!
Outside our cabin
The Russian towns and cities we’ve been through along the way have been interesting. They all seem to have a lot of derelict old buildings and bits of machinery that look like they haven’t been used for decades just dotted around amongst the functional buildings. I guess they’re throwbacks from the communist era. Another one is that there only seem to be about 6 types of operational trains in Russia, one for each decade as the government would pick one and order loads of them every now and again.
We’ve experienced 1st, 2nd and 3rd class train travel so far on this trip. First and second were both great – though we did cheat in second class and buy tickets for all four of the bunks in our cabin – that’s still cheaper than first class and pretty much the same as you’re not sharing. Though you do get people trying to bribe their way past the train guard and into your cabin a lot when you have spare bunks (regardless of whether you’ve paid for them or not). Especially just after the passport checks at the borders!
Third class in China was quite an experience and we enjoyed it a lot though it would have been a lot harder without the guide explaining what’s going on for us! Also, as the carriages are just split into compartments rather than cabins they have an enforced lights out at 10pm. I tried reading past this time using a small torch and was told off by the carriage guard! Talking also isn’t allowed. This would be ok if you were then left in peace to sleep, except the guard then walks down the carriage every twenty minutes making noise and shining their torch in everybody’s faces to make sure they’re not breaking the rules…so if you are woken up easily like me then you just end up lying awake for hours unable to do anything for fear of being told off by the guard who’s shining a torch in your face, or will be soon!
One of the train based highlights was ‘changing the bogeys’ at the China-Mongolia border where they split the train up and lift each carriage off it’s runners and then switch them for ones with differently spaced wheels before reassembling the train (confusingly, in a different order!)
For some reason all the trains in Russia work on Moscow time so even though our train departed at the respectable 6.10pm from Irkutsk it actually departed at the not so respectable 11.10pm.
We arrived into Moscow at the equally bad 4.40am and as it’s Moscow there was no time zone change to save us. So right now we’re sitting in the train station waiting room waiting for something to open or for it to get light so we can walk to our hotel and drop our bags off.
Lake Baikal holds a lot of records – the world’s deepest lake (holding 80% of Russia’s freshwater and 1/5 of all the unfrozen fresh water on the planet), world’s oldest lake, the only lake with it’s own species of seal. I am going to go ahead and award it ‘most beautiful lake’.
It is genuinely breathtaking and it is not at all possible to do it justice with photos or words, so I think you’ll all just have to brave the Russian visa system. It has infinite shades of blue stretching off to the horizon and it changes every hour. In the sun the deep parts of the lake turn an inky purple, and it’s so clear and flat you can see the reflection of the clouds. We went out yesterday in weather that can really only be described as drizzle – and it was otherworldly.
We are staying on the lake’s biggest island, Olkhon, where the dominant religion is still Shamanism, and it is not hard to understand why.
The people here are Buryat, closely related to Mongolian, and lots of aspects of the culture are the same. Most people in the region (though not on Olkhon) are Buddhist and the same piles of rocks and ribbons on trees are everywhere.
There is a tiny Orthodox church though, with church bells on a wooden stand just outside, and when we went out to see the sunset a few minutes ago a man was ringing a series of discordant and slightly eerie peels. The lake had a thin layer of bright white mist across it, and the shores were gradually fading into midnight blue.
What could improve a location like this? Well, a species of utterly delicious fish found only here and served at all meals, and an incredible, wooden, fairytale hostel/village with towers, fountains, crazy buildings and carvings everywhere. And for Ben, large numbers of extremely friendly dogs and cats, including two kittens and even (yes, really) a puppy!
