Loco

Despite taking five days to get there, arriving in Moscow suddenly came as bit of a surprise. We were back in Europe; the vegetables were familiar, the buildings boasted stunning renaissance architecture, and there was a Tesco. Ah Red Label how I have missed you! Even the alphabet showed signs of cooperation. Granted Ресторан doesn’t mean much to the untrained eye, but if you know that Ps are really Rs, Cs are Ss and one of these little beauties [н] sounds like an N, then you’ve got yourself a restoran. It made perfect sense to us, that is until we tried to work out the metro: you try saying Serpukhovsko-Timiryazevskaya in a hurry. OK so the alphabet was still proving a challenge but we liked it. Maybe it was it was the cheese counter, maybe the jars of pesto, or even the courgettes but I suddenly felt very at home, and Moscow quickly became one of my favourite cities.

We visited all the tourist hot spots: the Kremlin with its mosque-like domes, Red Square with its worn out cobbles, and the incredible St. Basil’s cathedral. Legend has it that after it was completed Ivan the Terrible had the eyes of its architect poked out so that he could never make anything so beautiful again. Seems a little excessive to me, though it is rather a nice building. From there we wandered over the river to see the trees of love; sculpted from metal and hung with thousands of padlocks by newlyweds, these were a source of great interest – do you suppose divorcees come back with bolt cutters? Having spent all too long wandering the streets and eating delicious burek (бюрек – baked pastry cheesy goodness) we dashed back to Red Square just in time to see the changing of the guard and get in line for the mausoleum of Lenin.

Ho Chi Minh, Mao, and Lenin. It’s official I’ve got the Communist hattrick. All these gents have now had the pleasure of my company in all their waxy formaldehyde glory. I’m expecting an honourary Socialist Party membership any day now, complete with KGB security access and some sort of medal. Jokes aside I have been amazed just how many people still revere these former tyrants. I mean Ho Chi Minh seems like a stand up guy all things considered, but Mao, Lenin…really?! A few million deaths aren’t enough to put you off eh, not bothered by widespread persecution? Last year Russians voted Lenin as Man of the Century with Stalin as a close second (STALIN!!!! Honestly?) I’m baffled. But in a way that makes the history all the more interesting.

Our second and final stop in Russia was St. Petersburg; a sprawling mass of palaces, grand promenades, parks, bridges and McDonalds рестораны. There I made the terrible mistake of going to the Hermitage museum where I enjoyed some art, over 1000 rooms of it to be specific, and slowly felt my love of life slip between my fingers. OK, well not my love of life exactly, but certainly my appreciation of paintings of Jesus (which if I’m honest didn’t have a high threshold in the first place). This sadly quashed my appetite for museums and I spent the remainder of my trip deliberately avoiding anything that might fall under the category of a museum. That is with the exception of the Vodka Museum, which, as I’m sure you can imagination sits happily in the grey area between museum and bar.

“Vodka. Connecting People”, proclaimed the Nokia-inspired hat which Vicki had acquired somewhere between the nettle vodka and the chilli shots. We’d learned rather a lot about the distillation process, and looked at pictures of people who had something to do with vodka (one of whom looked rather a lot like Sean Penn). Then we tasted a medley of vodkas and proceeded to forget everything we had learned, including what exactly Sean Penn was doing there in the first place. Honey, cranberry, chilli, and nettle vodka were all duly tasted, washed down with beer and gherkins. Delicious. Then came a couple of expensive ones: Beluga (not, I was assured, made from whale) and Marmot (not to be confused with the small rodents I was eating in Mongolia). These were the final nails in my coffin and before we knew it Vicki and I were in full flowing conversation with a troupe of scary looking business men, and dancing to Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen, proving that Russian’s aren’t like coconuts at all, you just have to know their poison.

Despite the stereotype, Russians are not a miserable people. They do have a sense of humour, and laugh appropriately when they catch a ridiculous girl, mid-somersault, rolling down the aisle of a train. Any country that is host to this many mullets (retro hairstyle of 80s fame: “business up front, party out back”), must be good for a laugh. However, they don’t immediately crack a smile at you on meeting and their facial expressions may appear, to the untrained eye, to fall under the category of stabby. But it’s all a facade. On our last night in Russia we went to a bar and found ourselves without a table. The only spare seats in the entire bar were alongside a pair of mean looking Mafia types; leather jackets, shifty gazes, intriguing scars, definitely the sort of men who are in the “waste disposal” industry. We looked around for an alternative, but finding none we accepted our fates (donned our bullet proof vests) and took a seat. The first few minutes passed nervously, but then, as if by magic we broke the ice and before we knew it we were knocking back tequilas and dancing to Grease Lightning. I should have known their weakness. It’s just like the Russians on my cargo ship all that time ago. All they really want is to get a bit drunk and dance to bad music: rum and Abba for the sailors, vodka and Queen for the business men and tequila and Grease Lightning for these Mafioso. You just have to know the right combination.

A few days later we were in Estonia, back to the EU, the Schengen zone and a familiar alphabet. No more metro challenges: “what’s our stop called?” “It’s called tablecloth, starfish, backwards R, man jumping through a ring of fire… sounds like robotov-electrov-dimitrov-skaya…RED LINE, RED LINE…GO GO GO!” No more mystery meat: “you want me to eat this miscellaneous offal do you, or this cheese which you have been carrying in the lining of a goat’s stomach for days? Mmmm yes please”. No more monster bus journeys, Valium induced sleeps or train Olympics. No more tasers, reckless umbrella users or daredevil tuk-tuk rides. No more dinners of offal, scorpion or locust. No more mummified Communist tyrants!!! Whatever will I do?

The journey is almost over. Only a few countries lie between me and the United Kingdom. Around the World in 772 days, eat your heart out Michael Palin! Twenty-One countries, two oceans, somewhere in the region of 25,000 miles – of which I flew around 3,000. To my credit I have personally bullied countless backpackers into re-evaluating their choice of transport, and dragged Vicki at least 8,000 miles overland where she would have otherwise flown. I can say hello in a few more languages, and have developed an unshakeable belief in my ability to whatever the hell I want when it comes to bizarre and dangerous journeys. You might even say that I’ve found myself. Ha ha, bollocks, I’m exactly the same. So, goodbye-eee, don’t cry-eee, wipe the little tear from your eye-eee…never again with I darken you e-door with my long winded and unwanted tales. You never asked for them, you probably didn’t read them. So, be free, go forth and prosper.

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