A delightful weekend in the country

Much has happened since our last blog starting with our trip to a Russian dacha near Staritsa, a small town between St Petersberg and Moscow. This excursion promised snowy horseriding and simple living but delivered something much different...

We had arranged to be picked up at Tver station when our train arrived at 4:30am but half an hour's standing around in -18c temperatures gave us an indication something had gone awry. A few quick phone calls later (10 roubles of change doesn't go as far as you may think) and we knew that Pasha's car had failed to start and we had to make our own way there. A taxi driver was soon woken up and a price arranged. What our cabbie lacked in local knowledge he made up for in persistance. After multiple wrong turns and tracks that petered into nothing we arrived at the rendez-vous point and were met by Pasha and his horse drawn sleigh.

Pasha could be described as a somewaht cynical, world-weary man of few words. We soon came to think of him as a miserable sod. His place was very basic and featured a couple of heated rooms (the second warmed after we confounded his expectations by being able to light the wood burning stove (those Nibthwaite bonfires taught me much)), an outside loo 30 metres from the house (temperatures were routinely -20), a shower which looked like a deathtrap and a kitchen which would have shamed the Clampett family. Brave faces were applied but we all felt that our original estimate of 4 days here would be more than enough.

Hig and I were lucky enough to accompany Pasha into town after the car was tractor tow-started. Our host didn't open up much and exchanges like...

Hig: Your English is very good, where did you learn it?
Pasha: So is yours, where did you learn it?

...didn't really offer much encouragement. Our trip to town was primarily aimed at stocking up on food supplies for our time there (four days immediately cut to three on viewing the house, subsequntly cut to two after an afternoon with Pasha.) Letting him know we were going a couple of days early had a detrimental effect on suppliles, something we only found out about back at the 20-kilometres-from-town homestead when it turned out Pasha had 'run out of Roubles'. We had two days of eating pasta and tomato sauce and fried bread and tomato mush to look forward to. (Recipes for tomato mush available on request.) The live chicken in the basket was eyed up more than once. (Hig had seen a way to hypnotise a chicken on Tv but couldn't remember what it was. As a result we missed the chance to see a hen eating an onion thinking it was an apple.)

That's not to say we didn't enjoy ourselves. The scenery was breathtaking, Pasha's neighbour Kolya was a character and feeding logs into the fire never grew dull. The three of us also had a good laugh at the situation in a 'gallows humour' kind of way. The night before we left Vic tried to get Pasha to arrange a taxi which he was at first reluctant to do. He simply gave Vic the phone and a few cab numbers and let her get on with - pretty typical of the man. Eventually after a wall of Russian was clearly between us and a lift out he stepped in and arranged the pick up, not 100 metres from his house but over a kilometer away over the frozen Volga. The next day we set off with full packs in -21c temperatures like Scott, Oates and, er, Smith of the Antarctic and tramped through the snowy wastes. Despite ice forming on our eyelashes and stubbly chins we weren't that cold and the walk in the dawn light rates as one of the high spots of the trip.

From there, to Moscow and an amazing few days wandering around seeing Red Square, St Basil's Cathedral, the Kremlin, Lenin's Mausoleum (closed), the massive GUM shopping centre and the even bigger Hotel Russya. We had a fun afternoon looking round a market and bought some souvenirs but turned our nose up at the stamp album of a shady bloke and his mate despite the rather fetching Hitler collection he needed to shift to buy vodka.

We caught the train from Moscow at 9:35 on Tuesday night and got into Irkutsk at 12:40 early on Saturday morning, a barely credible 75 hours and 5,100 kilometers later. Life aboard the train was surprisingly good. Things were helped by having our compartment of four to ourselves for all but the first five hours and we whiled away the hours watching endless pine trees and silver birches drift by, counting the kilometer markers, drinking tea and coffee from the supply of boiling water in the carriage samovar and playing cards. Despite the time passing fairly painlessly we were all happy to get off today, slightly train-lagged as we have crossed 5 time zones and in desperate need of a shower.

From Irkutsk we plan to visit the worlds deepest freshwater lake at Baikal after which we'll astound one and all with some Siberia stats and facts. Bet you can't wait...