(Update from August 22, 2011)
I know it’s been a long while between updates, but the break is over because, after a lovely visit home to Australia to see family and organise visa paperwork, I’m happy to report that Marco and I are back on the road and the travelogues are recommencing! I’m also pleased to announce that we made the investment of a little laptop (thank you, e-bay) so I’m now typing this to you in the comfort of our guesthouse, rather than banging it out on a greasy keyboard in an internet café somewhere. Much more pleasant!
We began what we refer to as ‘Phase 2’ of the trip in Russia. And wow – what a country it was. It’s so enormously vast and varied that I feel I should say a few words about the place in general before getting into the specifics of it. It’s truly like nowhere I’ve ever been before – we met people who went miles out of their way to help us, and also people who were utterly unsympathetic to the confused traveller and would blatantly roll their eyes at us trying to negotiate complicated Russian trains and metros. We saw villages that were as ancient as the hills and cities that were the ultimate thriving, modern metropolis. We both bore a furious grudge against the old people in the country who seemed (without fail) to shamelessly push in front of us in EVERY SINGLE QUEUE WE GOT IN until someone pointed out to us that they’d lived most of their lives in the Soviet Communist era, and that in those times if you didn’t push in you missed out. We saw the tombs of WW2 war criminals covered in roses, and spent days on end on trains. We spent 4 weeks in Russia, and yet I still don’t feel I managed to gain any kind of proper understanding of the place.
But, I have to start somewhere, so for want of a better idea I’ll begin at the beginning! Our first stop in Russia was Moscow, and as Marco and I had spent some time apart applying for visas (me with my family in Australia, him with his parents in the USA) it was absolutely lovely to see one another again, and to feel a fresh sense of excitement to have our packs on our backs and be back on the road once more. I must confess that we approached Moscow with a bit of a sense of trepidation… after a cushy time period spent living in the same, English-speaking place and enjoying home comforts we were a little worried that we may have lost some of our travelling ‘smarts’, and had heard plenty of stories about Russians being fairly unfriendly to foreigners… not to mention the difficulty of the language. I’d been doing my darndest to learn a word a day before leaving, but even the simplest words seemed to have about 8 syllables that tied my tongue in knots and had me spraying spit all over the place.
Anyway – that may be too much information! Luckily, we fell back into the swing of miming and pointing before too long, and we managed to negotiate the utterly insane Moscow subway systems without too much trouble (thanks to Marco’s totally awesome map interpretation skills). Although it was a very big, quite dirty, fast paced city that was mostly unremarkable, it was still absolutely worth the visit because it contained a few sights that blew our minds – namely, The Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Red Square. Conveniently, they were all located pretty much right next to each other and we lost no time in checking them out.
The Red Square was about 2 subway stops from the poxy shithole they had the nerve to call a guesthouse we stayed at, and the sight of it made our jaws drop. It was an absolutely vast courtyard flanked on one side by the red wall of the Kremlin, on another side by the vividly colourful St Basil’s cathedral, and on the remaining sides by yet more magnificent buildings and cathedrals. Taken all together, it was very impressive, very beautiful and very, very Russian!
St Basil’s cathedral was definitely my favourite, and I liked it even more when I learned the fabulously gruesome story behind it… Ivan the Terrible had it built centuries ago to commemorate a military victory, and was then so delighted with it that he (purportedly) had the architect’s eyes plucked out so he could never design anything so beautiful again. How’s that for payment?!?! The cathedral itself isn’t actually very big, but it’s a marvel to look at, topped with multiple onion domes painted the brightest shades of red, blue and green. The whole thing is just about the craziest kaleidoscope of colours you ever saw from the outside, and the inside is just as lovely: dim rooms with walls covered in old, peeling religious murals and a lovely choir of Russian men in crisp white shirts singing hymns that echoed off the walls in a very ethereal manner.
Just next door to St Basil’s was The Kremlin – Russia’s political heart and hub. The complex was enclosed by an enormous, turreted red wall, above which towered the onion domes of plenty more cathedrals (this time in shiny silver and gold). We bought ourselves tickets and lined up with the rest of the tourists, watching the official looking cars as they whizzed in and out ferrying goodness knows who. Inside it was almost like another world away from the dirt and noise of Moscow in general. There were lovely, peaceful, shady gardens to sit in, and several gorgeous old cathedrals to explore. We also visited what’s known as The Armoury, which is more or less Russia’s equivalent of the Crown Jewels and houses their national treasures. We saw the dress that Catherine the Great wore at her coronation, the crown, orb and sceptre that belonged to Ivan the Terrible, and enough jewels and gold-encrusted objects to knock your socks off. Those Tsars sure knew how to live!!
We were very lucky during our time in Moscow and had brilliant blue skies almost every day, but the downside of that was that the sun was so strong we had to return to our guesthouse to take a nap most afternoons as we were so worn out by the heat. We didn’t stay long in Moscow as it was a hellishly expensive place, and also I’m afraid I admit that we did find the stereotype to be true… the people in Moscow really weren’t the friendliest. As practically nothing in the city was in English we needed to ask for help quite a bit, and often we’d have to stop 2 or 3 people before we found someone who was even willing to give us the time of day and look at our map or watch our sign language. Many of the people would quite literally turn around and face the other way when we approached them, or simply shrug us off, even when we were wearing our friendliest, most charming and beguiling smiles. But to give credit where it’s due – in terms ofappearance the Muscovites were absolutely stunning. The women in particular. It seems to be a city where women dress to the nines, style their hair and slap on heels and makeup just to go down to the shops to buy a bottle of milk. They also seemed to have some strange aversion to wearing bras… it was extremely common to see some beautiful woman clad in designer clothing strutting down the street in stilettos with her top half totally unrestrained, bouncing about and jiggling like mad. And we saw it A LOT, too, not just a couple of times. At least, I should say I saw it a lot... Marco assures me he never noticed it once!!! ;-)
So, after only 3 days we left the heat and haste of Moscow and took the train to St Petersburg. Now, I don’t say this so unreservedly very often, but this is a case where I feel I can hold nothing back. I LOVED St Petersburg. I mean I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. It was a beautiful, timeless, romantic city and so elegantly European. I’m sorry – I know I’m gushing, but it really was just gorgeous. For starters, it is so far north that the sun stays high in the sky almost all day. We were there pretty much at high summer too, so we’d watch as the sun finally sank below the horizon at about midnight, very briefly enjoy a kind of purpley twilight, and then watch as the sun came right back up! Utterly surreal, and very strange to get used to.
St Petersburg is built on the river Neva and has an intricate system of canals running through the entire city, so many of the streets are on the water and have graceful little bridges running over the canals, with boats floating along underneath them. The architecture is very European, and it’s a place where you can literally feel the history – I found it really easy to imagine the streets full of horses and carriages instead of cars. Most of the city is in beautiful condition, but every now and then we’d stumble across a street where the stone edifices on the buildings were crumbling and blackened with grime and with a jolt I’d remember that the history of the city wasn’t all Tsars and grandeur…. in the Second World War, when the city was called Leningrad, it was held for siege for 900 days, and the citizens had to eke out an existence as best they could under continual Nazi bombardment.
Anyway… enough of the history lesson! For us, the highlight of St Petersburg was right in the very heart of the city – the Winter Palace. Basically the place where the Russian Tsars would spend the harsh winter months, it was a beautiful, bright blue palace built on the river that is absolutely stuffed to the gills with gold encrusted furniture and priceless works of art. We spent a happy day fighting with the other billion tourists to get a good look at all the luxury, and trying to snap photos in the millisecond when there’s no one else in the background.
Palaces were certainly something St Petersburg wasn’t short of, and we visited several, some of which were slightly outside the major city. The most beautiful was the palace owned/built by Catherine the Great, known (not very originally) as Catherine’s Palace. It was, in my opinion, even more ostentatious and grandiose than Versailles in France. You honestly couldn’t fit one more bit of gold leaf in there or I’m sure the whole place would cave in on itself. Even more amazing is the fact that the place was totally ransacked by the Nazis in WW2 and nearly burned to the ground. We saw old photographs of what the palace looked like after their retreat – totally derelict with the ceilings and floors destroyed and many of the rooms devastated by fire. It’s an absolute credit to the Russian government how well it’s been restored. A similarly impressive palace was Peterhoff, where Peter the Great used to spend his time. Peterhoff, though, was impressive because of its grounds more so than the palace itself. Peter the Great had a thing for fountains, and had hundreds of them installed through the very elaborate gardens, and as it was summertime they were all playing beautifully!
Another event I’ll always remember as one of the highlights of our time in St Petersburg (and my life!) was a wonderful evening Marco had organised for us at the Russian Ballet. We went to see Swan Lake – the most Russian of all the Russian ballets! The performance itself was fabulous enough – the dancers superb, the costumes ethereal and dreamy, and the live orchestra absolutely perfect – but the icing on the cake was that it was performed in the breathtaking, centuries-old Alexandrinsky theatre! A theatre that the Tsars themselves used to go to, and watch the performance from the ornate, elaborate ‘Tsars Box’ that is still the best seat in the house (when we were there it was filled with a collection of tubby Japanese tourists). The chandelier in the theatre was about the size of our old living room. And if all that wasn’t enough, Marco had arranged for us to watch the performance in sumptuous golden-tasselled, red-velveted style from our very own, private box! I just loved being there imagining all the Russian nobility sitting in that very same place hundreds of years ago, engaging in goodness knows what debauchery and carousing.
When we left St Petersburg it was to embark on our first stint along the Trans Siberian railway. We travelled third class, naturally, but we were amazed at how comfortable and convenient the trains were even so. Third class meant we were in a big long carriage where everyone was shoved in together rather than in private compartments, but none the less every passenger had their own sleeper bunk and with the rocking motion of the train it was marvellously easy to sleep. After the ghastly bus rides in South America, the Russian trains seemed like the height of luxury!
So we rode the train to the city of Vladimir, and spent 3 days staying in a guesthouse in the nearby ancient little village of Suzdal. In medieval ages it used to be a monastic centre, so it’s absolutely chock-a-block with convents, old cathedrals and churches. Everywhere we looked we saw bright onion domes, spires and church steeples. Women are forbidden to enter the Eastern Orthodox churches without covering their heads, so I invested in a lovely little silk head scarf and felt very Audrey Hepburn as I strolled through the cathedrals and convent grounds. Another thing about Suzdal was that it was absolutely filled with wildflowers. In some meadows they were so thick you couldn’t see the grass below them, and the nuns in the convents tended huge patches of sunflowers and cultivated gorgeous, madly out-of-control flowerbeds that exploded over the pavements and paths in beautiful swathes of colour.
From Suzdal we leaped back aboard the Trans-Siberian and stopped at Nizhny Novgorod, which was a very unremarkable place, though I do have to give special mention the very friendly (though extremely drunk) young man we met in the train station there. He was on his way home from a football match and standing behind me in the tickets queue; he noticed me nervously clutching our phrasebook in my clammy hand, trying to figure out which phrases I was going to have to use to buy a ticket. He tapped me on the shoulder and politely informed me that he spoke a little English (his English was flawless!) and that he’d be happy to translate for me and help me buy the tickets if necessary. Not only did he help us buy the exact tickets we needed for the cheapest price, but he also helped us navigate our way through a new city, and personally escorted us to the doorway of our guesthouse (which we later discovered was in a very dangerous area). This guy single handedly managed to make up for the rudeness of the Muscovites!
From Nizhny Novgorod we did our first real, long leg on the train – 44 hours into SIBERIA!!!! Now, I’m lucky enough to have an auntie who comes from Siberia, and though she now lives in Australia with my uncle she just happened to be there at the same time as we were, visiting her family. So we spent a very happy few days staying with her in her home city of Novosibirsk. It was during this time that we really got our first taste of traditional Russian food, because my aunt Margarita is also an amazing cook! We were royally feasted on delicious dumplings, spiced/picked vegetables, traditional salads and fresh melons and berries. As well as just generally spending time with family, the highlight of Novosibirsk were definitely our trip to the Russian circus, where we saw people and trained animals perform feats that made my jaw drop. Until you’ve seen a hot-pink poodle ride a unicycle across a tightrope towing a beaver in a basket, you haven’t really been to the circus. That’s all I’m saying!
From Novosibirsk, we headed to the smaller, university-town of Tomsk. We probably would have skipped Tomsk altogether if it hadn’t been for some absolutely lovely Russians we met in a backpackers’ hostel in Colombia last year, who invited us to stay with them. And I’m so glad we did, because Tomsk was a great place. It’s filled with old, crumbling, ramshackle wooden buildings bedecked with wooden lace, painted in bright colours and some so old they’re literally falling apart at the seams. Our friends were kind enough to take us to the ‘dacha’ of a friend of theirs – meaning the patch of land handed out to all families by the Communist Party to allow them to build a second home and grow their own produce. This family’s dacha was beautifully nestled in amongst row upon glorious row of furiously growing vegetables, fruits and berries. We spent hours happily grazing like animals, eating berries straight off the trees in the afternoon sunshine. To top the day off, we all sat around on the grass as we grilled marinated chicken and fish over a fire pit and ate them along with freshly grown vegetables picked minutes before. A very authentic Russian experience.
From Tomsk we headed back to Novosibirsk to leap back aboard the Trans Siberian, and after another 24 hours on the train we reached the little town of Irkutsk: a very pretty place with lots more of the ramshackle, timber buildings adorned with wooden lace we’d seen in Tomsk. It was at this point that we really noticed the faces of the people in the streets looked significantly different, and the city definitely had a much more Asian feel about it. I think that was when we really first realised just how far we’d come along the train line, and that we really were close to the border with Mongolia.
We had a bit of an anxious time here and I must confess I began sweating bullets for a few days as our Russian visas were perilously close to expiring, and we still had to wait for our Mongolian tourist visas to be processed at the consulate in Irkutsk for the next leg of our journey. Just getting visas for Russia was a complicated enough process (think official Letters of Invitation, sponsored Tourist Vouchers and an ongoing process of registration) – the last thing we wanted to do was accidentally overstay and end up in the country illegally! To take our minds off the potential looming catastrophe we left our passports with the consulate and went to visit the nearby Lake Baikal, which is the both the largest and the deepest freshwater lake in the world (it holds 25% of all the fresh water on Earth). Our anxiety about the visas didn’t stop us from appreciating the beautiful lake, and though it was quite touristy and expensive in the area it was lovely just to walk along the banks of a lake so vast it looked like an ocean. The water in Lake Baikal is drinkably pure, a vivid crystalline blue, and the shores are flanked by beautiful natural vegetation and wildflowers.
Upon our return to Irkutsk we gratefully picked up our passports from the Mongolian consulate, and – with quite literally only hours remaining on our Russian visas – hightailed it outta there and crossed the border. I think Marco and I both felt a little frazzled and emotional at leaving… Russia really was unique among all the countries we’ve visited on our trip so far. It was also very expensive (at least, it was by our backpacking standards) – at one point we described Russia as feeling like one constant trip to the ATM. But though it was definitely challenging and at times frustrating because of the language barrier, it was also tremendously rewarding.
Our train chugged into the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar very early in the morning, and upon disembarking we were relieved to find ourselves walking down a street where many of the signs had the English alphabet as well as the Cyrillic. People in general seemed much more willing to approach and offer help to bemused looking backpackers, and to top it all off Ulaanbaatar is blissfully cheap! Unfortunately, though, it is also absolutely teaming with pickpockets, and practically every traveller we’ve met has had something lifted from their pack. We’ve been ridiculously lucky so far – I realised a split-second too late that I had a chap with his hands elbow-deep in my backpack, but through sheer dumb luck nothing was taken. I had my jumper at the very top of the pack which blocked his access to any of our valuable stuff, but we’ve learned from the experience and now always keep our backpacks on our chests. Let’s hope we stay lucky!
We didn’t lose any time in setting out to see the sights of Mongolia, and began by teaming up with 3 Israelis and a Danish chap and embarking on a 7 day tour of the Gobi desert. We camped every night, didn’t have a single shower in the whole 7 days, and were driving around in a minivan so ancient and beat up it was like sitting in a washing machine. But although we were all extremely hot, dusty and looking forward to a comfortable night’s sleep by the end of our Gobi Desert exploration, we really saw some of the most spectacular scenery we’ve seen in our entire 14 months travelling. At times it was like being on another planet. Much of the desert isn’t ‘deserty’ at all… we drove for hours and hours through endlessly rolling, grassy hillsides with not a tree in sight, we saw slowly moving herds of yaks, horses, goats and camels being driven by Mongols on horses or on foot dressed in traditional costume. As well as that, we saw phenomenal, flaming red cliffs that towered and stretched out along the horizon for miles, rode camels along mammoth sand dunes, and camped out under the stars on the flat plains known as ‘steppes’.
Outside the cities, Mongolia really seems to be a country that is frozen in time. Many of the Mongols still live traditional nomadic lifestyles, living truly in the middle of nowhere in white felt huts called ‘gers’, which they dismantle when they’re ready to move on and then reassemble at a new spot. The landscapes are endlessly vast – I’ve never been in a country where the sky looks so big. Most of Mongolia is treeless, so it’s just hillsides covered in grass that seem to roll away for ever. It’s quite a lonely landscape in some ways, but also very, very beautiful.
I now also have another reason to love this country. Right at the top of a beautiful waterfall in central Mongolia, I turned around to find Marco down on bended knee with a lovely ring that used to belong to his mother. So after over 6 years together and an epic exploration of the globe that has, to date, lasted 14 months, I’m pleased to say that we are engaged and feeling very happy.
Well, that’s about it for now! We have another week left in Mongolia, during which we think we’ll head up to the North and spend a couple of days riding horses and soaking up some more of these stupendous landscapes, and then it’s back on the train to Beijing to tackle China.
Once again – if you actually read this entire travelogue, then thank you thank you thank you, and I’m grateful to you for your time! As always, we really miss you all at home, and think of you all very often.
I know it’s been a long while between updates, but the break is over because, after a lovely visit home to Australia to see family and organise visa paperwork, I’m happy to report that Marco and I are back on the road and the travelogues are recommencing! I’m also pleased to announce that we made the investment of a little laptop (thank you, e-bay) so I’m now typing this to you in the comfort of our guesthouse, rather than banging it out on a greasy keyboard in an internet café somewhere. Much more pleasant!
We began what we refer to as ‘Phase 2’ of the trip in Russia. And wow – what a country it was. It’s so enormously vast and varied that I feel I should say a few words about the place in general before getting into the specifics of it. It’s truly like nowhere I’ve ever been before – we met people who went miles out of their way to help us, and also people who were utterly unsympathetic to the confused traveller and would blatantly roll their eyes at us trying to negotiate complicated Russian trains and metros. We saw villages that were as ancient as the hills and cities that were the ultimate thriving, modern metropolis. We both bore a furious grudge against the old people in the country who seemed (without fail) to shamelessly push in front of us in EVERY SINGLE QUEUE WE GOT IN until someone pointed out to us that they’d lived most of their lives in the Soviet Communist era, and that in those times if you didn’t push in you missed out. We saw the tombs of WW2 war criminals covered in roses, and spent days on end on trains. We spent 4 weeks in Russia, and yet I still don’t feel I managed to gain any kind of proper understanding of the place.
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| St Basil's Cathedral, Moscow |
But, I have to start somewhere, so for want of a better idea I’ll begin at the beginning! Our first stop in Russia was Moscow, and as Marco and I had spent some time apart applying for visas (me with my family in Australia, him with his parents in the USA) it was absolutely lovely to see one another again, and to feel a fresh sense of excitement to have our packs on our backs and be back on the road once more. I must confess that we approached Moscow with a bit of a sense of trepidation… after a cushy time period spent living in the same, English-speaking place and enjoying home comforts we were a little worried that we may have lost some of our travelling ‘smarts’, and had heard plenty of stories about Russians being fairly unfriendly to foreigners… not to mention the difficulty of the language. I’d been doing my darndest to learn a word a day before leaving, but even the simplest words seemed to have about 8 syllables that tied my tongue in knots and had me spraying spit all over the place.
Anyway – that may be too much information! Luckily, we fell back into the swing of miming and pointing before too long, and we managed to negotiate the utterly insane Moscow subway systems without too much trouble (thanks to Marco’s totally awesome map interpretation skills). Although it was a very big, quite dirty, fast paced city that was mostly unremarkable, it was still absolutely worth the visit because it contained a few sights that blew our minds – namely, The Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral and the Red Square. Conveniently, they were all located pretty much right next to each other and we lost no time in checking them out.
The Red Square was about 2 subway stops from the poxy shithole they had the nerve to call a guesthouse we stayed at, and the sight of it made our jaws drop. It was an absolutely vast courtyard flanked on one side by the red wall of the Kremlin, on another side by the vividly colourful St Basil’s cathedral, and on the remaining sides by yet more magnificent buildings and cathedrals. Taken all together, it was very impressive, very beautiful and very, very Russian!
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| View of the Red Square |
St Basil’s cathedral was definitely my favourite, and I liked it even more when I learned the fabulously gruesome story behind it… Ivan the Terrible had it built centuries ago to commemorate a military victory, and was then so delighted with it that he (purportedly) had the architect’s eyes plucked out so he could never design anything so beautiful again. How’s that for payment?!?! The cathedral itself isn’t actually very big, but it’s a marvel to look at, topped with multiple onion domes painted the brightest shades of red, blue and green. The whole thing is just about the craziest kaleidoscope of colours you ever saw from the outside, and the inside is just as lovely: dim rooms with walls covered in old, peeling religious murals and a lovely choir of Russian men in crisp white shirts singing hymns that echoed off the walls in a very ethereal manner.
Just next door to St Basil’s was The Kremlin – Russia’s political heart and hub. The complex was enclosed by an enormous, turreted red wall, above which towered the onion domes of plenty more cathedrals (this time in shiny silver and gold). We bought ourselves tickets and lined up with the rest of the tourists, watching the official looking cars as they whizzed in and out ferrying goodness knows who. Inside it was almost like another world away from the dirt and noise of Moscow in general. There were lovely, peaceful, shady gardens to sit in, and several gorgeous old cathedrals to explore. We also visited what’s known as The Armoury, which is more or less Russia’s equivalent of the Crown Jewels and houses their national treasures. We saw the dress that Catherine the Great wore at her coronation, the crown, orb and sceptre that belonged to Ivan the Terrible, and enough jewels and gold-encrusted objects to knock your socks off. Those Tsars sure knew how to live!!
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| One very small part of the Kremlin |
We were very lucky during our time in Moscow and had brilliant blue skies almost every day, but the downside of that was that the sun was so strong we had to return to our guesthouse to take a nap most afternoons as we were so worn out by the heat. We didn’t stay long in Moscow as it was a hellishly expensive place, and also I’m afraid I admit that we did find the stereotype to be true… the people in Moscow really weren’t the friendliest. As practically nothing in the city was in English we needed to ask for help quite a bit, and often we’d have to stop 2 or 3 people before we found someone who was even willing to give us the time of day and look at our map or watch our sign language. Many of the people would quite literally turn around and face the other way when we approached them, or simply shrug us off, even when we were wearing our friendliest, most charming and beguiling smiles. But to give credit where it’s due – in terms ofappearance the Muscovites were absolutely stunning. The women in particular. It seems to be a city where women dress to the nines, style their hair and slap on heels and makeup just to go down to the shops to buy a bottle of milk. They also seemed to have some strange aversion to wearing bras… it was extremely common to see some beautiful woman clad in designer clothing strutting down the street in stilettos with her top half totally unrestrained, bouncing about and jiggling like mad. And we saw it A LOT, too, not just a couple of times. At least, I should say I saw it a lot... Marco assures me he never noticed it once!!! ;-)
So, after only 3 days we left the heat and haste of Moscow and took the train to St Petersburg. Now, I don’t say this so unreservedly very often, but this is a case where I feel I can hold nothing back. I LOVED St Petersburg. I mean I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. It was a beautiful, timeless, romantic city and so elegantly European. I’m sorry – I know I’m gushing, but it really was just gorgeous. For starters, it is so far north that the sun stays high in the sky almost all day. We were there pretty much at high summer too, so we’d watch as the sun finally sank below the horizon at about midnight, very briefly enjoy a kind of purpley twilight, and then watch as the sun came right back up! Utterly surreal, and very strange to get used to.
St Petersburg is built on the river Neva and has an intricate system of canals running through the entire city, so many of the streets are on the water and have graceful little bridges running over the canals, with boats floating along underneath them. The architecture is very European, and it’s a place where you can literally feel the history – I found it really easy to imagine the streets full of horses and carriages instead of cars. Most of the city is in beautiful condition, but every now and then we’d stumble across a street where the stone edifices on the buildings were crumbling and blackened with grime and with a jolt I’d remember that the history of the city wasn’t all Tsars and grandeur…. in the Second World War, when the city was called Leningrad, it was held for siege for 900 days, and the citizens had to eke out an existence as best they could under continual Nazi bombardment.
Anyway… enough of the history lesson! For us, the highlight of St Petersburg was right in the very heart of the city – the Winter Palace. Basically the place where the Russian Tsars would spend the harsh winter months, it was a beautiful, bright blue palace built on the river that is absolutely stuffed to the gills with gold encrusted furniture and priceless works of art. We spent a happy day fighting with the other billion tourists to get a good look at all the luxury, and trying to snap photos in the millisecond when there’s no one else in the background.
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| The Winter Palace, St Petersburg |
Palaces were certainly something St Petersburg wasn’t short of, and we visited several, some of which were slightly outside the major city. The most beautiful was the palace owned/built by Catherine the Great, known (not very originally) as Catherine’s Palace. It was, in my opinion, even more ostentatious and grandiose than Versailles in France. You honestly couldn’t fit one more bit of gold leaf in there or I’m sure the whole place would cave in on itself. Even more amazing is the fact that the place was totally ransacked by the Nazis in WW2 and nearly burned to the ground. We saw old photographs of what the palace looked like after their retreat – totally derelict with the ceilings and floors destroyed and many of the rooms devastated by fire. It’s an absolute credit to the Russian government how well it’s been restored. A similarly impressive palace was Peterhoff, where Peter the Great used to spend his time. Peterhoff, though, was impressive because of its grounds more so than the palace itself. Peter the Great had a thing for fountains, and had hundreds of them installed through the very elaborate gardens, and as it was summertime they were all playing beautifully!
Another event I’ll always remember as one of the highlights of our time in St Petersburg (and my life!) was a wonderful evening Marco had organised for us at the Russian Ballet. We went to see Swan Lake – the most Russian of all the Russian ballets! The performance itself was fabulous enough – the dancers superb, the costumes ethereal and dreamy, and the live orchestra absolutely perfect – but the icing on the cake was that it was performed in the breathtaking, centuries-old Alexandrinsky theatre! A theatre that the Tsars themselves used to go to, and watch the performance from the ornate, elaborate ‘Tsars Box’ that is still the best seat in the house (when we were there it was filled with a collection of tubby Japanese tourists). The chandelier in the theatre was about the size of our old living room. And if all that wasn’t enough, Marco had arranged for us to watch the performance in sumptuous golden-tasselled, red-velveted style from our very own, private box! I just loved being there imagining all the Russian nobility sitting in that very same place hundreds of years ago, engaging in goodness knows what debauchery and carousing.
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| Our wonderful evening at the Russian Ballet - thank you Marco!! |
When we left St Petersburg it was to embark on our first stint along the Trans Siberian railway. We travelled third class, naturally, but we were amazed at how comfortable and convenient the trains were even so. Third class meant we were in a big long carriage where everyone was shoved in together rather than in private compartments, but none the less every passenger had their own sleeper bunk and with the rocking motion of the train it was marvellously easy to sleep. After the ghastly bus rides in South America, the Russian trains seemed like the height of luxury!
So we rode the train to the city of Vladimir, and spent 3 days staying in a guesthouse in the nearby ancient little village of Suzdal. In medieval ages it used to be a monastic centre, so it’s absolutely chock-a-block with convents, old cathedrals and churches. Everywhere we looked we saw bright onion domes, spires and church steeples. Women are forbidden to enter the Eastern Orthodox churches without covering their heads, so I invested in a lovely little silk head scarf and felt very Audrey Hepburn as I strolled through the cathedrals and convent grounds. Another thing about Suzdal was that it was absolutely filled with wildflowers. In some meadows they were so thick you couldn’t see the grass below them, and the nuns in the convents tended huge patches of sunflowers and cultivated gorgeous, madly out-of-control flowerbeds that exploded over the pavements and paths in beautiful swathes of colour.
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| A lovely convent in Suzdal, complete with glorious garden |
From Suzdal we leaped back aboard the Trans-Siberian and stopped at Nizhny Novgorod, which was a very unremarkable place, though I do have to give special mention the very friendly (though extremely drunk) young man we met in the train station there. He was on his way home from a football match and standing behind me in the tickets queue; he noticed me nervously clutching our phrasebook in my clammy hand, trying to figure out which phrases I was going to have to use to buy a ticket. He tapped me on the shoulder and politely informed me that he spoke a little English (his English was flawless!) and that he’d be happy to translate for me and help me buy the tickets if necessary. Not only did he help us buy the exact tickets we needed for the cheapest price, but he also helped us navigate our way through a new city, and personally escorted us to the doorway of our guesthouse (which we later discovered was in a very dangerous area). This guy single handedly managed to make up for the rudeness of the Muscovites!
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| 3rd class carriage on the Trans-Siberian Railway |
From Nizhny Novgorod we did our first real, long leg on the train – 44 hours into SIBERIA!!!! Now, I’m lucky enough to have an auntie who comes from Siberia, and though she now lives in Australia with my uncle she just happened to be there at the same time as we were, visiting her family. So we spent a very happy few days staying with her in her home city of Novosibirsk. It was during this time that we really got our first taste of traditional Russian food, because my aunt Margarita is also an amazing cook! We were royally feasted on delicious dumplings, spiced/picked vegetables, traditional salads and fresh melons and berries. As well as just generally spending time with family, the highlight of Novosibirsk were definitely our trip to the Russian circus, where we saw people and trained animals perform feats that made my jaw drop. Until you’ve seen a hot-pink poodle ride a unicycle across a tightrope towing a beaver in a basket, you haven’t really been to the circus. That’s all I’m saying!
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| The Russian Circus |
From Novosibirsk, we headed to the smaller, university-town of Tomsk. We probably would have skipped Tomsk altogether if it hadn’t been for some absolutely lovely Russians we met in a backpackers’ hostel in Colombia last year, who invited us to stay with them. And I’m so glad we did, because Tomsk was a great place. It’s filled with old, crumbling, ramshackle wooden buildings bedecked with wooden lace, painted in bright colours and some so old they’re literally falling apart at the seams. Our friends were kind enough to take us to the ‘dacha’ of a friend of theirs – meaning the patch of land handed out to all families by the Communist Party to allow them to build a second home and grow their own produce. This family’s dacha was beautifully nestled in amongst row upon glorious row of furiously growing vegetables, fruits and berries. We spent hours happily grazing like animals, eating berries straight off the trees in the afternoon sunshine. To top the day off, we all sat around on the grass as we grilled marinated chicken and fish over a fire pit and ate them along with freshly grown vegetables picked minutes before. A very authentic Russian experience.
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| Marco picking berries at the Dacha |
From Tomsk we headed back to Novosibirsk to leap back aboard the Trans Siberian, and after another 24 hours on the train we reached the little town of Irkutsk: a very pretty place with lots more of the ramshackle, timber buildings adorned with wooden lace we’d seen in Tomsk. It was at this point that we really noticed the faces of the people in the streets looked significantly different, and the city definitely had a much more Asian feel about it. I think that was when we really first realised just how far we’d come along the train line, and that we really were close to the border with Mongolia.
We had a bit of an anxious time here and I must confess I began sweating bullets for a few days as our Russian visas were perilously close to expiring, and we still had to wait for our Mongolian tourist visas to be processed at the consulate in Irkutsk for the next leg of our journey. Just getting visas for Russia was a complicated enough process (think official Letters of Invitation, sponsored Tourist Vouchers and an ongoing process of registration) – the last thing we wanted to do was accidentally overstay and end up in the country illegally! To take our minds off the potential looming catastrophe we left our passports with the consulate and went to visit the nearby Lake Baikal, which is the both the largest and the deepest freshwater lake in the world (it holds 25% of all the fresh water on Earth). Our anxiety about the visas didn’t stop us from appreciating the beautiful lake, and though it was quite touristy and expensive in the area it was lovely just to walk along the banks of a lake so vast it looked like an ocean. The water in Lake Baikal is drinkably pure, a vivid crystalline blue, and the shores are flanked by beautiful natural vegetation and wildflowers.
Upon our return to Irkutsk we gratefully picked up our passports from the Mongolian consulate, and – with quite literally only hours remaining on our Russian visas – hightailed it outta there and crossed the border. I think Marco and I both felt a little frazzled and emotional at leaving… Russia really was unique among all the countries we’ve visited on our trip so far. It was also very expensive (at least, it was by our backpacking standards) – at one point we described Russia as feeling like one constant trip to the ATM. But though it was definitely challenging and at times frustrating because of the language barrier, it was also tremendously rewarding.
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| Irkutsk |
Our train chugged into the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar very early in the morning, and upon disembarking we were relieved to find ourselves walking down a street where many of the signs had the English alphabet as well as the Cyrillic. People in general seemed much more willing to approach and offer help to bemused looking backpackers, and to top it all off Ulaanbaatar is blissfully cheap! Unfortunately, though, it is also absolutely teaming with pickpockets, and practically every traveller we’ve met has had something lifted from their pack. We’ve been ridiculously lucky so far – I realised a split-second too late that I had a chap with his hands elbow-deep in my backpack, but through sheer dumb luck nothing was taken. I had my jumper at the very top of the pack which blocked his access to any of our valuable stuff, but we’ve learned from the experience and now always keep our backpacks on our chests. Let’s hope we stay lucky!
We didn’t lose any time in setting out to see the sights of Mongolia, and began by teaming up with 3 Israelis and a Danish chap and embarking on a 7 day tour of the Gobi desert. We camped every night, didn’t have a single shower in the whole 7 days, and were driving around in a minivan so ancient and beat up it was like sitting in a washing machine. But although we were all extremely hot, dusty and looking forward to a comfortable night’s sleep by the end of our Gobi Desert exploration, we really saw some of the most spectacular scenery we’ve seen in our entire 14 months travelling. At times it was like being on another planet. Much of the desert isn’t ‘deserty’ at all… we drove for hours and hours through endlessly rolling, grassy hillsides with not a tree in sight, we saw slowly moving herds of yaks, horses, goats and camels being driven by Mongols on horses or on foot dressed in traditional costume. As well as that, we saw phenomenal, flaming red cliffs that towered and stretched out along the horizon for miles, rode camels along mammoth sand dunes, and camped out under the stars on the flat plains known as ‘steppes’.
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| Camel riding on the Mongolian sand dunes |
Outside the cities, Mongolia really seems to be a country that is frozen in time. Many of the Mongols still live traditional nomadic lifestyles, living truly in the middle of nowhere in white felt huts called ‘gers’, which they dismantle when they’re ready to move on and then reassemble at a new spot. The landscapes are endlessly vast – I’ve never been in a country where the sky looks so big. Most of Mongolia is treeless, so it’s just hillsides covered in grass that seem to roll away for ever. It’s quite a lonely landscape in some ways, but also very, very beautiful.
I now also have another reason to love this country. Right at the top of a beautiful waterfall in central Mongolia, I turned around to find Marco down on bended knee with a lovely ring that used to belong to his mother. So after over 6 years together and an epic exploration of the globe that has, to date, lasted 14 months, I’m pleased to say that we are engaged and feeling very happy.
Well, that’s about it for now! We have another week left in Mongolia, during which we think we’ll head up to the North and spend a couple of days riding horses and soaking up some more of these stupendous landscapes, and then it’s back on the train to Beijing to tackle China.
Once again – if you actually read this entire travelogue, then thank you thank you thank you, and I’m grateful to you for your time! As always, we really miss you all at home, and think of you all very often.
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