ZDRAVSTVUJTYE!

Well, we're in!
It only took 4 hours to cross the border – 2 hours of waiting, followed by 2 hours with 4 different sections of border control with people who don't speak English trying to sort out the paperwork of 2 inept smiley scared Brits, who only know the Russian for “please” and “thank you”!
Once across the border ... what a difference! Roads are unbelievably pot-holed most of the time (although there are extensive road renewal works in lots of places). All of a sudden too, we were only seeing Russian cars (lots of Ladas, which we didn't realise they still make!) And not that Russia is a big country, but we drove 60km to Pskov, and only went round one corner ...

There was a flurry of panic in the car as we arrived in Pskov to be surrounded by lots of road signs in Cyrillic – thankfully Russ had learned the word for “Centre” so we followed signs accordingly, until we found a Lonely Planet recommended hotel, the Hotel Rizhskaya, the best hotel in Pskov apparently, where a room cost us a grand total of £30... an experience in itself, where each floor of the hotel has a lady who looks after the room keys, and keeps a tight rein! Breakfast was in a converted bedroom on the 2nd floor, with ½ dozen small tables, and a little kitchen where the bathroom would normally have been ...
That first afternoon and evening was quite a revelation; our hotel backed onto what looked like the set of a Harry Palmer movie (above); the ultimate Cold War Soviet scenes of tower block flats and knocked-about cars parked in the mud in between the high rises. I'm not ashamed to say we both called our mummies for some TLC and reassurance! (Thank you Mummies). (Strewth, how embarassing! My wife is 40 and she writes like this - Russell).
We keep saying to each other about the road systems in Russian cities; that we are glad we've had the transition of driving across different countries (eg Poland), 'cos if you were just dropped into here with a car, you wouldn't have a cat in hell's chance – it is completely mad! Russians are the masters at queuing, except when they're in a car! There's absolutely no road discipline – if it's a 3-lane carriageway each way, someone will “create” a 4th and even a 5th lane in between. At crossroad junctions people pull across into the middle and sit there, irrespective of the fact that they are blocking the way of the other 3 junctions. Undertaking? A way of life here.

Bizarrely, just has we had in Latvia, we turned up in St P the night before their main “Victory Day” holiday (celebrating the end of WWII and the breaking of the 900 day Nazi blockade). Unfortunately we were so shattered from our journey the day before that we pretty much slept through most of their morning military parade (but did catch some of Moscow's on the TV). However we did get to see the afternoon parade of survivors, being driven up the main route in old military vehicles, accompanied by small representative marching groups of the different forces.
We've both come to be quite fond of St P; the centre is a manageable size to walk around and once you get the hang of the road system, it's a fairly easy place to drive around, and drive in and out of. There are 3 beautiful canals; if the light's right they rival some of Venice's views. There are also some nice parks (albeit small); we had a wander round the Summer Palace Garden, and the Mars Field park,where an eternal flame burns for victims of the 1917 revolution.

A small section of the vast Winter Palace

We managed to see the main tourist attraction, the Hermitage, which has some wonderful rooms, especially in the Winter Palace, and a great collection of art (never did I expect to find myself in a room with 15 Picassos, most of which aren't even behind glass). However, we've come to learn that a favourite local phrase is “it's closed” - I was looking forward to seeing the dozen rooms occupied by the last imperial family, including Nicholas II's library - “this wing? It's closed” and the Malachite Hall (supposedly the most impressive room in the Hermitage) “it's closed” and the family chapel “it's closed” and then at the end of the day, when we'd made it as far as the French art collection, as the big hand on the clock hit 5pm and we were about to walk into the rooms containing works by Monet, Renoir and Degas, off went the lights and “it's closed”.

Looking across the River Neva to the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg

A huge error on our part was not checking to see when Catherine's Palace, 25k south of St P was open. We decided we'd visit on the Tuesday, but no “it's closed”. As a consolation prize (or so we thought) we decided to drive west instead, to the Gulf of Finland and the Petrodvorets estate, fully expecting its famed gravity-powered fountains to be switched off (example, above), but no! It was all up and running and it was absolutely glorious – shiny, gold and pretty, with lots of greenery and a lovely yellow and gold palace that looked “comfy”! Whichever tree-lined avenue you walk down, there's another different beautiful fountain, and the main Grand Cascade runs into a canal that flows down into the Gulf itself.
Our only other adventure of note in St P was the inept British couple's 45 minute walk to the British Consulate to register our presence in Russia. We glibly assumed we'd wave our passports and wander through the Consulate for a chat with some nice young UK chap. The reality? We arrived at a gated entrance, to be met by two Russian men,who although very pleasant, were in no frame of mind to let us in! What would two English people want with the British Consulate after all?! However, they very kindly phoned through and got us access to the Visa department, where we were met by a very serious but extremely polite Russian security guard, and then we went up to a glass-fronted counter where we were advised by a nice Russian lady that we couldn't register at the Consulate anyway, we needed to do it online ... (All Russians seem serious. Most of those in customer service roles are capable of polite, but the default behaviour for Russians, generally, is surly or pouty. We regard it as a victory to get a smile out of one and that takes patience and time. We had a conversation with a Russian chap who told us that they cannot understand why Westerners smile, although there seems to be a slightly rebellious (and at the same time materialistic) core of youngsters who are prepared to laugh and smile with each other in public. An observation on the various different types of police and army types wandering around (they really like uniforms, it seems) – treat them like nasty dogs; if you look them in the eye, they might think you are challenging them, so don't - Russell).

Left - an empty roadside 'shop' unit (in the rural areas, these structures are quite common)

Below - thanks to Guy, Angela, Joe and Marcus for the 'innovative' Spork, invaluable for car picnics

Moscow was our next goal; we thought 2 days to get there, no problem. Well yes, it probably is 2 days if you can get your arse into gear and leave St P before midday on the first day. As it was, we got 210k south by late afternoon, then hit major traffic jams,so we gave up after an hour, turned off onto a dirt road (actually a B road equivalent)and headed back 30k for a night in Novgorod. We were pleased to have done so; a very pretty town and kremlin (fortified citadel – we've now realised how common kremlins are across Russia). Day 2 of this excursion meant covering 510k, which we mostly did in good time (and we'd actually managed to start out about 9.30am that morning) until we got to the outskirts of Moscow. What we should have done at that point, if not earlier, was give in to the fact that we weren't quite going to make Moscow in 2 days, and so would spend the night in a hotel in the outskirts. But no, the invincible, inept British couple kept going, entering the city of Moscow at 8pm, and finally booking into the Novotel in the city centre for one night at 11pm and spending a week's budget for the privilege of doing so (yes, really).

Our view of the All-Russia Exhibition Centre

Now we are coming up to our 4th and final night at the Cosmos Hotel, out by the All-Russian Exhibition Centre. It's an amazing 1700 room hotel that thinks it should really be in Las Vegas – the two-tier lobby has got bars, restaurants, slot machines, casino, ladies of the night ...

Some of the towers along the wall of the Kremlin

We have of course been to the Kremlin, a surprisingly peaceful, and spacious area, wandering tourists notwithstanding (and once again a place we got kicked out of as the clock struck 5!), and visited it's Armoury, which sadly for Russell did not contain much in the way of arms, but fantastically for me does contain more jewelled items than you can shake a stick at, including a selection of gorgeous Fabergé eggs.

Darwin at St Basil's Cathedral, Red Square

We've risked the Metro system 2 days in a row, and you know, it's not really that different to the London tube, once you can translate the signs. Whether it's because we've seen so much in a short space of time, with Moscow we've struggled to find the “wow” factor (apart from St Basil's Cathedral, which is completely mad).
Our strangest experience I think so far was our trip yesterday to have a look at the Komsomolskaya Ploshchad, the transportation hub of Moscow, where 3 architecturally different train stations sit round one square. As Russ said at the time, it was like walking onto the set of a Mad Max movie; the types of people here are so different from the sleek, groomed, shiny people of the city centre; here are drunks, tramps and generally people who’ve slipped through the cracks in society.

So we get trucking again tomorrow, on to Nizhny Novgorod, and then generally following the Trans Siberian railway route across to Siberia. The bigger picture of our journey is still a little undecided; for the China part of the trip, the quote from the agents suddenly tripled, then following a lengthy revisal of our route by Russ, to leave from Shanghai rather than Hong Kong, to make it shorter and hopefully much cheaper, of course China suffered their terrible earthquake (plus there seem to be problems with obtaining long duration visas at the moment). The agents we've been liaising with are based in Chengdu, and although all are safe, are spending a lot of time helping their community, so we now need to be patient and see if it can yet come off. If not, it could be something of a double-back, down through the Stans and into India, or maybe keep driving across Russia to Vladivostok and ship out to Australia from there. Who knows? We'll keep you posted.

Yellow Brick Road – More Like Solid Brick Wall

26.04.08 Camping in Kladow, a few kms West of Berlin and close to Potsdam, alongside the line of the old wall (we think). A beautiful wooded area and the most raucous dawn chorus we've ever heard. Had lunch outside in Kladow town itself and had my first schnitzel (Alexis). Campsite great – clean and plentiful facilities. Cooked our first camp dinner, then went for a walk and came across a beautiful lake – all pretty idyllic.
Next day we went to Berlin itself, and due to a language error, ended up paying to get into the city zoo, and then couldn't find our way out. Good side of language barrier – ended up driving right up the Brandenburg Gate (above) and got some fab photos of it (was only supposed to be route for taxis!) Also got our zlotys (Polish currency) for the next day.
Monday 28th and off to Posnan in Poland. For some bizarre reason it took us 4 hours to have breakfast and get all packed up (Not bizarre at all. Just too flipping casual and not in a mind to leave – Russell) – we only just managed to get out of the campsite around checkout time (11.15am when we should have been out by 11.00am). Once outside Berlin we came across a Toyota dealer - Thomas Reist - who sold us ½ dozen car fuses (to top up our supply of the ones we'd blown up earlier in the week). On the road in Poland it became apparent that Polish drivers are “slightly” nutty – they think nothing of overtaking into oncoming traffic, even if that oncoming traffic is a huge truck. We learned pretty quickly that you pull off the road as far as you can when you see a vehicle sitting on your rear bumper. Didn't make it to Posnan til 7.30pm that night, so found an Ibis hotel with not too much difficulty and hunkered there for the night. (I regret not taking any photos of Posnan - pretty city centre. Poland seems vibrant. A lot of businesses are 24 hour – notably amongst them, depots buying and selling pallets for truck freight. Polish trunk roads are very busy (and not always well-constructed) – sometimes just long lines of trucks. The town and city centres seem to have kept their history, but the bigger of these also have sprawling out of town retail and commercial areas that look more like the USA than Europe – Russell).
(Along the major roads, at least, there are a lot of modern, privately-owned restaurants (some 24 hour) and hotels. Food in these (good, fresh food at that), seems to be less than half the cost of the UK equivalent (or a quarter of a Little Chef bill). I suspect that the hotels are cheap (and comfortable), too. As with the Netherlands and Germany, the cost of petrol and diesel in Poland is about the same as the UK, so fuel must seem, disproportionately, very expensive to Poles. This is probably why there are a lot of LPG stations in Poland - Russell).

- The Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw.

Tuesday and on again – Posnan to Warsaw now. Found out we couldn't get on the motorway without a special permit (there are very few motorways; we should have obtained a 'vignette' at the border, but found that out too late - Russell), so decided to take the E route, and what a difference suddenly, to the quick, easy autobahns we'd become used to; now it's speed up, slow down, (swerve to miss oncoming, overtaking cars and trucks), etc as we leave or get to small towns along the route. It took over 5 hours to get to Warsaw and then we spent another 1 ½ hours trying to find another Ibis hotel that had been (badly as it turned out) signposted. In the end we gave up and found ourselves in a very comfortable Novotel (above) bang in the city centre (sorry JP, hardly the hippy dream you'd pictured for us!). The one big plus of having to spend another huge wodge of cash on accommodation was that we had free internet access – praise the gods! (A little melodramatic, perhaps. Finding cheap internet access is difficult when you don't have time to spend in a City centre looking for it. It's not that we are aimlessly surfing the net; amongst other bits of 'admin', we were in the middle of re-arranging our itinerary with the Chinese agent when we left the UK, as travelling through Tibet is no longer an option - Russell).

- Probably, a less common sight in recent years, but still normal transport for a few Polish.

Another day, another town – Bialystok this time; a very nice town with a very nice Best Western (yes, there's a theme here, but it's about to quite rudely change when we realise what our daily budget is supposed to be, versus what we've already spent). Not much to say about this place really, except we had a tasty veggy pizza at a street cafe. (Poland has a reputation for car crime. In Posnan, guests seemed to clamour to park their car outside the front of the hotel lobby, but I didn't sense that it was a dodgy area. In Warsaw, we were parked in the 'culture and entertainments' centre of the city and, I guess, there were plenty of 'reasonable' folk walking around day and night. In Bialystok, however, the hotel seemed to be in a little bit of a seedy part and had an office manned 24 hours, overlooking the car park, with the gate to the car park controlled from the office).

- Below - an example of a Soviet Era statue. Prior to independence, you weren't allowed to forget who was in charge.

Into May, and a different border to cross, from Poland into Lithuania. This time (following our wake-up call re funds), I'd done a bit of research and found a cheap and cheerful Hotel Metropolis in Kaunas (Traveladvisor.com said it had clean sheets and towels and was just fine if you went with a sense of humour and closed your eyes to the rest). We found Kaunas an odd mix – flash shops down a main promenade, but then defunct factory / industrial buildings around the edges and quite a few “bag” ladies and gents. Not sure what's been going on here. (In Kaunus, too, a 24 hour car park means that there is somebody in an office (more like a shed) watching the car park night and day - Russell)

And yet another border on Friday 2 May – from Lithuania into Latvia, and the capital, Riga (right - 'Old' Riga). What a shock, for the first time since we'd started travelling, it rained! Managed to have a bit of a wander round old town Riga – very pretty but very touristy. We booked ourselves in the Hotel Irina close to the station, after turning up at one of the Youth Hostels to be told we'd be lucky to find a room since we'd come at a major holiday weekend (4 May is Latvian Independence Day).
Saturday we were meant to cross into Russia, but hit some interesting problems today. For one, suddenly our credit card was being refused .... slight panic to say the least, added to by the fact that my phone (our main contact with the Western world) had run out of credit and couldn't be automatically topped up cos it came off the credit card, which was now not letting any payments go through .... Luckily we had a brainwave and put my old sim card in my phone and managed to call the credit card company. Note for all future travellers – tell your credit card company if you're going away for a little while – ours had stopped transactions because it was “out of character” for us... (sigh...my fault; it was the one card provider that I hadn't informed - Russell). Our Wedding Anniversary day was spent driving 4 hours to the Russian border, realising that info we'd read re getting Russian 3rd party car insurance at a petrol station was a kind of a moot point since there was not a petrol station within 2 hours of the border, and driving back towards Riga for another 2 hours until we found a hotel to sulk in for the night. (When Latvia was still part of the Soviet Union, this would have been very busy, as it would have been the trade / supply route between Latvia and Russia. Along the route, there are large hotels, restaurants and truck facilities that are now unused and boarded up or unmanned. Presumably, Latvia now looks to the EU and the US for trade and Russia makes a point of ignoring it, in that respect. There are still some Russian tourists, but I think they are welcome only for their money (that said British 'stag-do' tourists have caught the critical eye of Latvian media, too - Russell).

- A view from a rural Latvian home.

Must mention the Hotel Melkuri on the Riga – Pskov road; it was the equivalent of £25 for the night, B&B, and was a real oasis in the middle of pretty much nowhere. The owner speaks little English, but Russ and he managed to converse quite comfortably in German, of all languages! (In other words, his German was as basic as mine. Also, the older generation in Poland and the Baltic States seem wary of saying much to strangers. Perhaps, this is a hangover from the Soviet era– Russell).
4 May, Sunday, back to Riga, to see if we can sort out our car insurance tomorrow and head back for the Russian border .... but no. The holiday weekend for banks continues inclusive of Monday, so now we have another 2 days to kill in Riga. Spent some time today taking in the Latvian Independence Day parade etc. and even saw the Latvian President laying a wreath of flowers at the main memorial. Also did the “proper”tourist route of old town, which was indeed scenic, but now we've done that, what's left??? Managed to book into the Balthostel, thehostel that had been fully booked a couple of nights back (and JP, this is definitely more the travellers accommodation you'd have pictured us in!!!).

So now it's Monday 5 May, still a public holiday, and we're kicking around, trying to work out what we can get done at the local 24 hour internet cafe, so that we can be as ready as we can be to get on with stuff again tomorrow. Let's hope next time we do our blog, it'll be from the “other” side.