Home

Touched down in Ireland and now I'm home. The trip has been amazing, we have done and seen so many things. We've been gone 5 months, seen 15 countries (including stopovers), 5 continents, 4 wonders of the world and spent at least one night in each of 36 different cities. Pretty exhausting but damn fantastic. So many places we want to go back to and so many other places we now want to see. For now though I want to go nowhere and just eat a whole load of Irish food and see all my friends and family all the time.

St. Petersburg

The first day was mostly just getting to the hostel. We spent about an hour trying to get into the metro from the train station. Excluding one girl who just ignored us, we asked three people how to get to it and couldn't find any door that lead in to it. We found two sets that lead out though. Eventually we found a map and found out we were only and a 20 minute walk from our hostel. With our bags at the heaviest they have ever been it took a bit longer than 20 minutes but our hostel here is really nice. The girl running it is very friendly and we got some really good food and just sorted ourselves out. Next day was spent sight seeing. We saw a few of the parks and palaces that St. Petersburg has to offer and bought a few sweets for the guys back home. Brian made a complete mess of using his Visa card in a shop and caused a big queue and a lot of confusion I doubt we could have understood even if we spoke basic Russian (my Visa card has expired). Brian stopped by a small park were people released doves on their wedding day, to play with a baby bear. We are pretty sure it is now illegal to keep bears as pets in Russia but this guy still had one in a lead and muzzle. The heat was stone splitting and the parks were full of people in bikinis. It was a nice last day. Had a chat to a few guys at the hostel that night who had been traveling by train through Uzbekistan. Next day we were woken by a very load snorer and the door banging so we got up early and headed to the airport. The airport doesn't let you check in until a maximum of two hours before your flight so we were left sitting and eating terrible airport food. We were on our way home so it didn't matter. St. Petersburg airport has about 5 places to queue before you get on a plane and while your bags can go through to your final destination you have to get your second boarding card at the stop over airport and not at the start. We got very confused by this but met two other English speaking girls without follow on boarding cards so we took it to be the norm. Also met a slight drunk Ukrainian who has lived in Ireland at least 5 years who tried to convince us to go swim in the Black Sea cause it was so great.

Moscow

Next day we headed to the to the train station after a pretty relaxing morning. We arrived at the train station and about twenty counters are labeled tickets. We needed to exchange our booking confirmation for tickets so after asking at a counter we were directed to a building at the end. We headed in with our luggage through a metal detector (the guards just ignored me as I walked through setting it off and waved Brian through when he came after me). Then a random man got us to follow him to an office further inside the building and left us at a machine which looked like an atm. After some investigation we found out it was a ticket machine which had an bar code reader hidden in it. We random clicked buttons for almost half an hour to try and get our tickets. It displayed a video to show how to use the reader so we were ok there. However it need a document number (after 10 minutes of matching symbols in our dictionary we found that out). We tried every number on the ticket and then asked a passing person. She said it was our passport number and we then spent 10 minutes entering our passport numbers in a variety of different ways.. She then left and we messed with the screen and a new lady appeared with her who canceled the whole thing, scanned the document again, changed something, entered our passport numbers and gave us tickets. She made it look easy. We then had tickets. We went outside to the display and found a train at 13:00. It didn't have any words we recognised but it was the only train at the right time. 15 minutes before we went to the platform but there were turnstiles and we got turned away by the attendants there. They just pointed outside. That took 5 minutes and now we were getting worried. We rushed back to where we got the tickets and found the nearest attendant. She then pointed us in a completely different direction (turns out there are two completely different train stations in the same place). Finally the last attendant rushed us through the metal detectors and got us to run onto our train with only a few minutes to spare. Then we headed to Petersburg.

Moscow

We were completely exhausted and terribly sweaty from four days on a train when we got to the hotel. The hotel was part of three massive buildings on the out skirts of Moscow. From what we picked up they were built for the Olympics. They were all about the same size (our hotel building being 30 floors). It took the guy about 45 minutes to check us in but it was half five in the morning so that is forgivable. By the time we had showered and sorted our stuff out it was eight. We couldn't sleep because we would never get up again and we had a train to catch the next day. So we paid the quite high price for breakfast in the hotel and had a really amazing buffet. It was filled with fruit and veg done exceptionally well. It also had cheeses and breads and spring rolls and dessert and some really random other things. Then we headed out to see the Red Square and the Kremlin building. We explored the air and wandered the markets which were much more reasonably priced than Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. I suppose Moscow does good business with tourists so they don't have such high prices. Our energy drained away pretty quickly and we gave up on the sight seeing completely exhausted. Moscow seems quite nice though there isn't a lot to do but we really didn't get a chance to see much. Russian food is really good and the country is really nice. You get the occasional person who can't stand foreigners and ignores you or tries to get you to go away but you can one or two of those everywhere. Getting your visa registered everywhere can be a real pain though and the paperwork to get into the country is fairly excessive.

The Train

Poor Brian was pretty sick of the train at this point. The thought of three and a half days (three nights) seemed to be upsetting him and on the journey he got pretty frustrated being stuck in a cabin. After both of us walking up and down the train we realised we were the only English speaking people we could find. I think a lot more people travel from Moscow to Beijing than the way we traveled. The scenery was beautiful. The Russian countryside is full of brightly coloured houses and towns with cute little wooden fences. It was mostly countryside with a few cities which had a lot of space to grow. We did spend about 6 hours going nowhere which drove Brian up the wall as we couldn't tell the reason for it and he was sick of reading, playing with his iPod and listen to music already at that point. We were heading home though so that picked up his spirits. We are both a bit sick of living out of a suitcase and not having are own beds though we do love traveling. The train was meant to get in at 6 that evening. Turns out that delay was a lot bigger than we thought and I think we might have been going slower because of it. In the end we arrived in Moscow at 5 in the morning. Of course we didn't know this was going to happen as a conductor had said something in Russian about it we didn't understand. We stayed up late thinking the train could only be a few hours late and ended up getting almost no sleep. Sundowners still had a guy meet us though we didn't see him until Brian was stalking a different guy with a board and ended up back on our platform.

Irkutsk

We only got less than two days in Irkutsk. The company representative who took us from the train to the hotel was really helpful. They told us of the few sites in town but when we asked about lake Baikal they gave us all the details we needed to use the public transport in Russia and wrote out the name of the place we needed. First we dropped off stuff at the hotel but it was too early to check in. We walked down to the water front and then took a long walk around the edge of the city. We stopped along the way to avail of some free wifi which was advertised in spray paint on the ground. It was a beautiful day. The literature we got off Sundowers said it would be a max of 15 degrees but it was at least 23 degrees, probably more. We were so warm. Later we checked into the hotel and did some shopping and then looked at some of the old sunken buildings in the city. That night we had a seriously good meal of a sizzling beef, mushroom, chicken and potato dish. It was absolutely amazing. Especially after all the noodles. The restaurant (Brau House) had Russian dishes (which that was suppose to be) but it was an international restaurant that had a place in Dublin which I definitely want to check out. We had a few beers and headed to bed pretty exhausted. Next morning we headed out to Lake Baikal. The buses in Irkutsk to places outside the city just sit around and wait until they are full before leaving. You just go down and there is no timetable. Thanks to the info our guide had written down we were able to find the nearest town on the edge of the lake. There we walked around a market and then walked further along the edge of the lake. The area is absolutely beautiful. I would recommend going to see it. Even the town didn't seem to impact the natural beauty the area had. We wandered some more around the markets and then grabbed a drink and headed back to Irkutsk to catch our train.

The Train

Getting from Mongolia to Russia was very entertaining. We arrived in our cabin and put our stuff away. Later a few people dropped by and left bags on the two other beds in our room. At four in the morning a woman arrived in our room making a lot of noise. The next day we had to get up early to pass customs. A second person appeared in the room and so began their attempts to smuggle things across the border. Mongolian customs didn't really care about anything but it took almost the whole day to get through the order. In that time the two ladies in our room had taken four bags filled with new wrapped up clothes and stuffed them just about everywhere. They unwrapped, crumpled up and threw some on Brian's bed to look like they were his clothes. They stuffed some up their tops. They hid them in every hidey hole in the room. They even hid a few shirts around their ankles under their trousers. Russian customs was significantly more thorough. They checked the whole carriage for drugs (with big fluffy German Shepherds) and then army guys searched it for people. The whole thing took much longer than the China to Mongolia border crossing and we were soon sick of our new friends and the fact they continually touched and moved stuff (both ours and their). Once they got to Russia they got off and we were left in peace to reach our destination.