The first thing you need know is this: my love affair with Russia continues.
This must now count as one of my longest relationships. It is particularly surprising as several days on a train across Siberia would put most romances under strain but this Christmas and New Year have been the most memorable, and certainly the strangest, that I have ever had. I'd do it all again...but perhaps by plane next time.
I left Moscow on Christmas morning and, deciding to break myself in gently, my first destination was only a few hours away. I was heading for Suzdal, whose many convents and monasteries were the dumping grounds of choice for the unwanted wives of the tsars. Any hopes I had of finally making some headway with Tolstoy's War and Peace, which I'd dragged all the way through Scandinavia, were quickly dashed as my fellow passengers engaged me in conversation.
The Russians are very similar to the British in that they do not see an inability to speak their language as a barrier to understanding. It was assumed that my inability to understand was due to some sort of hearing difficulty so what seemed like the whole carriage proceeded to shout at me, smiling and waving all the time. At last I knew what it was like to work in a French motorway service station and have my mother turn up waving her arms and loudly ordering coffee and croissants in broken Spanish. It was less of a conversation and more an elaborate game of charades. Which was appropriate considering it was Christmas Day.
All that was really needed was patience. Questions like "What is your name?" took about five minutes to navigate, while questions like "What is the British public's attitude towards Kosovo?" took up to an hour or more with frequent detours into the realms of Pictionary.
By the time we reached Suzdal we had established that the man sitting opposite me was called Vladimir. His father's name was Gary, just like Gary Cooper, Gary Lineker and several other Garys, he had been to Madagascar, although no amount of sketches could convey exactly what he had been doing there, and he had once had a vision of God descending from the heavens surrounded by angels... at least that's what it looked like. Before I left he gave me an unexpected Christmas present of an icon of Saint Nikolai. By drawing a picture of me surrounded by a halo and a ring of crucifixes, he explained that it would protect me on my journey... either that or he was predicting my death from multiple stab wounds while trapped in a sack.
After a short bus ride from the nearest station, I was dumped like an unwanted tsarina, in a field, in the dark, on the outskirts of Suzdal. I did not want to wait and find out which interpretation of Vladimir's doodles had been the most accurate so I scuttled off towards distant lights, which fortunately turned out to be the right way.
Among the dark streets of ornate and brightly painted wooden cottages I finally found my guesthouse which, again appropriately for Christmas, was located in the racily called Monastery of the Deposition of the Holy Robe (perhaps to make up for the fact that no tsarina had ever been deposited there). I found that its dilapidated state added to its charm, although the satellite dishes in the belfry of the baroque bell tower were a surprise. As with all the places I have visited on this trip so far, I had it completely to myself. The chances of timing my arrival at the Monastery of Saint Euthymius to coincide with a tour group, and therefore a concert of bell ringing, were zero. Fortunately Boxing Day was clearly practice day and I was treated to a private concert of beautiful music, occasionally interspersed with the less beautiful shouting of the teacher somewhere up in the bell tower.
Although no tsarinas were locked up in this lovely place, it did serve as a prison for German generals captured at the Battle of Stalingrad. The generals should have counted themselves very fortunate and, by the looks of the photos in the museum, spent most of their incarceration growing cabbages.
The next part of my journey east was on a totally different level: 30 hours by sleeper train to Yekaterinburg on the far side of the Ural Mountains. The small, four-bed compartment was the setting for a truly titanic contest of endurance charades matched only by the endless Russian countryside for epic scale. The views were like a hypnotic loop of film played without end. While the landscape of Russia is often described as featureless, I found that its overwhelming, relentless monotony was the source of its power. The same cannot be said of the Russians themselves. They may sometimes be overwhelming and relentless, especially when it comes to insisting on drinking with them, but each one is a fascinating and colourful character and my three companions were no exception.
The hours of charades revealed that Dmitry was an ethnic Russian from Samarkand in the Central Asian republic of Uzbekistan. He had been in the army, was stationed in Chernobyl and, yes, he did expect the pair of us to drink all the unending supply of alcohol he put on the table. I was at the mercy of my fellow passengers and we were all at the mercy of the dreaded provodnitsa. These carriage stewardesses are not to be trifled with and, though they do not quite deserve the terrifying reputation that they have, they rule their domain with a rod of iron. Most importantly, they control what music gets played on the carriage intercom system.
During merciful lulls in endurance charades, Dmitry and I would drink and give thumbs up or down to Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones and Creedence Clearwater Revival (as well as a lot of Russian rock music). I spent over an hour trying to explain to Dmitry what was so funny about "KLF and the Justified Ancients of Moo Moo" and the link with my visa invitation but I had to give up in the end. The provodnitsa may sometimes play a passenger's tapes so I was alarmed when Dmitry announced he was the biggest Cliff Richard fan east and west of the Urals. Tragically, he had no tapes with him. What rotten luck.
In the early hours of the morning we rumbled into Yekaterinburg, leaving the provodnitsa less than happy about the 30 hours' worth of Pictionary doodles left in the compartment. The city is about 20 miles inside Asia, though it is impossible to make those kinds of distinctions here. The low, rolling Urals do not really deserve the title of mountains and are nothing more than an arbitrary boundary in an ocean of trees.
Yekaterinburg is Boris Yeltsin's home town and has a reputation for crime and violence that stretches back to the days when it was a frontier town established to exploit the mineral wealth of the Urals. These days it appears that the majority of the precious metals have been transferred to the mouths of the locals and, in the unlikely event you get a smile to appear on one of their stony faces, you will be greeted by rows of sparkling gold teeth. Without the teeth, or the equally obligatory broken nose or black eye, it was pretty clear I was a stranger in town.
I wandered nervously into town. About 10 minutes' walk from the station is the massive, brand new Church of Blood (a name surely chosen by the locals). It marks how far the last tsar and his family made it into town in 1918 before being shot. I had no wish to be made a saint and, perhaps with the help of my lucky icon of Saint Nikolai, I made it further than the tsar did, all the way to the city centre in fact. Any policemen foolish enough to get out of their cars were walking around in gangs of at least six. The streets seemed filled with menacing thugs dressed, unfortunately exactly like me, all in black. I had been warned about this before I left the UK and certainly did not want to look like some kind of rival gang member. I regretted not packing a white flag.
I took refuge, along with the local garrison of the Russian army, in the ice fair in the city's main square. Even here, Father Christmas had a faint black eye. In stark contrast, the glittering ice slides were a wonderful sight. It was fantastic to watch the laughing children whooshing down them and scything into unobservant adults milling around at the bottom.
Yekaterinburg is the gateway to Siberia and ahead of me stretch 2,000 miles of frozen forest and swamp and at least 55 hours of train travel... and that is just to reach Lake Baikal. In the depths of winter it is perhaps not everyone's idea of a holiday destination but I have wanted to go to Siberia for as long as I can remember. I will admit that, unlike many previous visitors to Siberia, it is nice to be given the choice.
The vast expanses are like an enormous atlas, bisected by mighty rivers such as the Irtysh, the Ob and the Yenisy. Scattered sparsely among them are towns with exotic names seemingly dreamt up by Popeye himself: Omsk, Tomsk, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk. For me it's the trainsk directsk to Tobolsk. It is a mere 12 hours away.
Charades anyone?
