By the seaside - kind of Today we made our way to the bus station, bought some tickets and got the bus to Listvyanka by Lake Baikal. That was actually a WHOLE lot more difficult and time consuming than it sounds. The bus station makes Chorlton Street bus station (M'cr) look positively palatial. The bus window pane had the odd stone chip and several cracks but you could see out of it so what more could you want right? The transport around here is at least 150 ye...

Now in Asia Happy Anniversary Helen's mum and dad!! The following day, the soldier returned at around 11am, still drunk, with a friend. They sat opposite us for a while until I think they got the message and left. We finally arrived in Irkutsk at 06:45 Wednesday morning (now GMT + 8 hours) and alighted the train feeling like the great unwashed. We clambered onto a tram where 2 females (I think); one the driver one the conductor, were literally barking orders a...

Interesting people We left the hotel and headed for the station. I, in what would appear is my usual style these days, went into blind panic after being in the station for nearly a whole minute and not being able to locate our platform. We had established that our platform was number 1 and all the signs made reference to platforms 2-9. To cut a long story short we finally found a sign in an inconspicuous corner of the station and found it. Our carriage was numb...

Didn't do an awful lot today. Ekaterinburg is the economic and cultural capital of the Urals and more importantly for us much easier to navigate than Moscow. We visited the Romanov death site where Tsar Nicholas II and his wife and children were murdered in 1918; there is a church to honour the family and 2 wooden crosses; one which marks the spot. That's really about all we have done here; I probably won't write an entry for a short while, as late tomorrow we b...

I woke up around 7.30am and the Russian man promptly offered me a tea bag and a sweet. Neither of the men (Andre and Micha) spoke English but Micha, the older guy did try; he showed us a booklet of some boats and a picture of a dog. We showed him Mrs Colin. He offered Matt a beer (at 11am). Then Olga came round; she had swapped her knee length boots for socks and slippers and had curlers in her hair. She vacuumed, ordering us all to lift our feet up and then kind...