Welcome from Kungur. Well techniclly we're still in Perm but todays trip took us to the Kungur Ice Caves, which are about 100km from Perm. As we didn't have a computer there we are doing a belated blog.

The Kungur Ice Caves are awesome and nothing like the minimal amount of info we could find on the net led us to believe. We thought that they would be practically impossible to find and even harder to get into. . . not so.

We found the apparently new tourist information office yesterday in Perm, who gave us bus times, maps, bus numbers and even little notes in russian to give to the ticket people! So we got on the bus at 09:25 this morning and 2 hours later we were in Kungur. Then we took a small local bus to just outside the caves. The short walk to the cave entrance went past the Hotel Stalagmit and a big garden of wood sculptures.

It looks like they are ever expanding the tourist attractions here. We spent an hour and 20 mins in the cave - the only downside was that all the talking by the guide was in russian but she was kind enough to point us in the right direction when there was something particularly beautiful to photograph. Appart from the amazing ice walls and underground pools we really enjoyed being cold again! it was just below freezing in there and I felt vindicated for bringing my jumper all this way. The caves were awesome, and very well lit - unfortunately I am bloging from a prehistoric lap top and it has taken over 2 hous to put 6 photos on here, so ill save the others for later.

We met a nice lady on the bus who basically (in broken english) made sure we got all the right tickets, had a nice time and got our bus home, she even picked some local strawberries for us! we said thankyou lots and tried to chat as much as we could, I have found pretty much all the Russian people we have met to be very accomodating and helpfull. Some have even gone out of there way to make sure we were having a nice time. So appart from the sun stroke I like it here.

Tommorow we are going to visit the art museum and possibly the small zoo before getting our next train to Irkutsk. I have checkend and tripple checked the time for this one so no foul ups . . . this leg of the journey will take 2 and a half days! thats a lot of noodle dinners!

So the next time we blog we should be on Olkon island on Lake Baikal in a Yurt! Bring it on!

Bye for now x Mrs P