Hypermobility

Before I went to Moscow everyone kept saying to me “oh, Moscow is nothing compared to St Petersburg!” and when I was in Moscow people kept saying “oh, wait till you get to St Petersburg!” and to hear them talk you would have expected Moscow to be some sort of horrendous concrete bunker (St Basil’s Cathedral in the centre as its one saving grace) in comparison to the glimmering mirage of perfection that is St Petersburg.

I loved Moscow. I admit that I am a total City Girl, so I suppose I am an easy sell, especially after three and a half days on a train in the taiga, but still, Moscow had the sort of energy that I really like in a city – and prize above elegance, these days, I think – and, as ever, my time there was too short; I will definitely be going back.

I stayed at the erroneously-named Central Tourist House, which is 9km out of the centre and not a house, by any stretch of the imagination. It was not ideal accommodation, mainly due to the location, but certainly wasn’t as hellish as the reviews at TripAdvisor or VisitMoscow.com would suggest (but then, I am always mistrustful of review sites like TripAdvisor, as people’s standards and opinions are so variable: basically, as long as there are no bloodstains on the walls and the food doesn’t poison me, my accommodation needs are very, very easily satisfied), and presumably convenient for anyone coming from Vnukovo Airport, as it’s apparently on the way into town from there. Anyhow, I had a private room, double bed, en suite bathroom, interesting views over high-rise Russian suburbs, and a generous (if peculiar) breakfast was included; I was admittedly awoken by noise in the corridor at 4am, but that was the fault of the billion English tourists there for the football, and frankly given the circumstances I was just glad not to be stabbed.

I only had one full day in Moscow, so what I was able to see was limited, especially as that day was a Thursday, which happens to be the day that the Kremlin is closed. However, this is what I did see:

- Red Square, which was much more impressive than I’d thought it would be: it’s an elegant space, and surrounded by enough interesting stuff (GUM, St Basil’s, Kazan Cathedral, the Kremlin, Lenin’s mausoleum) to keep anyone busy for a while;

- St Basil’s Cathedral, the outside of which is the sort of image that’s been seen so often that it’s lost a lot of its power, but the inside is absolutely and unexpectedly breathtaking;

- GUM, the sort of consumer paradise that doesn’t fit well with the traditionally austere image that Moscow has;

- The Tretyakov Gallery, which was possibly the most impressive art museum I have ever seen, especially the icon collection: I am a sucker for icons anyway, and there was a group of Orthodox nuns singing hymns there the day that I visited, which certainly added to the atmosphere; and

- The Moscow Metro (site in Russian), which is glamorous and amazingly efficient – the trains come every 30 seconds at times! It is wonderful! – and more than just a way of getting around, is actually a tourist attraction in its own right, as these photos would suggest.

My day in Moscow concluded with the Red Arrow sleeper train from Leningrad Station to St Petersburg. I admit that by this point I was somewhat over trains, but this service redeemed itself by being by far the swankiest train I’d been on, and I shared a compartment with a chap who’d been a rocket scientist during the Cold War, which enlivened the journey considerably.

One of my favourite things to do, in a travel sense, is to sleep on trains. Sleeping on other modes of transport, particularly buses and aeroplanes, generally involves twisting one’s body into impossible formations, and never getting beyond a fitful doze for fear of flopping a concertina-ed limb onto the lap of the person in the next seat, or, if you ever do manage to fall into a proper sleep, it will invariably be when the person in the seat next to you needs to clamber over you on their way to the bathroom, or when the bus decides that that’s the perfect time to switch all the lights on and make a smoking stop while leaving the door open and letting in the freezing draught (please see Istanbul to Safranbolu bus journey, late December 2006), or put on a Middle Eastern comedy at full volume, causing one of your fellow British travellers to freak out and demand to get off the bus in the middle of a tunnel (please see Cairo to Dahab overnight bus, August 2006). I heard tell, while in China, of the legendary sleeper buses which have almost bed-like seats, but I remain unconvinced – not of their existence, but whether they would actually be any more comfortable than normal buses.

However! Sleeping on trains is a completely different kettle of fish, and one that I like to indulge as much as I can. My first overnight train journey was when I was 19, backpacking through Eastern Europe, and staying in a normal compartment on the overnight service from Berlin to Gdansk via Gdynia was so disrupting and exhausting that even on my paltry student budget I decided to splurge on the extra – oh, £5, maybe – on a couchette from Krakow to Prague. From then on I was hooked: Zurich to Graz (in a luxurious sleeper, as there were no couchettes left), Budapest to Sighisoara, Bucharest to Sofia, all in the unimaginable wonder of going to bed in the evening for a night of gentle swaying somnolence, and waking the next morning, well rested, somewhere else. Magic!

Since that seminal backpacking experience in 1997, I’d slept on trains a few more times – the lovely Bulawayo to Victoria Falls service in 1998, complete with fancy restaurant meal, and, more recently, Skopje to Belgrade and Belgrade to Bar – but my eye was fixed on the prize: the Trans-Siberian railway, allowing a person to take the train over a staggering one-third of the globe, and indulge in as much glorious train-sleeping as anyone could hope for.

Cutting to the chase: so I finally did the Trans-Mongolian in early October, and it was largely awesome. I had initially intended to buy my tickets on spec, but that turned out to be a little risky given that I was working to a rather tight schedule, and so I ended up enlisting the help of Intourist, who conveniently have a Glasgow office and were able to assist me in terms of visa support and accommodation en route as well. This is the first time I’ve ever used a travel agent for stuff like that, which made me feel a little dirty and ashamed, but I didn’t have time for all the visa-related faff, especially since I’m no longer in London. Another reason that I used them was because I was travelling from east to west, and while there seem to be plenty of agents offering cheapo tickets from west to east (Trans-Sputnik, a Dutch agency, being the cheapest I’ve found), I couldn’t find anything going the other way.

I broke the journey up into sections: a thity-hour trip from Beijing to Ulaan Baatar, the highlights being: the mountainous scenery west of Beijing, including glimpses of the Great Wall; the Gobi Desert, particularly at sunrise; watching the bogies on the train being changed at the border between China and Mongolia (and watching our cabin-attendants stuff contraband into empty pillowcases to smuggle it across the border); and the stunning Mongolian scenery, mostly big, bald mountains, the occasional ger, a lot of horses and some of the most isolated towns and villages I’ve ever seen.

I stopped for a night in Ulaan Baatar, and was rather charmed by the city, especially Sukhbaatar Square, and the Gandan Monastery, despite the fact that it was absolutely freezing, and there was snow on the mountains surrounding the city, although it was only mid-October. I had booked accommodation at the Gandan Guesthouse, but mysteriously was collected from the train station by Idre, of Idre’s Guest House, and stayed there instead – presumably the Gandan was booked out and the two places have some sort of agreement (details of both places are here). In general, the brevity of my time in UB just made me want to come back for more – I’m particularly keen to go trekking in the Gobi (though possibly not on a camel, because bloody hell, those things are PAINFUL to sit on for more than five minutes), and/or hiking in the Altay Mountains (though it may be more interesting to do that on the Siberian side).

Next leg was from UB to Irkutsk, around 24 hours, and I had the good luck to be sharing my cabin with the patriarch of a Mongolian smuggling dynasty, who spent much of the journey up to the Russian border secreting things, and much of the journey thereafter unsecreting them and selling them on platforms. The highlight of this leg was of course the views of Lake Baikal, which was also the main reason why I stopped off in Irkutsk and travelled out to Listvyanka, on the shores of the lake, overnight (I got an exorbiant taxi from Irkutsk to Lisvyanka, as the train was late, but I got the bus back to the city the next day which was significantly cheaper and didn’t take any longer), which was fairly spectacular, especially with the rivers starting to ice over and the forests full of autumn colours. I spent much of the next day back in Irkutsk, mainly because I wanted to see the Decembrists‘ houses (the 19th century Russian rebels, not the indie band), near the bus station, and then back on the train again for the three and a half day journey on to Moscow.

I will admit that the train-related novelty wore off after about a day, as did the endless vista of taiga, taiga and more taiga, punctuated by the occasional concrete Siberian town, and I spent much of the journey planning where I’d stop off if I were to do the trip again (which I will). Namely: Tyumen, for a side-trip to Tobolsk; Vladimir for a side-trip to Suzdal; andmost excitingly, Krasnoyarsk to travel up the Yenisey river to Dudinka on the Arctic Ocean (though I am too much of a travel snob to go on the swanky ship in that link: ordinary cargo boat for me, thanks). I’ve also got a real hankering to have a wander round Turkic Siberia, Khakassia and Tuva and Yakutia (Yakutsk will apparently at some point be joined by rail to the main Trans-Siberian line, though I can’t find any information about that online), and to ride the Baikal-Amur Railway, hopping off at Severobaikalsk to see some of the more out-of-the-way bits of Lake Baikal, not to mention continuing the trip to Vladivostok and Lake Khanka, and on to Sakhalin Island and the Kamchatka Peninsula…and see this, here, is the curse of the travel-obsessive: every trip you make just makes you more and more conscious of all the other great trips out there, and you will NEVER HAVE TIME TO DO THEM ALL. That thought, right there, terrifies me a little.

Anyhow! The Man in Seat 61 gives more information about the Trans-Siberian than I ever could, so I’m just going to leave it there. Oh, and Russian train timetables online, because you never know when you might need them…

So I am back from my most recent travels and it is long past time for an update, though I have been putting it off until all my photos were uploaded. However, uploading to flickr is taking an age (unexpectedly – I’ve never had problems with them before, and incidentally, you may not want to click on that link unless you’re prepared to wade through literally thousands of untitled and uncaptioned photos – it’s in progress, honest), and so I may as well get on with things.

I left Glasgow on September 22nd for the first, and least glamorous, destination on my journey: Knutsford, Cheshire, for the wedding of a friend. I’d never been to Cheshire before and to be honest was not enormously excited (though I was excited about the wedding), as the image in my head was of untrammelled suburbia, punctuated with footballers’ mansions and tedious commuter monstrosities. However, I was pleasantly surprised by Knutsford itself, which, in addition to being your typical slightly-posh Middle English small town, has a rather bizarre collection of Art Nouveau architecture, including the freakishly opulent Belle Epoque restaurant and hotel, where the wedding was – excellent food, and good just to look at. Too pricey for us in terms of accommodation, though, and we stayed at the Angel Inn down the road (scroll down), which was perfectly serviceable, despite giving Tom the Small Town Fear. Man Zen for decent Chinese food, too.

Perhaps most usefully, Knutsford is also only 20 minutes by car from Manchester Airport, from whence I was flying to Sydney the morning out of the wedding, and therefore made an infinitely preferable alternative to a grim airport hotel. Would visit again. Probably.

1. Way way back in 1997, when I first discovered the magic of the internet, the first site where I actually spent any time and interacted with people was the Lonely Planet site. It’s not as good as it used to be, as far as I’m concerned – they used to have much more destination information up there, before they presumably realised that if they put all that information on the website, no one’d bother buying the books any more – but there’s still a lot of interesting stuff – I particularly like their section on responsible travel, and this article (on showering on the Trans-Siberian railway) made me laugh, especially as I will be Trans-Mongolianing next month. On the other hand, they seem to have changed their accommodation booking interface to something infinitely less useful than it used to be (no information about pricing on the front page? Pah), so I will be booking my Budapest accommodation here instead.

2. Good lord, Oz-Bus. While the very concept fills me with snobbish, misanthropic horror, encouraging overland travel can only be a good thing, right? Maybe?

3. Due to my obsessive reading of the Observer’s weekend travel supplement, I have finally found the answer to one of my burning questions, i.e. ‘what is there to see in Belarus?’ Answer: Berezinsky National Park. It’s got bison! Now, if only I could find out what there is to see in the Central African Republic, I could die happy.

(Not really.)

Oh, here you go. I still don’t know anyone who’s been there as a tourist, though.

This is obviously much too late, and nobody’s reading this anyway, given that I haven’t actually promoted this blog anywhere. But still! On the subject of close-to-home tourism, this weekend’s Doors Open Days in Glasgow, where all sorts of interesting historical stuff’s going on. There are details on the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust website here, and actually there’s a whole load more interesting Glasgow/Scotland-specific links on their website here. 

Particularly recommended (by me) is the Glasgow Slavery and Abolition Movement walk - I went on a practice version of this today, going through the Merchant City, and there was some really fascinating stuff mentioned, particularly for someone as new to Glasgow as I am. My favourite piece of information learnt was about the Ramshorn Kirk, and the fact that when Ingram Street was widened, the bones in the graveyard weren’t disinterred, meaning that several eminent Glaswegians are now buried beneath a zebra crossing.

Ooh, lots of information about sites in Glasgow’s Merchant City here.

I’m off to a wedding in Cheshire next weekend, so sadly I’m going to miss almost all of the Merchant City Festival, which will include a giant maze in George Square. Ah well, maybe next year.