Another Sunday, another bleak eyesore of a town.

This time we were all hungover and tired. Lorraine and I had made the mistake of going to Koninginnedag the previous night - an event celebrating the birthday of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands. We had a bottle of wine with dinner and rocked up to the hall to find a bunch of strange and embarrassing characters getting their groove on to various oldie classics. There was an older lady in a strappy dress so tight that Lorraine declared she looked like a trussed ham. There was an older couple ball room dancing to Phil Collins. There was an older (what am I saying, they were all old) guy from the I.T. department in an orange bow-tie and braces who asked Lorraine if she was at school. We made the rational and logical decision to drink through the hideousness of the whole affair, and so hit the free bar and subsequently - and inevitably - the dancefloor, where things got very messy.

Paul had had an interesting night too, involving a sauna, plentiful vodka, nudity, and being beaten with birch twigs... but that's a whole other story. Suffice it to say, the three of us were functioning a little below par.

Paul and Lorraine valiantly hauled themselves over to my place where I let the side down somewhat by being still in my bathrobe, looking like Death. After a paracetamol and a piece of clam (what we called kulich - a Russian Easter cake which tastes like brioche but has icing and glitter on the top, and wavy clam-like sides... hence the name. Like what I did there?) I was back in the land of the living, and we walked to the bus station to catch the midday bus to Dolinsk.

The bus ride was - again - the highlight of the trip as we passed through pretty scenery with melting snow and mountains, as well as a pipeline spread. I had found a sentence about Dolinsk on a Sakhalin tourist agency website and it said that there was an arboretum with 170 different types of plants. I was fairly sceptical considering the site also said that Kholmsk was 'beautiful' and Korsakov 'majestic' - I don't think so! But you never know! We walked through the town, past the obligatory Lenin statue, across the square, and along streets of shabby apartment blocks, heating pipes and old patriotic symbols. We didn't know the word for arboretum in Russian, so we asked a lady where the forest was, and even helpfully drew some trees (which looked like broccoli - hey, drawing's not my forte). She looked at us like we were crazy since the town is surrounded by woods. In the end, Lorraine called DD back in Yuzhno and got him to look up 'arboretum' in his Russian dictionary and spell it out to us. We returned to the lady armed with our new-found knowledge and proudly showed her the scrap of paper. She stared at it for a minute and then said "Ahhh, park!" Right. Park.

So we followed her directions to the arboretum - sorry, park - which was pretty much just more snow-covered forest behind some rusty garages. We fell around in the snow for a while but if there were 170 different kinds of plants, they certainly were well hidden.