Great party v2

By bliny!

The last thing you want to hear at 6 am from a hostel receptionist after arriving in a new country on a sleepless coach trip is: “Sorry, 4 o’clock check-in”. On the up side, we were finally, after considerable outlay and red tape, in St Petersburg.

We tried to wait it out in the communal kitchen but, realising sleep was beyond us, we opted to wander around town bleary-eyed. That day, we encountered some of the most beautiful architecture in the World. We stumbled into the Palace Square to behold a vast perimeter of grand buildings including the (less grandly named) General Staff Building and Winter Palace. There were baby bears dancing around the Alexander Column and buskers in period-clothing, which all added to the memorable, semi-delirious experience.



We expected to see tall, fur hats and bottles of vodka but - it was the wrong season for that. In fact, we saw very little vodka consumption, but the same cannot be said as regards beer. Back home, before midday we say: “one before eleven, eleven before one”. In Russia, they say: “brushing your teeth tastes better with beer”. It seemed that everyone, mostly men (but not exclusively), had a fresh beer in their hand at all hours and most notably at around 8-9 am. Given this, we surprisingly did not encounter many drunks.

Apparently, we later learned, vodka is reserved for cooler weather. It is not surprising to hear, although distressingly tragic, that more people drunk-drown in Russia than anywhere else in Europe (fourfold), the ‘average’ annual consumption of pure alcohol is twelve (12) litres (about a bottle of vodka per week) and the average life expectancy of a male is 58 years [ref: LP Russia & Belarus, 3rd ed].

Now, where was I. Oh yes, the magnificent architecture...



We found in St Petersburg two of our most favourite buildings: the Church of the Resurrection of Christ (more colourfully known as the Church on Spilled Blood, above) and St Isaac’s Cathedral. Both are obviously religious buildings, but in no other way comparable. The Winter Palace was also quite special and it now holds arguably the lion’s share of the Hermitage Museum, in which we invested a whole day, and which is up there with the Louvre and British Museums.

Now for the absolute highlight of Weisie’s trip to Russia. It was huge. Absolutely enormous. Epic. No, colossal. Gargantuan. Mammoth! Well, a baby mammoth.



If you have ever wondered how museums acquire items such as baby mammoths, we now know the answer. They buy them on eBay (proof). In all, we saw a couple of immature woolly mammoths and quite a few not-so-woolly adult mammoths. To be able to see one of these prehistoric beauties was wonderful. Okay, they sort of look like modern elephants, but when you see their enormous tusks and the fleshy protrusion on top of their heads, you know that the makers of Ice Age did their homework.

We lived mostly on blinis (traditional buckwheat pancakes), but complimented our staple diet with salami soup from ‘Blin Donalds’ (truly, it’s called that). Our time in St Petersburg was, as you would imagine, not nearly long enough. The place is huge, and every street is a marvel. However, before too long we found ourselves on a cramped, overnight train through villages and forests to the capital.

The underground mass transit railway system in Moscow is unparalleled anywhere in the World. Apparently, it carries more people than its counterparts in New York and London combined - every day. It is as deep as the Mines of Moria and more spectacular than most contemporary museums. We should know because we spent nearly two hours underground on the first day in Moscow trying to work out where our hostel was...




Moscow is unlike any other city. There is the monstrous, out-of-place statute of Peter the Great (partially visible above), the Red Square, the Kremlin, St Basil’s Cathedral, the State Gallery, and so much more. There is not enough room in this blog to tell you all about our experiences. You simply have to go there yourself.




Walking around the Kremlin was a bizarre experience. We were in a place that we had known from our childhood as the centre of the impenetrable Soviet Union and a place where we would never see the inside of. So to be there, marshalled around by men that looked like they were auditioning for the part of an Agent in the next Matrix movie, was fantastic. Inside the fortified walls were some of Russia’s oldest Orthodox churches, the largest bell in the World (it was huge) and a not inconsiderable cannon (above).




Finally, let us play a game:

Question: Is it possible to fit more than 45 Russian dolls one inside the other?
Answer: yes (proof).

Balt up

We were up before 3 am to take a taxi then a bus to Stansted Airport - when you add up the actual cost of so-called "cheap flights" (out-of-hours travel) and the opportunity cost (lost sleep), you begin to wonder whether paying a few extra squids next time is not such a bad idea. Still, we can not complain, particularly when we get to see so many wonderful places.




The capital of Estonia, Tallinn, has a great medieval Old Town and we loved every minute of our time there as we walked around its 'Yea Olde' cobbled streets. We stayed in the University district a short way out of town and had to take a 'trolley' (a bus on wires like a tram). Initially, we were unable to distinguish the trolley stops but after a couple of days, shuttling back and forth, we discerned the name of our stop: "Lipstick fanny-smacking eight times a day".




Our hostel room had an Internet connection so we ‘skyped’ everyone we could think of (get Skype if you don't already have it!) and undertook some important last minute planning for our foray into Russia. We bought tickets for an overnight bus that did not leave until just prior to midnight. In an effort to fill in time on the day of departure, we treated ourselves to a Chinese meal and the cinema ('Charlie ja Shokolaadivabrik') - then after all the fun we nearly missed the bus to St Petersburg.

We did make it to Russia in the end but only just made it out again. We took the overnight train to Latvia and in our four-bunk berth were two Aussies from Melbourne: Justin and “G’day, my name’s Bruce”. We engaged in some stimulating conversation about travelling, sitting knee-to-knee until midnight before we prostrated ourselves in an effort to sleep.

At around 4 am, with lungs aching from diesel fumes, we stirred to find ourselves stopped at the border. The train was prevented from leaving on account of Bruce and Weisies’ questionable passports. Bruce’s passport, which was issued in India with his photo simply stuck inside the front page, was handed back after a few minutes of inspection. Weisie’s passport, however, was passed around to several officers who went over it with a black light, front-to-back, back-to-front and upside-down. The passport was a little banged up from frequent use and they therefore decided that it was ‘not in order’. It was cold and dark, and we were not keen on being left at the border to fend for ourselves. Everything we had read in our guide book told us this was a bluff (an income supplementing exercise) so we remained cheerfully obtuse and eventually they gave up, leaving us to journey on in sleepless peace.




We liked Riga although it faced stiff competition when compared with the likes of Moscow, St Petersburg and even Tallinn. The Old Town architecture was marvellous and as usual we snapped away happily at all of its landmarks. We paused one afternoon in a park and fed a dropping of pigeons (well, they helped themselves to our lunch, actually). The pigeons were so brash that they landed on our arms and shoulders (and my head) to peck at crumbs.




Friends of ours recently visited Riga and considered it to be a great place to party. We were not in the mood (or the money) to go out on the town, but we did treat ourselves to a wonderful meal at the omnipresent Lido chain of buffet-style restaurants. We ordered far too much and paid way too little for a small banquet. It was excellent food and a great way to finish our time in Riga. We would recommend it.

The remaining capital of the Baltic region, Vilnius, is on the itinerary for later this year.

Who parked that car in our yard!?

We were well rested after KL and keen to move on. Weisie had been to Vienna before but this was my first time, and we both felt that we needed a lot more time (and money) to experience all that the capital of Austria had to offer. I suppose that means we will be going back...




Vienna is a beautiful, historic city with many opulent buildings. It is famed for its late, local musical talent (Mozart and Strauss, among others). We would have liked to attend an orchestral performance but shied away from the guys that hung around squares in stockings, wearing rouge and powdered wigs, touting discounted tickets. Instead, we opted for a whole day in the Natural History Museum. Some might have spent their time differently but all those stuffed animals were a highlight for us!




The Museum has, among many other things, one of the World’s largest collections of meteorites which I had been meaning to see for some time. An iron meteorite (pictured above) found in Australia in 1884 weighed in at just under a tonne. Imagine that! It would have been like a small car crash landing in your back yard (although meteors often enter the atmosphere travelling in excess of 70 kilometres per second and tend to leave craters ranging from ten metres to tens of kilometres wide).

Unusually for us, we did not really have a plan for where to go next. I had enjoyed a few too many celebratory beverages the night before we left Vienna, which did not help, and by a process of elimination and dehydration we jumped off the train half way to Budapest. From there, I paid far too much for a taxi to take us to Gyirmöt, a modest one-store town, best known for the nearby Greek run ‘Achilles Camp’.




We stayed comfortably in a thatched hut from where we witnessed a brilliant lightning storm, avoided the resident family of swans, played over-sized chess and whiled away the evenings drinking red wine on our wooden porch. We spent a summery day in Györ, a gorgeous Baroque-styled town that reminded us of Prague in a way and was well worth the visit. To get there we rode for miles on hired bikes through the woods, which was great exercise but my hand-made straw hat kept blowing off.

Our next door neighbours at the camp were a young Hungarian couple who only came out of their hut (bedraggled I might add) to light up cigarettes every half an hour or so. When we decided to leave Gyirmöt, the pair kindly drove us to the station from where we took the train to Budapest.




Budapest is actually two cities on either side of the Danube: Buda on the East bank and Pest on the West. Although we had heard wonderful things, to be honest, Budapest was not what we expected. Perhaps it was because our hostel had given away our room (a real bore given that a week-long music festival was well under way) or because we could not seem to escape that acridly ureic smell that often plagues European cities that charge money to use public toilets. We did a lot of walking but the only highlight (from our journal) was finding someone willing to sell us a beer on the old chain-bridge that linked the two cities.

A few days later, we flew to London where we stayed only one day (and managed to find a place to live in that time!), washed our clothes and repacked before setting off to see more of the former Soviet Union.