Our journey here was our longest yet; 26 hours on a train. Sleeping in the train is ok, but when you wake up and have a whole day to spend before you can get out, then cabin fever starts to set in. On the plus side, I have read far more books while travelling than I did before. We can strongly recommend A journey into Russia by Jens Muhling, which has helped fill the hours.

We had low expectations for Novosibirsk. We had picked it as a stopover, to avoid spending multiple nights on the train. All we knew about it was that they had a statue to what was allegedly, the first traffic light. In Novosibirsk. That was so charming that we just had to visit.

The atmosphere of this city was completely different to Perm. Whereas Perm was busy and business focussed, here the city felt more student and tourist friendly. The transport connections are good, with an easy to use metro. The architecture too is a mix of modern and soviet, with a lot of variety and colour.

On the first day we followed directions to what my app said was a tourist information centre, but was in fact a large sign in the middle of a forest! Fortunately, this was located in a large nature park and just being among the trees was superb. It was completely free to access and populated with locals who like us could just walk here. We sadly couldn't go on the railway running through the park as it was closed for the winter.

We had a fantastic time exploring the capital of Siberia and we left wanting more.