Episode 5We plodded on eastwards on a good road that bypassed all towns and villages. After some hours we saw our first agriculture this side of St Petersburg but we didn’t see any farm animals until we turned off this road and began to make our way southwards towards Yaroslavl. Just after turning south we passed through a very large industrial city, Cherepovets. First there was a big power station then what L thinks might be an agro chemical plant, Fosagro...

Episode 4At Pskov we spent a while looking for a bank, usually we don’t have any trouble finding banks but on this particular day they seemed to evade us and L ended up using an ATM instead only to find that she was limited to a 5000 rouble withdrawal. Do you people have any idea how little 5000 roubles is, well, it proved to be $108 AU, well less than 100 Euros and even in Russia it doesn’t go a long way. L worked it out at about 46 roubles to an Au$...

Having decided that a trip out to the Solovetski Islands would be nice my lot then found themselves with a few days to fill in hanging around Arkangelsk as being the height of summer they couldn’t get a flight out to the islands until Sunday and would come back on Monday. Back in ’98 they had tried to catch the ferry to the islands from Kim but then it was running very sporadicly and some people had been wanting a week for it so they decided not to b...

Episode 10Sorry, it’s been a while since I whipped L into doing a bit more, but I’ve been having an identity crisis that still isn’t fully resolved. All these years I’ve been quite happy to believe that I was a ‘bean bear’, but lately L keeps calling me a ‘grub’, so that now I am totally confused and don’t know what I am, then L clarified the situation today by calling me a ‘grubby bean bear’. Now ...

Episode 17 Olgii didn't appear all that attractive. Again there were puddles everywhere the size of swimming pools. Fortunately most are so deep and bumpy that drivers don’t rush through them so avoiding getting drenched with muddy, oily water isn’t as difficult as it could be. The population of the town is mostly Kazakh and Islamic so there are several small mosques, none very impressive. In the centre is a big open square littered with rubbish and...