Today, being the first day of our travels, I’m sure you’re expecting me to say “Wow! How exciting! How wonderful! How marvellous!” and I won’t.
To be honest I’m completely and utterly exhausted. The last few months have been hugely tiring with planning, organisation, high pressure from work until my last day which was only 9 days ago and constant parties! Evidently some of this tiredness is self inflicted so no sympathy there -  but also it has been quite difficult saying our goodbye’s to everyone; it must be said that a fair few tears have been shed. Needless to say I also have caught a stinker of a cold and with a aching temperature, blocked ears and runny nose we took to the skies first this morning from Brussels after a hasty and emotional “au revoir” from Ju Ju at the airport.
The cabin pressure did no favours for my already delicate state, and by the time we hit 3000m at 9am CET (central European time) my hearing went totally out of the window. It still hasn’t come back. Having said all this you must think the whole day has been awful. It really hasn’t; just a shame I was feeling so rough!

Our flight was excellent; we flew with SN Brussels Airlines – very good service & not too pricey; 363 € for both of us to fly one way to Moscow. Pas mal. The first odd thing that happened was watching with mischievous glee as our Belgian fellow passenger ate his jam up with a spoon. I can only assume he failed to notice his yoghurt has slipped off of his tray …
Landed on time, immediate train connection to Moscow   (the airport is 40km out of the city centre) and I must admit that the Russian equivalent of the Gatwick express is quite fun. Very rustic and a good drinks selection offered in a plastic basket carried through the train by a couple of large Russian ladies in their undersized uniforms! After a smooth metro trip with only 1 minor hiccup we found our hotel at 6pm this evening Moscow time. CET + 2hrs. 

Evidently everything is cheap which is great. Colin is over the moon about he cost of everything. Our evening meal cost the equivalent of 10€ and included 4 pints of Russian beer! 

Russian police seem to be everywhere and yet not be doing anything at all. Even though today was a beautifully sunny autumn day, no one smiles here at all, heads down, eyes averted, trudging along – very dour. And then we met Matlab from Azerbaijan, the waiter in the porter cabin café where we ate dinner. Very friendly fellow, can’t believe we actually managed to have a conversation with him in view of the fact we don’t speak Russian and he doesn’t speak English!

After a soak in a hot very deep old bath to soothe our aches and pains from our ridiculously heavy rucksacks – (we’ll be dumping a lot of things quite quickly I think!) an early night to bed whilst watching some Russian telly in our horrendously decorated room which has not been updated since the communist era … Wonderful!

So you see all in all it has been a good day. Let’s see what tomorrow brings.

 9 October 2005 - Day 1, Colin's viewpoint.

We left Croix, just north of Lille at 6.55am this morning and crossed the border into Belgium at about 7.10am, bye bye France. Our friends Gilles & Juliette have kindly taken us to the airport as both our cars are now garaged up with batteries disconnected awaiting sale. In any case an 18 month long term parking bill would not help our budget.
Arriving at Brussels, Zavantem airport we checked in without problem, managing to get my guitar through security without problem. Unfortunately the same could not be said for our hiking boots which we had to remove and then wait while they were subjected to scans, sniffer dogs and who knows what.
As the tickets were such good value I was slightly concerned that the flight would be a Ryan air type affair with a free for all to get a seat and no sign of anything to eat or drink without paying through the nose. However I was very pleasantly surprised, loads of leg room, a hot breakfast and a free bar. They even ignored the fact that we were 7kg over our baggage allowance.
Passport control was fairly lengthy, but not too onerous and customs no problem at all. As we had rucksacks the Russian Taxi Mafia left us almost completely alone and we were able to get the Russian equivalent of the Gatwick Express without delay. The airport is 40km from central Moscow, but only cost 120 Roubles each (about £2.40). The scenery was lovely with rolling forests and occasional farmhouses. 2 uniformed, Russian ladies also came round offering cold beers and water from a little red plastic shopping basket.
We then took the underground to our hotel about 15-20 minutes from the city centre. The tunnels are very deep and the distances between the stations seem much larger than in London, but the cost was about £0.20 each.
After a very minor hiccup, due to unintelligible and often non-existent signs we arrived at the correct Metro station and set off to find our hotel. We immediately stumbled into a market and I was amazed at the huge selection of fresh fruit and vegetables, I had been half-expecting cabbage and not much else, but evidently much has changed since the old USSR. Except perhaps our hotel room. Don't get me wrong it's ensuite, clean and tidy with a phone and TV, but the decoration, electric sockets, furniture, beds (twin, not double!)and bathroom explain why it is classed as an 'unrestored' room.
We quickly took off our rucksacks, mine in particular had been causing problems as it wasn't adjusted correctly and also it weighs in at 27kg. We then walked back to the market and went into a little cafe for a drink and dinner.
Russian beer is classed from number 0 to 9, 0 being non-alcoholic and 9 being up with the most potent Belgian brews. A good standard beer is number 3 at about 4.8° and only 20 roubles a pint. We ordered two tomato salads which included cucumber, raw onion and lots of fresh dill, they were wonderful. To follow we had chicken brochettes, which were really flavourful and not at all dry; obviously not battery chickens.
We got chatting to one of the waiters who is originally from Azerbejan, but now lives in Moscow along with approx. 1.5 million of his countrymen. He gave us our first Russian lesson and now we can count to ten, say please and thank you, order a beer and know the words for husband and wife. We have also learnt that the police and skinheads are a problem and that his wife lives on the other side of Russia.
Back at the Hotel, Tony Blair and President Putin are on the TV, I must say TB's Russian is excellent, is he planning on defecting once Gordon gets his feet behind the desk at No 10?

What a superb day! I just hope Sam's cold will be better tomorrow.

10 October 2005 - Day 2, Sam's Account

Well thank god I feel better after a good night's sleep. No heating in the room though so it was slightly nippy but nothing the sleeping bag couldn't handle. Late start. No alarm, Hooray!

Breakfast was included in our hotel cost and having presented our vouchers to the surly waitress we got tucked into the buffet. Hmmm, not what you usually get in your standard European hotel but thought I'd better give it a go. So once I'd kick started the system with some strong coffee I braved the Russian buffet and ate some pickled beetroot, coleslaw, a hardboiled egg, a slice of cheese and Spam. Lovely! One thing I couldn't handle though was the milk; it was revolting both hot and cold - they must think that changing the temperature could make it better. It doesn't.

First stop was a little kiosk selling cigarettes. As Colin bought his Marlborough Lights I surveyed a woman propping herself up on the kiosk wall. She was short and plump with short peroxide hair, a very red round face partly covered by large sunglasses.  At a first glance I thought she was drinking a can of beer but on closer inspection of her drink I noticed it was a half pint can of gin & tonic. Not bad going for 11am!

We walked for miles today in the glorious sunshine. We also got our heads around the metro system a little more which is badly signposted. Russian announcements over a loud speaker tell you which station you have arrived at which was not very helpful to either of us, a signpost would have been far more welcome. The other tricky thing is that any signs that are visible e.g. road names etc... are all in the Russian alphabet. This wouldn't have been a problem if the map we had been given was written in the same alphabet, but no, it was translated into the western alphabet so we really didn't stand a chance at all in knowing where were were all day!

Huge panic on the tube this afternoon when I saw my rucksack open and Colin's passport on the floor. The carriage was packed as usual and as we frantically searched the floor for my own passport it seemed to be a total waste of time. We immediately thought "that's it, the trip is over before it has started" but no, thankfully a Russian lady had spotted it and handed it back over to us. I could have been sick with relief. My hands were shaking and I couldn't believe that we had been so lax on day two. Of course I immediately blamed Colin and told him that I would never have let such a thing happen if I had been travelling on my own. We agreed he needed his own bag and he spent the rest of the day with both of our passports in this front trouser pocket which cut off the blood supply when he sat down. Phew! Double , nay triple phew!

My opinion of the Russian people totally changed today. Firstly they are FAR more friendly than they seem and secondly they are mostly all complete piss heads! Three Russians independently came up to us during the day to help us out. The first in the metro who spent a good 5 minutes trying to explain to us where we should be going. Another saw we were in the wrong queue and personally took us to the correct one so we could buy our ticket and the third was the most astonishing of all... We had gone to the train station area. I say area as there are 3 stations all on top of each other and I asked a lady at a kiosk where we had to take the Trans-Siberian train from tomorrow evening. She left her booth unlocked the office door and physically walked us out of the building and over to the other train station which was where we needed to go. Beat that for customer service British Rail or SNCF!  

This evening was spent in another portacabin - the area we are staying in is fairly "simple" shall we say! The ambience was fantastic everyone was hugely drunk on vodka and dancing and singing away as they tucked into their meals. Colin and I stayed fairly circumspect as the Russian Karaoke started and only hoped and prayed they wouldn't ask us to come up and sing. They didn't thank god and we had a good evening enjoying everyone else get drunk and have a party. That's a first for me I think!

Night night.

10 October 2005 - Day 2, Colin's Account

I didn't sleep too well, a fly was caught between the net curtains and the window and kept disturbing me; also I was too excited too sleep much with all the events of yesterday still playing through my mind.
We had breakfast in the hotel at about 10.30am which was an interesting experience, the tea was very weak although the coffee was good. On lifting the lids of the dishes that usually contain sausages, eggs, beans & mushrooms, I found pasta and frankfurters. The juice was some type of grape juice, thankfully unfermented as the Muscovites, men & women alike seem to be constantly swigging from bottles of beer as they walk down the street. Our friend Matlab assures us that beer swigging is ok and the police turn a blind eye, vodka, however is frowned upon.
We took the metro to Yaroslavsky train station first to find out where our trans-Siberian journey starts and with some help from the locals worked out where to go. The locals are very helpful and we experienced many incidences of this throughout the day. A lady helped us with the metro changes we had to make by getting on the same carriage as us and indicating where we had to get off. Another time Sam took a picture and forget to zip up the bag, both of our passports fell out and we didn't notice!! Moments from disaster a Russian woman handed me back my passport, but when we checked our bag Sam's was still missing. Trip over almost before it had begun, or at the very least seriously delayed. We ducked down looking between people's feet to no avail. Just as panic was about to set in another Russian woman elbowed her way through the crowds and handed Sam back her passport, phew!
We walked miles around Moscow today, around the Kremlin and Red square, although we won't go inside the Kremlin until tomorrow. We looked at the tomb of the unknown soldier and Lenin's mausoleum and stopped for lunch at a small cafe which had no chairs, but the salad, beer and slice of smoked ham was good.
The gardens around the Kremlin are lovely and the occasional soldiers striding by with their large caps or on horses, added a sense of occasion. The traffic is easily as bad as London or Paris, some of the roads are huge with 8 lanes one way. We found an internet cafe with free wi-fi to update this site and continued to walk around, marvelling at how different and yet the same it all was.
On the way back to the hotel the crush of humanity was incredible. 9.5 million people use the metro everyday in Moscow and I can believe it. We had dinner at another small cafe tonight which had live music, the singer was good and everyone was dancing. The bill at 650 roubles was nearly double last night and I suspect it was a little inflated, even though I got the owner to write down what we'd had with the prices.
We have seen all sorts today from a woman brushing the leaves up from the street with a tiny broom and a bucket to a woman with very high heeled boots and very short skirt (these by the way seem to be regulation items for many young Russian women) getting into her Ferrari and roaring off into the sunset. Amazing.....

11 October 2005 - Day 3, Sam's Account.

Can you believe it the Russian Gin & Tonic drinker was at the cigarette booth again this morning! And her hair was even worse... peroxide blonde with black hair dye from her ears down. Perhaps it was there yesterday but I didn't notice. Anyway, she was still propping up the kiosk with a half litre of G & T!!

Well what a day. Very tiring and quite worrying at times. If I explain what happened today from one event to the next I don't think you'll really think it was very different or anything to be worried about.

a) Woke up late after another good nights sleep. And yes, for those who know my morning face, this one was exceptional. I'm sure my friends and colleagues from Abbey (oh whoops!) UCB know what I mean!!

b) Ate a very odd Russian breakfast. Again.

c) Made our way with our rucksacks over to the station to leave them in the left luggage

d) Went to internet café to upload internet pages & send e-mails

e) Rushed around doing jobs - postcards, stamps, face wash

f) Had a pizza meal dinner in the shopping centre

g) Hopped onto the Trans-Siberian train to Irkutsk (N backwards then  PKYTEK in the Cyrillic alphabet - just so you can understand the difficulty we have been having with all the signposts)

But the highlights and lowlights were as follows :-

Situation:- Metro with all our rucksacks (4 of them) + the guitar. We were shoved around from pillar to post with total vengeance. Lucky we didn't know what they were all shouting at us. A chap was looking extremely menacing whilst staring at us. I whispered to Colin "Don't look around now but there's a guy behind you who looks extremely menacing with a beret" Colin looked at me for a moment totally seriously and said "How the hell can anyone look menacing wearing a beret?" We were in fits of laugher for ages !

We ordered our lunch and drinks in a restaurant in the centre of town and the service was soooo totally rubbish we made a dash for it before anything was served (including the drinks) after having waited half an hour for the surly girl to take our order. Am I ashamed? Well yes a little, I don't want to give us Brits a bad name after all BUT this was really awful service and to be perfectly honest they needed the lesson. I really think we would still be sat there now waiting if we hadn't got up and left.

Then we were refused entry to the Kremlin. Can you believe it? It's not as if we look like thieves or spies or muggers. Apparently it was because Colin had his laptop computer in his rucksack. The only reason we had it on us was to send our e-mails and update our web-site at the internet café on a wi-fi connection. Anyway, the police and Kremlin security guards obviously thought we were up to no good and forbade our entry. Well it's probably not that good anyway! I was fairly gutted though as I had really been looking forward to visiting the Kremlin as a highlight of our visit to Moscow. We both agreed that we would grace them with our presence in designer suits whilst staying at the top Moscow hotel in a few years time. We hope!

Having run around all afternoon to find the wretched post office - we were sent all over the city by various people who claimed they knew where it was, we eventually found the building in question to post our letter (a bill we hadn't had time to settle before leaving!) and a few postcards. Exhausted we decided a beer would be the best pick me up and did a phenomenal amount of people watching. The girls high heels are painful to watch as they pick their way across the cobblestones of red square and the skin heads just seem rather odd; tight camouflage trousers, shaved head (or course), combat jacket and a pink shopping bag. Very swish! 

After our pizza dinner we made our way back to the train station. By metro of course as it is so far out of the centre. We were feeling rather proud of todays efforts when we emerged from the overheated metro underground into the chilly evening air. It was dark, which was already rather odd as we were in a very public place and the street lighting was not on. Immediately we noticed a certain anxiety in the air. Hundreds of people were hanging around outside the main train station and we then very quickly understood why. The train station was closed. Sheer panic rushed through us as we realised that we wouldn't be able to collect our luggage to go on the trans-Siberian train. "Don't panic", I kept on saying to Colin - which was more for me than for him I think.

After a good half an hour of complete panic - I had resigned myself to the fact that we would have to get on the train anyway without all our luggage, however Colin was not in favour of this option, and thankfully we didn't need to make that decision as the lights lit up and the doors opened to the station. Phew!

Safely in our cabin on the train we cracked open a few beers, I got rather sloshed - what a surprise (!) and then we were rocked to sleep with the motion of the train. Perfect.

11 October 2005 - Day 3, Colin's Account.

Today was stressful! Our bags took ages to pack, we have far too much stuff in them. Again I didn't sleep very well, but nothing unusual there. After another strange breakfast we checked out of the hotel, my re-adjusted rucksack was much more comfortable than before, but still damn heavy.
We decided to go to the trans-Siberian train station (Yaroslavsky) to put our bags in left luggage. I was hoping for some lockers and a key, but they were all manned. The time of closing appeared to be 8.15pm, but we were assured that it would be open until midnight. The cost was 220 roubles for 2 large rucksacks and 1 small plus my guitar.
Next stop was the net cafe to update our site and look through and send some emails.This all went very smoothly, although last night it didn't seem very likely as the Wi-Fi was playing up and the drivers seemed corrupted. Fortunately I managed to fix it and job done we headed for a quick late lunch before tackling the Kremlin.
Unfortunately lunch was anything but quick, half an hour passed after we had ordered and the drinks had still not arrived. Sam wanted to just leave, but I felt uncomfortable, we had ordered after all. More time passed and I decided enough is enough, I put on my daypack and stood up, now it was Sam's turn to look a bit uncomfortable when faced with the fact of leaving. Faced with our visit to the interior of the Kremlin getting shorter and shorter we left, perhaps our drinks and food have still not arrived, you never know.
We picked up a sandwich from a stall in Alexandrovsky gardens, outside the Kremlin and headed for the ticket office. With only an hour to go until closing we decided on a tour of the Cathedral Gardens and skipped the Armoury tour, cost 300 roubles. At security we queued for a few minutes and then were turned back as were others by the soldiers on guard. Apparently he didn't like my laptop, paranoia stills reigns!
Fortunately the ticket office were kind enough to refund our money and we embarked on a new adventure, called find the post office. Everyone was happy to point the way and it's true that they all sent us to about the same place, but no-one seemed to know exactly where it was. Finally success and after 3 different kiosks we bought some stamps. I had a cheque to send off to someone and had to get one of the staff to write the word France, in Russian of course at the bottom of the letter. Frankly I have no expectation of it ever arriving and so I apologise in advance for you not receiving your cheque.
After some shopping we stopped at a small cafe for a drink and to watch the world go by. I saw several of the skinheads that our friend Matlab had warned me about and they certainly looked the part. Combat trousers, menacing expression and shaved head, of course. The effect was some how spoilt by the fact that one of them was carrying a bright pink carrier back and the other was wearing a beret!
We then had a spot of supper in the GUM centre, full of designer labels and right opposite the Kremlin. It is said that this used to be reserved for members of the Politburo and their wives and a few favoured foreigners, today it is still upmarket, but busy with nouveau riche as well.

We headed back to the station to collect our luggage and wait for the train, major disaster struck! There was and air of menace and confusion outside the station, which was shut and dark. Hundreds of people were milling around and the police were walking around looking threatening. Our bags, of course were in the station, which was shut. Suddenly some 20 minutes later the doors flew open, the lights went on and we were back in business.
The train is here, platform 1, train number 10, carriage 6, sleepers 1&2. The room is small, but there is fresh linen, electric socket and plastic purple flowers, it will do the two of us just fine. I poked my head out of the door and was immediately invited in for Vodka by a neighbour. We had a run in with the Provonitsa who looks after the carriage as she wanted to keep our tickets until we arrived at our destination. Not a problem except our onward tickets from Irkutsk to Ulaan Baatar are also in there!

We're off the train is great, chatting, drinking beer and watching the scenery go by & yes it is nightime, I love it.   Apologised to the provinitsa and we are friends again. We have seen a much more surly side of Russia today, but it has still been a great experience.

The Moscow Journal is now finished and moves to the Trans-Siberian journal