From Russia, with love (…and if I’m honest a little bit of fear!)
Halfway through the train journey that took us out of Russia and into Kazakhstan, I had to delete this post.
At that point Theo had been being interrogated for nearly an hour by Russian security forces.
Theo spoke quickly and quietly when he came back to us, it was our turn and they wanted to see our phones, were there any photos I needed to delete?
There was also a chance some of what I’d written about ‘The Prisoner of Astrakhan’ might not be interpreted exactly the way I meant it, so back to the ether it went and here I am starting again…
Our journey from Tbilisi to Vladikavkaz was terrifying. The only relaxing moments were when we stopped for breaks. What kept me going was the thought that I won’t have to be driven by a Georgian minibus driver, ever again.
I promise from the bottom of my socks that I will live in Baku train station in Azerbaijan until they give us tickets for the train across Georgia!!
(Quick aside: That’s the way we are planning to come back, it was the way we were planning to go – via Azerbaijan and across the Caspian Sea, but Azerbaijan still hadn’t re opened its land border post Covid so our only viable option was to go via Russia, or fly.)
What was particularly memorable about our latest experience at the hands of a Georgian minibus driver, was his skill at overtaking on blind hairpin bends with over 200 meter sheer drops on either side. He was a warm and charming man, but like ALL Georgian minibus drivers he wanted to get there, wherever there is, faster than everyone else. (Personally it reminds me of the joke, ‘my grandad died peacefully in his sleep’, ‘unlike his passengers’).
By the time we got to the border the tension was rising in the minibus. We went through the Georgian passport control, through no man’s land, and then on towards the Russian border. My hunch is there were a few people on that minibus quite glad there were three English people in it who were likely to take the heat…
Our drivers were very cheery and conversational with the Russian border police, their banter may have been slightly forced but it sat easy on them…
One border guard asked us where we were going and what we were doing, and then an incredibly glamorous passport control woman got us to fill out the additional entry paperwork.
We had help from a lovely Russian woman who offered to translate for us (Asya had done a PhD in applied mathematics and it had been largely in English so she’s learned the language alongside becoming a Dr!)
We had to fill out forms in duplicate, in Russian, but we didn’t have to spend hours explaining why we had so many antibiotics or what homeopathy was…we were through!!
There was a curious incident about ten miles into Russia when we were stopped by an army patrol and two passports were hurriedly passed from the front of the bus back to Theo and I. I think we were meant to hide them rather than pretend to be Russian at that point…so I stuffed mine out of sight, but Theo held his up in the air (he had taken on the Russian Duolingo challenge when we first conceived of the trip and though he never progressed much beyond ‘Это мой раксмак‘ – pronounced ‘etta moy rucksack!’ (‘It’s my rucksack’), he was clearly feeling confident that he could pull it off, so if that moment had come to something at least one of us would have made it through!
When we arrived in Vladikavkaz the lovely Asya ordered and paid for a taxi on her handy little app and we were at our hostel in minutes. If we never see you again Asya…thank you.
The Stanislavskiy hostel was spotlessly clean with simple rooms, a lovely kitchen and tasteful art throughout.
It was beautiful. The woman who greeted us said hello to me by name and told me her name was Angela; I knew I’d come home!
After a few moments of quiet disbelief at how lovely everything was we went for a walk to look for a restaurant.
You would be forgiven for thinking we’d walked out onto a movie set… The main street was six cars wide with an avenue of trees covered in sparkly lights running down the centre. There were tram tracks but otherwise the area was fully pedestrianised. Couples walked hand in hand and groups of young people were hanging out easily with each other, families were laughing with their small children, and old men were playing chess and drinking vodka shots by the side of the road (okay that last one isn’t true but it would have been if I’d been the director!).
Beautiful fountains graced the main square, lit with lights that changed colour, and there was no rubbish anywhere, hardly even a fallen leaf, it was clean and peaceful – it was the quiet that we noticed the most. Georgia had been so loud…
The only explanation we could come up with was that all the people were clearly extras and this was Mother Russias attempt to influence Britains three most prolific bloggers with how wonderful the country was…or, maybe we had just landed in the Knightsbridge of Vladikavkaz on a Sunday evening 🙂
Rosa keeps reminding us that we are on a tight budget so it was supermarket food rather than a restaurant for us in the end but the supermarket was full of whole-foods, but even when we thought we might be about to spend lots of money it turned out to be pretty cheap, so we filled our boots with sensible treats for the ten hour bus journey to Astrakhan the next day.
Everything went smoothly in Vladikavkaz – (oh shining jewel of our time away!) We even bought delicious hot potato breads in the bus station waiting area for 40p each the next morning …and then everything got slowly worse until we were glad to get out of Russia at all (slight exaggeration for dramatic effect but there was definitely a certain relief when we noticed it was Kazakh guards now searching the train with sniffer dogs after the Russian interrogation session – anyway I am getting ahead of myself!)
The journey to Astrakhan started well, we had a driver who slowed down when we got to roundabouts and generally followed the speed restrictions. He even put his seat belt on when we got to police checkpoints – but it was long, very long, and as the bus driver got more tired, he drove faster, smoked more and spent more time on his mobile phone.
I was counting down the kilometres for the last hour of the journey and as we finally drove over the bridge into Astrakhan, the bus station in sight, our driver pointed to a huge palatial building on the right…’ Putin’s house’ he said with a laugh…and Theo said ‘The Prisoner of Astrakhan’ which we all loved because who doesn’t love a Harry Potter reference after a ten hour bus journey?!
When we got to our hotel, the Volga-Volga, we discovered the only WiFi available was via the government sponsored network and you needed a Russian phone number for that… The receptionist looked like she’d had a long day already and my complicated explanations about needing WiFi to book trains in Kazakhstan, all via the never completely accurate iTranslate, was not what she needed at 10 o’clock at night… and then a bat flew into the reception area.
Our family leapt into action.
Honestly we were like bat rescue Ninja’s – Theo and I headed for the doors to get them open and Rosa instantly started flapping at the bat to direct it towards the exit. The receptionist joined in and found a couple of old window screens to make the flapping slightly more effective, but after five fruitless minutes – another bat joined the party.
I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to persuade a bat to go out through the door in the lobby of a large reception area but just in case you haven’t I can tell you it isn’t easy.
We were joined by a large older man and his way of dealing with bat rescue was to try and hit the bats, and with the second swipe of his old window frame one of them fell to the floor.
Theo went ballistic, I thought we were about to have an international incident, but of course I didn’t care! The bat came first… Theo took the actually quite large, little bat outside, and eventually the other bat, quite tired by now, attached itself to one of the screens and we were able to get that one out too. Not before I had explained to a second man that we were doing this ‘Gently’…. said firmly in English four or five times with a restraining hand on his arm as he too went to swing his screen… living life on the edge a little.
Anyway, I’m delighted to report that both bats flew away into the night and mine and the receptionists relationship had warmed up a little…
She suggested we went to a different hotel that had normal Wi-Fi – she even rang them for us. We had to get the train tickets booked for our longest train ride in Kazakhstan, from Atyrau to Almaty, a 40 hour mammoth journey. Tickets that we couldn’t book in advance because until we knew if they’d let us into Russia we didn’t know if we’d ever make it to Atyrau.
We headed to the new hotel, where we discovered that we would have to pay again for the new room, of course we would! I had genuinely thought the hotels were transferable somehow – something left over from the Communist era, ‘my hotel is your hotel comrade’ – you have the money this time – it all goes in the same pot!’, …anyway the kind woman allowed us to use her Wi-Fi and rang the first hotel to let our bat rescuing friend know that we would be coming back.
After two long and irritating attempts to book the tickets we gave up and trudged back to the Volga-Volga to our fourth floor room and went to sleep.
I woke up early, and because of the lack of Wi-Fi I went out for a walk. I love the way the world feels first thing in the morning; newly made, still and fresh, and the light is different somehow. It touches my heart in a certain way and I’ve found that to be true everywhere I’ve been in my life so far.
The people of Astrakhan were beginning to go about their day. I saw three street cleaners leaning on their brooms having a chuckle with each other, I saw some smartly dressed women off to their jobs., And I saw a man in army trousers, looking like he’d been up all night drinking – he had the same look I’ve seen in shop doorways in Britain…someone who has seen and experienced things that are too much…
I decided to walk to ‘Putin‘s House’ to see if I could see the Prisoner of Astrakhan for myself, or at least look at the building in the daylight …on the way I saw several fire engines in action at a house fire, they had it all under control by the time I got there. I’m always grateful when I see the emergency services in action and it reminds me that we as people have got some of our priorities right.
The time by myself was as precious as the life that I saw, and I love to walk.
We had a lazy morning, some shopping and packing and in the afternoon Theo and I went in search of a bank to try and pay back the 14,158 Rubles we owed to an unknown Russian woman who had helped us book our train tickets, without which we would never have got the visa’s.
Theo, even with his excellent grasp of the Russian language, could not translate the fine detail of the bus and train booking websites and we needed actual tickets to prove we were going in, and more crucially, out of Russia.
So Theo spent an evening with Polish and Ukrainian friends of ours translating the Russian, and when it turned out the tickets could only be bought in Russia our Ukrainian friend contacted her Russian friend who lived in St Petersburg and she was prepared to help three British people she had never met.
Getting the money to her has proved almost impossible…but I had a brainwave on the bus into Astrakhan, we are in Russia so why not try and transfer the money at a bank?
The bank we went into actually opened and closed a bank account for me! It took 45 minutes and a lot of smart patient work by the bank lady…and it was done, people once again going out of their way to help!!
I then went back to stand outside the WiFi hotel (only slightly embarrassing) so we could send an email confirming the money had been transferred, and to let you all know we were safe at least…and to be honest we thought Russia was done.
We walked the 45 minutes to the station so we could spend our last Russian money on food and were safely in our train carriage an hour early.
Three hours into that train journey and we’d be leaving our sweet Russian adventure behind – hmmm, not so fast Musky!
An hour and a half in the train stopped, we were miles from the border so we had no idea why. Nothing happened for ten minutes and then one of the carriage hosts (every carriage has two on trains to Kazakhstan) shouted up and down the hall way ‘passport, passport!’
A Russian border guard came into our little compartment, filling the doorway with his imposingness (and gun!) scrutinised us all against our photos and went away and we thought that was it. Then a female border guard came and took our passports away. After fifteen more minutes, and quite a lot of shouting, our carriage host came and got Theo – we had no idea why, we didn’t know where he had gone, and we couldn’t hear his voice anymore…
Rosa was scared, we both were, but I knew it was my job to be reassuring, …he’d be fine, people don’t disappear in Russia (!) …and we didn’t have our passports so that’s a good sign right?!
He was gone over 45 minutes.
When he came back he looked resolute but I could see that hadn’t been easy …and it was our turn.
‘They’ wanted to see our phones. I hurriedly deleted all the photos of barbed wire at the border crossing (sigh!) and my blog, which may have mentioned Putin once or twice, and headed in to meet the lovely Pavel and his side kick ‘bald man good at tech’.
They turned on our data …and Rosa was ready to beat them to death with her rucksack for doing that – I physically restrained her from hitting the nice Russian man (never turn on a teenagers data unless she has expressly said you can!) and after questions about our time in Russia, how we found Russia, what we thought about Russia, where we were going after Russia, and a bit more fiddling with our phones, we were all allowed back to our compartment.
We were held up three times in all that night – I actually had a high five moment with the lovely Kazakh man sharing our compartment when, between me looking a bit clueless, and him saying I was English, we managed to stop a full scale search of our bags…
Rosa, Theo and I even managed some black humour at one point about whether we should open one of our precious Russian whole-food snacks in case it was what the sniffer dog was looking for, the fear had started to pass into slight hysteria, and by this point we were in Kazakhstan…
I was conflicted about going to Russia because of the war…was I condoning it in anyway by applying for a visa and going to the country?! Perhaps…
And then a dear friend pointed out that every major western power is at war with its own people or it’s neighbours and there is no way of getting from the UK (one of the major players in all that sucks about global politics) to Australia, again well known for it’s fair and generous treatment of its indigenous population…she said you can either stay at home, or put the planet first and go via Russia if you can.
On balance I’m glad we did because I loved the Russian people I met… I found them to be at ease with being themselves. They had an awareness of other people around them even when they were engaging with each other and I loved seeing older women in bright, colourful dresses, people selling vegetables by the side of the road, and ordinary people like me, and the people I love, living their lives, I feel richer for the experience, and the Russian people we met were kind to me and my family.
That was a *lot*. You guys are incredible. Love you.
Phew … thank the sweet Goddess you are all OK xxx
Wow! That’s a lot of adventure and terror all at once crammed into a train journey! I’m really glad you got through it ok and you’re out the other side in Khazakstan.
And my name-sake didn’t let me down, she sounds lovely. It’s a shame there were no friendly cats to break the tension up…. Pets/livestock on the train might have made all the difference.
Thank you both for rescuing the bats by the way. I LOVE bats and they get such a crap time from most people, so it’s amazing that you managed to champion them. Well done to Rosa for not fighting the Russia military over her data…. I think she might have won!?! But it’s better that she didn’t humiliate the poor guard!
I hope this next leg of the journey has loads of adventures….. but nice, amazing ones that fill you with awe and love. Xxxx
Every time I read your blog I admire how beautifully written it is. You’re all amazing and it’s just such an adventure that I look forward to the next page just like a good book. Stay safe guys ❤️
Beautiful, what an amazing adventure, and they get to meet you all too❤️
Phew. Well done The Magnificent Three… xxx
I love the helpful toilet picture.
Stay safe all of you XXXX
Such lovely writing and so interesting.
It sounds that the attitude has hardened. But it’s not new so it can’t be just the current war.
In 84 when it was the USSR, my mother had her – analogue – diary and all her camera films confiscated at the border because she had criticized or maybe just gently mocked the USSR in her writing. And over a decade later on the train(s) from Paris to Moscow there were also many, many passport checks. The uniforms, the presence of guards and their dogs are there to create that very unpleasant atmosphere. And as for guns, Britons are much more civilised than the rest of the world in that respect. So you’re not used to them… in Paris train stations in normal times we have police patrolling with machine guns across their chest.
But for Theo to be kept so long, and for 3 checks to happen on a short bit of track is really quite scary!
I have to do this journey too now, and I’ve been wondering what to do. I’m worried. I’ll use my French passport, not my UK one. Might help but who knows.
Thank you for writing this amazing blog.
I understand Pascale, but Idont think there was actually anything to fear. IF it happens to you, and it might not, You just need to be completely transparent and treat them as what they are – guys doing a job, who will respond well to being treated as friendly rather than enemies. X theo