As a seasoned nomad, I like to think of myself as well-travelled. But I am not really. I've been as far east as Kazan on the river Volga, as far west as Dublin, as far north as St Petersburg and as far south as Málaga. My scope is therefore pretty limited. But I'd bet a lot of money that I've had more fun than most while doing them...
Just before Christmas 1994, as a student in Moscow, a Dutch friend Maarten and I decided to do something we were advised not to do by everybody who had any brains: go to a railway station and take a train eighteen hours in one direction or another. What we were banking on was going to a place where the local mafia was not so hot. Unfortunately, we chose the worst of the whole lot: Kazan, capital of the Autonomous Republic of Tatarstan, a semi-Islamic state with serious plans on declaring independence from Russia, and prepared to go the same way as Chechnya was at the time. The whole idea in the first place was to get away from Moscow. The trip will forever remain memorable, for many reasons. The train, this time with sleeper wagons, was far superior to anything built in the west of Europe. It had immaculately vacuumed carpets on the floor and the wall. There were net curtains, each compartment had a lock, a spyglass and was well heated. To go a thousand kilometres by train and feel like you were on a moving hotel was quite a change from the moving slums used in the south east of England, where the trains that go fast do the stopping services and the older, slower trains do the long runs made me wonder how the hell we were paying $20 for the ticket. It was simply amazing.
Let me explain the class system on Russian trains: there is the third class, yes, segregation in Russia existed under the communists. It involves bedding down with forty other people travelling across the continent, and this train was going to the far expanses of the Siberian forests and on to Vladivostok. That was five days away. The contents of these carriages were pretty scary: the odd thief, undercover assassins, peasants, alcoholics, and yet there were also women, children, old grandmothers and grandfathers, the poorest of the poor, all travelling together. The noise at night from the compartments was tremendous. Think yourself lucky if you only have one snorer in the house. Here, there was a pride of lions with sinus problems taking a night’s rest. Travellers were stacked on one side in sixes, three each side of a partition wall where the beds hung off. On the other side was a thin corridor where the guard would bustle on up and down. After half an hour, the windows had steamed up, so what would it be like after a few days in there?
The reason I know this, was due to a trip I took in one overnight to St. Petersburg. To go the whole way on one of these would have driven me nuts, so for the journey there, we chose second class. This was a normal couchette, but you took pot luck on who else you were going to have. Russians sell tickets by the couchette/seat number, not the availability of space, so someone was bound to come in. We just hoped, that when we re-emerged from the buffet car, there would be a nice, quietly sleeping person. The buffet car had the charm and elaboration of a transport café with designs on becoming a place where E-coli bugs could claim asylum and served only onion and cabbage soup with egg in it. We dived in to this sumptuous yet unelaborate meal. The liquid refreshment was blackberry compote, warmed up on a gas stove just visible from where we were sitting and which took on the shade of sacrificed sheep.
We hurried back to our compartment to find a man in his late fifties travelling as far as Omsk with breath like the downwind of a water recycling unit, sinus that rattled and whistled and spherical stomach attached to his knees. He just would not stop talking. He kept on telling us about his family and showing us photos. His wife, incidentally, was twenty years younger than him and expecting their third child. The wedding photo he showed me convinced me that beautiful Russian women marry ugly men because at least they are less likely to have an affair, although with the evidence shown to me from the parties back at our hostel in Moscow, I just thought Slavic women in general were deranged nymphomaniacs, and that is from someone who does not believe in stereotypes. So much for my own principles.
Besides, there was a trip to be experienced. At three in the morning, we arrived at our first destination. It was a large station, probably Gorky. The thing was, it could have been the rush hour. There were street sellers everywhere. They were flogging anything they could get away with: chandeliers, crystal vases, heirlooms, sewing machines, Olympic teeshirts for Moscow 1980, picture frames, dessert spoons, milk, coca-cola, underwear, even a set of tyres. They were, of course, all desperate to earn some money. Most of them had not been paid for several months and this was to be the best way of earning extra cash. I bought a bottle of spring water and an empty four-litre bottle of Bell’s whisky.
The next day, we were awoken by the noise of Tatarstani pop playing on the internal radio. Russian trains are well equipped in this way. The scenery had changed on the outside: there were fields laden with permafrost. when I say fields, I do not mean thay had cute hedges around them intertwined with small wooden thickets. No. The fields here were the size of the Isle of Wight and were marked off by barbed wire fences or just had different colours. I remember seeing one farmhouse over the course of a hundred kilometres. This was extensive farming at its most impressive. Imagine owning a bit of land bigger than Switzerland. That is what I call a waste. Not having two brass coins to rub together, but enough land to solve the problems of overcrowding in India or China. After a long haul through the picturesque scenery of Chuvashia, the river Volga came into view. It was more like the Isle of Wight than I thought. Looking out across to the other side of the river was about as far as Cowes to Portsmouth only there was an interconnecting bridge. The bridge is not classed as the world’s longest because it is actually built on a series of small islands.
The train rattled on at its steady pace. Crossing the river seemed to take up the morning. It was time to eat something. The buffet car was full of hungry Russian peasants waiting for their onion and cabbage soup with eggs. We passed on this course and tossed a coin between the cabbage and onion omelette or the fried egg with onion. If we asked nicely, they were willing to add some cabbage at no extra cost. We enquired as to whether this was a Tatar dish. Yes was the reply and we could look forward to more when we arrived in Kazan. We were elated at the prospect of a few more days of this. I enquired as to what they would serve on their way over to Vladivostok. They said that they changed the culture of the meals depending on which city was next on the list. So, between Kazan and Omsk, they would prepare boiled egg cut up and placed on a bed of cabbage and onions. When they were going over the central Siberian leg, they would prepare golubtsy, cabbage balls with egg inside. As for the approach to Vladivostok, there were not so many passengers left, so they would cook fishcakes. A tremendous variety of cuisine, fit for any number of discerning gourmet chefs.
Once in Kazan, we were glad for a walk. The first thing to do was to find a hotel. Direct in the centre was Hotel Tatarstan, the tallest block of cracking cement around and seriously empty looking. However, beds were $20 per night including breakfast, and we could have done with a little dietary change. At the counter was a rough looking woman with a brown uniform and purple jumper over the top. “What do you want?” she screeched. When she saw we were foreigners, she asked us where our visas were. Our visas only covered the Moscow region, so we were relying on her “kindness” to allow us to stay there. This was like relying on a rock star to stay celibate while on a concert tour of girls' schools. She called over a security guard and spoke about us. She obviously wanted us to pay her off or go and find somewhere different. We were having none of it, and both started speaking subtly but audibly in English, fitting words and acronyms such as “CIA”, “military police” and “American Embassy” randomly into the conversation we were having about whether to go to another place. They were slightly alarmed about this and stuck us in a hotel suite on the eighth floor. It was small and smelled of the last client, who was probably a dung beetle breeder.
After serious contemplation that we would not speak a word in the room for fear of incrimination, we set off for a walk aronud the city of Kazan. It was a beautiful day but it was in the minus twenties. Our first port of call was a café, where we moresomely tucked into a plate of cabbage with grilled onion and egg sauce. It was the perfect start to our stay there. What a variety of gastronomic delights we were getting! On our way out of the restaurant, we decided to get a bus to the river to see it for ourselves. While sitting there arguing about the direction, someone said, “Get off at the next stop, and wait for bus number sixteen.” We were both startled by this welcome intrusion into our row that we got talking and she left the bus with us. She was approximately thirty years old and had a son, Timur, whose name fit the description, as Timur means Iron, and boy, was he hard. He was very young, only five, but he had a real hard streak in him. He would pull you as hard as he could until you played with him and did not take no for an answer.
Alla, the kind lady, showed us the main touristic sites of Kazan: the university where Lenin himself studied, the main church with a solid wall of gold and the river, which in my mind, was really an inland sea on the move. The French have two words for river: rivière, a river that is either a tributary of another or has just a puny estuary, and fleuve, a larger river with mouth, like the Seine or the Rhine. But nothing prepares you for this and there is not yet a word that could describe the Volga. It may not be as long as the Nile, but it is bloody awesome. It's like God's hosepipe. Alla then took us back to her house for something to eat, seeing as we had not seen anything more different than onions, cabbage or eggs, and I was beginning to crave anything, even radioactive fish from the Volga. She served us up some Borshch, or beetroot soup, which contained potatoes, beef, carrots, onions (although we fished them out), and plenty of charming herbs that went down a treat. She followed this up with a pork escalope and started talking about the possibility of marriage with a guy from the West. She needed someone who would keep the Iron Kid, who during this conversation, was in the other room shifting the wardrobes around, in his place and a father figure would have been nice, but Timur’s biological father ran off three years earlier. Oh, how nice it would be to have a Western man, who, not thinking in the least about the monetary aspect, could bring Timur up to be a lumberjack or a removal man instead of the mafia joint bouncer he was destined to become.
Goodness, this was time to leave the establishment if this was the alterior motive, but just before saying this, she asked us if we could find someone for her in Europe. Phew... We had a longer chat and seeing that the sun was ebbing away, we resolved to go and find a place to have a drink. Alla recommended a place in town. It was incredible, but the population of Kazan is about one and a half million and yet on the map, it reads Kazan whereas my university town, with only a quarter of a million people, looks more like WOLVERHAMPTON. Never trust a map. Most cartographers cannot even tell the difference between the capital city of Tatarstan which is a huge metropolis and a piddling little brewery town which was ranked only third most important place in Staffordshire until the County Council was too confused to keep it any more and gave it to the West Midlands. Map drawing must attract some weirdos.
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