long red lines across a map

 It has felt like a long time coming but after nearly four weeks of baby steps the trans-Siberia starts now.  Technically only starting in Moscow the traditional route goes down through Nizhny Novgorod across through Perm and the Ural mountains to our current destination of Yekaterinburg and then further on out to Vladivostock.  Because of the false start out of Moscow that was the Golden Ring and then getting sidetracked to Kazan this fourteen hour overnight leg felt like the real beginning of the journey east.  Not least because Yekaterinburg is a further time zone away from Moscow.  The fourth out of eight on  the trip.  This leg also marks the point, in the form of a handy white pillar, where Europe becomes Asia and we reach the verges of Siberia.

Europe on one side, Asia the other.

[read on]

Less than an hour in Russia proper and I have already been fined by a very severe looking railway official.  The crime was taking a photo of an, on reflection kind of average, wall mosaic of Lenin.  The site Finland Station where the great leader had arrived back to from his exile, gave a speech on a tank and proceeded on to do some stuff that you can read about elsewhere.  The punishment 100 roubles, a sixth of the money that we had just changed upon arrival.  The sequence of events was as simple as get off train from Helsinki, drag others outside to take photo of statue of Lenin on spot of aforementioned speech, change money, line up for subway tokens, pull out camera, get pulled by the scruff of the neck into a booth filled with unidentifiably uniformed officials, have piece of paper shoved under nose explaining offense and amount of fine, try and explain that personally I have no money on me a situation that’s not covered by my phrasebook, get shouted at, eventually wave over others who thankfully post my bail. [read on]