‘Igor, is that you…?’

We were hungry when we arrived in Kunming (first class, first smarse…not a single flippin snack!)

We had booked the same hotel as we had in October, because every now and again knowing where you are going is what the weary traveller needs.

We came out from the underground on the wrong side of the gigantic highway – (there were four options and we were the furthest away we could be) …a faffy and irritating ten minutes later and we turned the corner towards the hotel.

There were six food stalls arranged around a courtyard, two were mostly meat, there was a KFC and another stall selling corn and two that looked quite promising.

The first was run by the most miserable person we had met since we left home, and the other was run by Mr Sunshine.

Mrs B. S. A. Misery (Bored and Slightly Aggressive) wasn’t really prepared to look up from her phone and pretended she hadn’t understood anything we said to her, so we turned towards the happy, smiling face of the beaming friendly man…

Life did shine out of him, and looking for all the world like an all knowing Buddha, he explained slowly in Mandarin what he would cook for us, so Rosa had time to more fully understand.

I don’t know which of them was Yin and which Yang (seems a bit of a loaded decision that one) but they were definitely opposites, and maybe if I worked next to ‘the most cheerful person in the world’ I’d be miserable – it was hard to know if there was any cause and effect here but what we did know was his food was delicious.

We thanked our warm hearted cook and went to our hotel.

Up in our room none of us could face completing our Russian visas.

…we wanted to watch a couple of episodes of Brooklyn 99. We decided we were not in any fit state to check each other’s visa applications so we let ourselves off the hook.

Tomorrow would do.

We discovered in the morning that we were entitled to breakfast, missed that the first time…I still haven’t found that written anywhere in the booking but we gratefully accepted and took some things to keep us going on the way to Guilin.

There were no grumpy mutterings or irritated sighs that morning… we were all in good form. Guilin had been our first ‘home’ on our journey to Australia and it would be our last proper stopping point before we got home.

Rosa was diving fully back into Mandarin study and I was going for the more sedate, ‘one, two hour lesson a day’, partly because of money but it alsi made sense for me. I needed to take it slowly if I was going to stick at it…

The four and a half hours on the train passed quickly and we walked out of the station to a cheery looking taxi driver holding a CLI sign – it’s fab walking out and finding someone waiting for you, there’s something about it…

Amanda, one of the interns, was waiting in the CLI lobby when we arrived. She had been an intern back in October and it was lovely seeing her again.

She helped us in with our bags and took us to our room. On the fifth floor this time – ‘great training for the Yellow Mountain trek we’re doing next’, Rosa said cheerfully.

She’s never usually cheerful about exercise…

Personally I felt like I was going to have a heart attack by the time I’d lugged myself and my luggage up to the fifth floor…where the air is definitely thinner.

The room was big with two double beds, two desks, large pieces of artwork and a bathroom in it…exactly the same as our last room had been just two floors up, we unpacked and got down to work.

Russian visas don’t fill in themselves.

We all successfully retrieved our applications from their virtual home and filled in the missing country information – it took us about fifteen minutes to get to the point where we could swap and check each others forms.

There were the normal spelling mistakes, picked up because we were ‘keen’ and then Theo started to laugh.

Rosa had ticked ‘yes’ to ‘have you been convicted of any war crimes in the past’ – we’ve had a lot of fun with that since then… ‘Does our ickle war criminal want some bwekfast?!’ …and waking her up in the morning is done much more carefully now, our daughter has a past!

They were done, finally, and Rosa went to find Amanda to get them printed.

I booked the trains for our journey to Guangzhou the next day and looked for a hotel…they were wildly expensive apart from one, ‘Youth Space’.

It was cheap and coincidentally the closest place to the Russian Embassy – I booked it.

We went out for dinner with Pablo that evening…he had arrived the same day as we had back in September and he’d been here ever since – it was incredible hearing him speak Mandarin now. No hesitation, no slow and painful translation in his head, although to be fair he had been at a similar level to Rosa when he’d arrived. It showed Rosa what she could achieve if she came back here for three months…

It was great catching up on life at CLI, and just as we had last time, we had our first meal in the restaurant where the staff didn’t really like customers.

It was the only place like it we’d found in Guilin, but the treatment was equal across the board, they didn’t really like anyone… Our food came quickly and was dumped with a clatter on our table.

It was delicious and we caught Pablo up on our adventures.

The conversation eventually turned to our efforts to get a Russian visa. Pablo wasn’t convinced that travelling in China without our passports was going to go very well. He is pretty good fun most of the time so when he turns his serious face on we pay attention.

He suggested we asked the CLI team to ring the police and talk to them before we set off, ‘at least you will know if you are going to get arrested’, he said very pragmatically.

Amanda rang the police for us and we were told that we would need to get a specific form from the embassy and then exchange that at the train station  by going to the ‘Public Security Bureau in Guangzhou Train Station’ to ‘open a certificate to the train’.

We weren’t entirely sure what that meant but it wasn’t a flat out no and after the amount of time and effort we’d spent on getting the tickets and filling in the forms we were going to give it a go, what was the worst that could happen?

We also printed copies of our passports and Chinese visas, just in case, and after a quick visit to register with the Guilin police the next day we set off for Guangzhou.

We had spent an hour checking we had each form, that each of our applications was signed, dated, had a photo attached and all the correct train tickets and hotel bookings were in the right folder. We each signed the letters of request three times…and then we checked it all again.

Probably overkill but we didn’t want our little war criminal carted off to Siberia…or all these bloody efforts to go to waste.

It was the first time we’d travelled anywhere that wasn’t a day trip without our rucksacks – it was really liberating.

Instead of heaving Suitcase down five flights of stairs, or queuing for the one lift behind the 150 people wanting to use it, we strolled on past and got on our train. Enjoying travel with a passport for the last time, maybe ever…

We fantasised about how we would get home if the Russians kept our passports and denied all knowledge of our applications – could we make it?!

We probably wouldn’t make it past downtown Guangzhou…

Still, Theo enjoyed Jason Bourne-ing it and we decided our best option would be to get some camels from the desert near Chengdu and go across the mountains into Kazakhstan…the camels being my main contribution to the conversation.

The three hour train journey flew by, (at speeds of 300km an hour we were pretty close to taking off). So, where was the ‘Public Security Bureau’ located in Guangzhou Train Station?  We wanted to make sure we knew where it was and what proof we needed to bring from the embassy so we could ‘open a certificate to the train’.

The helpful woman at the information counter told us to go to the ticket office. There were a few people in uniform dotted around the ticket area so we made a beeline for one of them…when we got closer he had the fragile look of someone who hasn’t been doing the job for very long, we got the impression that today hadn’t gone well, in fact if anyone else asked any questions at all he would melt into the floor, so we skirted round him and headed for the competent looking woman with a small queue of people vying for her attention.

Eventually it was our turn – she looked confused when we wrote the ‘Public Security Bureau’ in iTranslate so we didn’t bother with ‘open a certificate to the train’. We instead told her we were going to the Russian Embassy to get a visa and we needed to leave our passports there. What evidence did we need from the embassy so we could get on a train? I hopefully showed her our passport photocopies but she shook her head and waved them away.

It took a while until she understood fully and then she went to find a book with the right information in it. When she got back she opened it at a specific page, there was a form on it and she indicated I should take a photo of it to show the Russians the document we needed, very smart!

We thanked her for her time and found our way down into Guangzhou’s subway system.

Theo and Rosa were up for coming with me on my little pilgrimage to the place where my Aunty Nancy had been born so we chose the tube station closest to her little island and set off.

It was such an incredible coincidence that the only place we could get a visa during our entire journey home was in the city of her birth…

What had it been like here in 1924, exactly 100 years ago?

The daylight was beginning to slip away as we climbed out of the subway network and over the maze of walkways that helped pedestrians get over the eight lane highways.

The walkways were things of beauty, lined with flower boxes and stretching in every direction. 

After a couple of false starts we figured it out and crossed over and down to the edge of the island where she had been born.

There was a beautiful bridge and each of us had brought a flower to put into the River Pearl that surrounded the little island, some way of marking how special this felt.

This was our family connection to China and to Nancy, who had been a wonderful part of my life. Her house had been full of ‘treasure’ during my childhood.

The Nancy I had come to know and love in the last twenty years of her life was wise and generous, and had a dry sense of humour. She told wonderful stories of a life lived on three continents and she had a very low tolerance for selfishness, or people who talked too much!

As we dropped our flowers and spoke our little words of love a bat flew across the water and did three figures of 8 before disappearing into the gloom… 888 is a very lucky number in China!!

Thank you for that Nancy…

Her island home was stunning – a very quiet and beautiful place. We noticed the trees that would have been here when she was born, here when she had taken her first steps and spoken her first words. It wasn’t hard to feel the slight air of magic and ‘something’ in the air.

What is it that inspires that extra feeling inside us? Where we pay attention a little more and notice the world around us with a question rather than an answer.

Nancy had come back here with Bob to meet her cousins a few years before she died. It had been a great experience for both of them and Bob had told me where they had stayed.

The price of a tea, a beer and a pineapple juice was almost as much as our hostel for the night. Ouch!

…but the cost was one that was worth the experience on both the level of spending an hour in a super swanky hotel …and being somewhere Nancy had been when she ‘came home’.

We got little snacks with our drinks and enjoyed both the rest and the time away from thinking about handing over our passports.

I sent Bob some photos and he rang me …it was like having a really top quality tour guide walking around that little island – Bob telling us stories of Fred Smith, his grandad, fleeing the First World War and ending up in China earning the gratitude of the ruler of the city for keeping the lights on when they were under siege.

If the lights had gone out the city would have fallen.

It was like a fairy story hearing about his first meetings with Fin Mae Chang, the lovely young Chinese woman he he fell in love with. When Fin came to England she changed her name to Violet May but I love Fin Mae Chang as a name. She was one of three girls… and listening to my cousin as he shared their stories I really wished I could just slip back on time and watch a few scenes from their lives…

Fred had started the first hire car business in Guangzhou over a hundred years ago…no slouch on the entrepreneurial front!

When Nancy was two she had left the island world with her older sister and her mum and dad and travelled by ship, to Canada where they had made a new life for themselves. Fin Mae never came back, never saw her home or her mum and dad or sisters again, what must that goodbye have been like…

We left the island and the first thing we saw was an old man with a cart full of possessions and a face full of grief. We gave him some money, not that he asked for it…we just wanted to help a little and didn’t really know how.

We walked along the river and the gentle calm we had felt on the island came back and found us, following us all the way to the tube station where we encountered a load of young, old and middle aged people dancing to rave music… it would have been stopped in the UK – but here it was ‘exercise’ and anyone walking by just joined in for a bit and then carried on.

It was great fun to dance and not to have to look out for all our bags, because we didn’t have any! When we were knackered we headed down into the subway to take us to ‘Youth Space’ – two tubes later and we had another ‘which exit shall we take’ decision and came out of the one furthest from the hostel – we didn’t care though. It gave us another chance to walk over one of the space age walkways – watching the traffic move almost silently by underneath us because so many of the cars and motorbikes were electric.

Finding the hostel happened totally by luck. We walked around the tower block that looked on the map to be where it was, but there were no entrances, or signs, or clues of any kind – so we just picked an entrance at random and the man sat behind the desk pointed to the elevator.

Haystack, needle – found!!

‘Youth Space’ was on the 12th floor and we were not able to use the smart new looking lift, that was for people who lived in the building…people who didn’t live in the building had to use the other elevator.

The one you had to hand cranked with a lever and pulley system…dating back to when my aunty was born.

It did not inspire confidence.

I was up for walking, but twelve floors was a bit much even for me so we slowly winched our way up and made it to twelve.

Youth Space was at least visible when we got to the 12th floor. The front door looked like it had been used to guard against foreign invaders on more than one occasion – we rang the bell and Joe opened it.

Joe was in his twenties and he ran Youth Space with a laid back approach and a lot of people skills.

The living room area was the size of a normal living room but there were 16 bed spaces advertised. Cramped didn’t do it justice.

There was just about room for us on the very old, seen better days, covered in old blankets to disguise god knows what, sofa.

We headed straight for it and Joe’s slightly blank look on meeting us at the door turned into full scale ‘I didn’t know there was any one else booked in for today, and I don’t think I have any beds.’

He went and found us some food while we contemplated this joyous news.

It seemed to us that we might as well sleep right where we were, it was a pretty big couch and we’d taken it over already…so why not?! Joe was apologetic but this clearly happened to him all the time.

I could easily imagine 50% of the people who booked never finding the place so they probably allowed for that in the booking margins and we just happened to turn up on a cleverer than usual day…we were in a hostel with a group of geniuses.

We figured out where to make up a bed for Theo and the three of us joined the other four people already sleeping in the lounge due to a shortage of beds. Joe had walked along beside us while we figured all this out for ourselves and then charged us slightly less than we would have paid if we’d had beds…masterful!

Just when I was thinking what a hole this place was and that from a risk assessment point of view we should be running for the hills not sleeping with twenty other people in a place designed for four…Rosa amazed me by saying she wished we’d stayed in more places like this!

We slept okay, Theo on the floor under the table on a roll mat and duvet, and me and Rosa on the soon to be condemned couch with a very large blanket shared between us. The other four inhabitants of the living room were pretty quiet and after Joe had produced the blanket, duvet and a couple of questionable looking pillows we never saw him again…where did he go? Certainly not into one of the tiny rooms, six people in one and ten in the other…

When I first woke up the next morning I wondered if I’d dreamed the whole thing, but no, I was asleep on the worlds worst couch and on the fridge there was a picture of Joe holding the huge cat that lived in the hostel as well…

After a breakfast of, nothing, we set off. First stop food…

We were nervous now.

Could we find the embassy building? It hadn’t been on the map so we’d guessed where it was. Would we be able to go in altogether or would we be seen one at a time…? Had we done everything right?

…and the big one. Was it even possible for British Nationals to apply for Russian Transit visas outside of the UK?

It was a twenty minute walk from the hostel to the embassy, made slightly longer by the hand crank lift not coming and the swish lift only accepting people from the 8th floor.

We walked down, and in places it was pretty creepy –  anything a welcome distraction from the nerves. 

It was cloudy and cool when we made it down to ground level, this after a brief diversion into the cellars because the ground floor was level 3.

The map led us past a shop selling croissant, perfect. They were filled with some kind of sweet purple vegetable – better for us than chocolate I suspected.

Nervous.

We arrived at a very tall skyscraper next to the river…it had flags on poles outside and three receptionists giving out lanyards. This was no back street office in a slightly dodgy part of London.

Was this all the Russian Embassy? If so it was huge…

No, the Russian Embassy was on the 26th floor – not quite the whole building but still, impressive!

Twenty six floors is pretty high up and the waiting area was intimidating, or modern and stylish depending on how you were feeling.

We sat on the dark sofa next to the symmetrical plants on the polished black marble floor, and waited.

A very smartly dressed man in a well fitted dark blue suit emerged from a side and came over to us in shoes that made a sharp clicking noise that echoed as he walked.

He checked our lanyards and took our passports, indicating for us to wait.  

We sat and read all the notices on the walls. About three quarters of the way through we saw ‘photocopies of passports and Chinese visas must be included with all visa applications’, where was that information on the website? How lucky was it that we had two copies of each with us? …we very quickly added one to each of our application packages, and waited some more.

The time for our first appointment came, and went – was there a problem…?

Four people came, disappeared into the side door, reappeared and left again…we started to get restless.

I got up and walked to the window at the opposite end of our waiting area. The view was pretty spectacular and I called Theo and Rosa to come and look.

Theo and I noticed the dramatic and comic photo potential of the reflective floor and nervously at first, and then more confidently, took it in turns to pose.

Rosa hissed at us to sit down but we ignored her, what harm were we doing?

Theo used the sign indicating the direction of the waiting area as s prop in his photo and I moved it out of mine completely – happy our creativity had been captured, we put the sign back and sat down to look at our handiwork. 

Almost immediately an official appeared from a door we hadn’t noticed and moved the sign ten inches to the left.

How had they known we had moved it…? Theo and I looked at each other, were they watching us – had they seen our photo shoot…?

Did they have a sense of humour…

Rosa looked at us both like the children we were.

We went back to waiting in silence…Finally dark blue suit man came and got us.

We walked through into a corridor where we were told to place our mobile phones in lockers.

The waiting area in front of the counter was not large but the office area behind it was. There were a number of men in smart suits working on computers.

Would it have hurt one of them to reply to my emails? Clearly this was not a one man show. My imagination had had Igor answering the phones, writing the emails, processing the visas…making the tea – but no, this was a busy office…

We waited for the young couple at the counter in front of us to finish – the man didn’t have the right paperwork and was sent away.

Not nervous, not nervous, not nervous.

They decided to see us all together and as we approached the counter I muttered ‘leave the talking to me’ …outside in the waiting area I had gone through everything they might ask us and wondered if they’d pick up on the fact that we had no bus or train tickets to get from Astrakhan to Vladikavkaz. We hadn’t known how we were going to do that bit when we’d been to get our visas in London but they hadn’t been interested in those details…’if they ask us we will have to tell them we are getting a taxi!’

The man behind the counter took all three applications – he pulled out the paperwork from the first one and took his time looking through it. He got to our letter and, without even a glance at it, gave it back.

So they weren’t interested in the ‘why’ here in Guangzhou.

He checked something on his computer and scribbled  on the front of one of the applications. We needed to apply for ‘TR2’ not ‘TR1’ by the looks of the scribble marks, but he wasn’t giving the form back to us to start again (!)…this wasn’t something picked up in London either, this man was thorough.

He asked about the train into Russia leaving the day before the 3 day visa started. I tried to answer but all the saliva in my mouth had disappeared.

‘It crosses the border after midnight…’ I managed at the second attempt.

He checked the train schedule.

A tense minute passed.

He looked up and asked, in a perfect movie Russian accent, ‘how are you getting from Astrakhan to Vladikavkaz?

‘By taxi’ all three of us chorused, in perfect unison.

It was a funny moment, in any other situation we would have burst out laughing but we all kept perfectly straight faces. I saw a slight eyebrow raise but he didn’t say anything else.

He asked about visas for Kazakhstan and Georgia – I told him we didn’t need them. He went away for a while to check. He came back and the methodical checking and writing continued. He looked at all six pages of the application form. He clearly knew exactly what he was doing.

After fifteen minutes he asked us if we needed receipts for the passports.

Were the applications being accepted? It certainly looked like it…I could almost hear the three of us letting out our breath.

We showed him the photo of the document the train lady official had given us and he shook his head.

His English was perfect. ‘We cannot issue these. Only the Chinese Government can issue temporary identity documents.’

‘Will we be able to get onto the train with this receipt?’

‘We have had no complaints!’ – a slight twitch of his left eyebrow. Was that the first hint at a sense of humour?

He completed our first receipt and handed it over. I glanced down and there it was, the man who had signed the receipt was Igor!

‘Is that you Igor’ I said, in slightly hushed tones. He looked up at me, ‘Yes’ his one word reply – a hint of a smile, or was I imagining it?

I could have gone into full on ‘gush mode’ but something about the surroundings meant I managed to limit myself to ‘…thank you so much for all the help you have given myself and my family.’ A slight nod his only acknowledgement.

We were not going to make friends.

…and yet I still loved that it was him behind the counter and I now knew what he looked like.

‘Is that Shannon Coggins?’, was still ringing in my ears from my attempt to ring the embassy from Thailand…he definitely had a flair for the dramatic, would he have introduced himself at all if I hadn’t noticed his signature?

He had known who we were from the get go, did her normally check applications or was he curious?

He finished our paperwork and gave us an earlier collection date than we were expecting. That was great news for people planning to live in China without passports.

Time to pay. We moved left to the payment counter.

I had bought cash but they didn’t accept cash…we tried via AliPay (literally everyone pays for stuff electronically in China) I hadn’t managed to make it work on the way to Oz, but on the way back the new tech savvy me was all over it…except it didn’t work.

What to do? There was no way our credit cards would work… Igor looked up from his desk and pointed at the Chinese people behind us in the queue – ‘Ask one of them to pay.’

‘One of them’ was very happy to accept our cash and pay for us and a few moments later we floated out to the elevator and down to the ground floor.

As we walked away from the Russian Embassy the euphoria followed us, Igor had accepted our paperwork. Maybe all this effort was going to be worth it…

We walked for about ten minutes and chose a spot to sit and debrief. We had a good laugh at our ‘by taxi’ moment and got the receipts out and had a proper look at them, they were pretty flimsy looking. Would they accept these at the station?

‘Only one way to find out’ Theo said, and we headed for Guangzhou Nan railway station.