9. VASSILY AND VITALI

Not a good snake

God knows what it was aboout the phrase 'Altai Mountains' that made me think my hysterical fear of heights wouldn't be a problem. Maybe it was the fact that the venture was described as a 'walking tour'. May it was when the travel agents told us all we needed to bring was comfortable shoes. Or maybe when we wrote to them and told them I was afraid of heights, and they said 'We don't suppose it is dangerous or scary'. I imagined gradual inclines and walking among, not up, the mountains.

Perhaps I just fooled myself because I didn't want to spend 10 days alone in Novosibirsk while Mari went on the trip. Novosibirsk is not one of the world's great cities - a sort of Siberian Birmingham. Whatever, off we went, and it didn't go well. If I've been guilty in this blog of creating humour by making other people look ridiculous or incompetent, at least I don't exempt myself. Now it's definitely my turn.

After a 12-hour bus trip to Altai, we were met at the starting point by Vassily, our guide for the tour, and his son Vitali, who was second guide. Vassily spoke not a word of English, Vitali enough to put together some broken, heavily accented phrases. The rest of the group either didn't, or didn't want to. That's fine, I knew what to expect and I'll have Mari to talk to.

We started with a 78km motorboat trip across Teleskoe Lake before the first day's walking. While we met our fellow walkers, Vitali didn't say much. Vassily busied himself putting on camouflage gear, mending things with his teeth, and generally giving the impression of a man who had once survived after a helicopter crash by eating the bodies of his dead comrades. It's times like this, I thought, when I'm glad to be so skinny. If it all ends in cannabalism, I'm the least attractive prospect for the pot. Having said that, I don't have any practical skills to justify keeping me alive: this one can make fire with sticks; that one can hunt; I could keep a semi-humourous diary of our descent into godless barbarism. Doesn't really cut the mustard.

Vassily split up the food supplies for the week - they seemed reassuringly abundant, and certainly felt so when we added it to our backpacks. We were also carrying clothes, tents, sleeping bags, mats and equipment for the week. After the boat landed, though, it was a flat and easy 10km walk to our first camp. Vassily  was becoming ever more military - giving us, literally, the marching orders; the exact line to follow; intstruction on how to carry our packs. 'He says you have to hold the bag lilke this if you want to rest in the mountains,' Mari translated, 'otherwise something about falling rocks or falling off.' Great.

On the second day we marched 24km, but it wasn't so bad on flat ground with kind weather. The third day was rest and fishing. Well, Mari and I made our customary unsuccessful swipe at the local fish community; Vassily fished. He pulled one out on his first cast, missed a couple, then got two more. I kept expecting him to dive into the water and come up clenching a salmon between his teeth.

Put out, Mari and I went off for a walk. And that's where the trouble started. We headed off on tomorrows route along the river and eventually the path started curling, very narrowly, around the side of a mountain that rose high into the clouds. Off high in the distance, it seemed to get thinner, the drop ever higher. Convincing myself it was just perspective, Mari and I plugged on, trying to conquer my fears before the next day. Instead I was reduced to an ever more panicked state and we decided it was better to go back.

I'd already seen enough to spend a sleepless and somewhat embarrassing night worrying myself sick, slapping myself around the face and trying to convince myself I could do it. By the morning, I believed that I could. But I couldn't finish my morning sludge, which was a bad sign as up until then I'd been wolfing it down greedily. All there was to eat. Half an hour up the road I was in big trouble.

I don't have any problem with being high up as long as there's a barrier between me and the drop. When there isn't, and the path is rocky and narrow, and I can see it rising ever more precariously however hard I try not to look, the fear is hideous. My whole body hollows, legs shake, head spins, eyes stop seeing and instead my brain plays repeat tapes of things falling from very great heights. Sweat drips off me. I was a mess.

When I told them I couldn't go on, they tried everything with me. Holding my hands, relieving me of the backpack, allowing me to walk behind Mari... but I flatly refused to continue. It's tempting to say I was behaving like a girl, but it's not true, because there were girls there and they were plodding along quite happily. I was behaving like a pampered coward.


All I wanted in the world was not to have to continue up that mountain. "I can't do it. I can't." Actually, that's probably not true. People are always telling me I need to confront my fears and feel a sense of achievement. But why? I'm supposed to be on holiday. If our lives had depended on it; if there'd been a holy man offering enlightenment at the top; if it would have solved the world's problems then I could have gone on. But for a load of cod-therapy speak and a group hug at the end of it? No thanks. 


I refused. Vassily was clearly disgusted, probably thinking I was putting the whole mission in danger and playing into the hands of the enemy, whoever that might be. I pleaded to be allowed to go back and camp alone until they returned but he wasn't having it. Clearly I couldn't be trusted. His son, Vitali, would have to accompany me.


Vitali looked every bit as delighted with this prospect as I was. I could understand that. Four days in the Siberian wilderness sharing a two-man tent with a complete stranger whose language you don't speak is not an easy prospect. I didn't take the decision lightly. When we got back, he tried to convince me I'd be ok, it wasn't too late to catch them up, if I could just get round the last corner on the hillside the rest of the week was easy.


I looked up doubtfully at the mountain. Clouds were settling around it only about 100 metres higher than our current point. I didn't belong up there. Besides, he had a vested interest in telling me it got easier. I decided to stay down below and face the music. At least until my ipod batteries ran out about an hour later, after which it was time to face the awkward silence instead.


Vitali made heroic efforts with his English. Fortunately he was a football fan and that gave us enough to start up a conversation. But given the limits, it couldn't go far, and soon the silence was back. We contemplated the enormity of the the boredom and awkwardness that stretched out for four days before us.

How that young man must have hated me. It was alright for me; I knew the alternative was far worse. For him, the chance to spend a week walking in the mountains he'd loved since childhood with people who spoke his language had been replaced by this. At one point I thought I saw his eyes redden with tears; they must have been from pure anger and frustration. 



After that, though, he never let it show. I've nothing but praise for his dignity and self possession in not only resisting the temptation to strangle me, but to actually keep up conversation and pleasantness. Quickly, we marked out our roles. Mine was that of preposterously ill-suited Englishman. I have an allergic reaction to mosquito bits which can result in anything from excess swelling to big angry red blisters to open weeping sores. I need a constant regime of of repellent sprays, soothing creams and anti-histamine tablets to stop myself looking like a leprosy victim. I must have looked a right tit, constantly fishing around for remedies in my pathetic little first-aid purse. I might as well have wearing a top hat and carrying a china tea pot.

The silence fell again.

Ants have an interesting life, when you follow it for any length of time. If you glance at it all it looks like meaningless scurrying; but you actually sit and stare down into their world for, say, hours on end, you can see there's a huge amount going on down there. Lots of overcoming huge obstacles, locking horns and wrestling with rivals, ant sex, struggling to drag huge loads that will serve in the feeding of whole communities or the building of some cathedral-like super structure they'll probably never see in their lifetimes... it's interesting stuff, it really is.

We had to save our drips of excitement: making fires (which I constantly got wrong), cooking in the big pot (same) and walking. Ah, walking. The next day we had to walk the 24km bag to base camp. How we savoured the prospect; how wrong we were.

There are people who will tell you that the journey back always seems quicker. I've been one of them. It's a load of horseshit.

We set off, for reasons Vitali explained and I couldn't understand, at 11am, instead of the 5am start we'd taken on the way there. Our target was to cover in five hours what had taken us eight in the other direction. But we were walking without any of the enthusiasm or novelty that had carried us out there, and the sun was baking hot. It bleached everything outside me brilliant white; inside, my mood was pure blackness. I cursed the stupidity, the vanity, the cowardice, the bus, the boat, the gods that had brought me there. I hated every dusty step. Sweat dripped of me, down to my heavy, lurching shadow, and the bag tore constantly backwards on my shoulders.

After a while I thought delirium must have been setting in because I actually began to appreciate my surrounding when we sat down for a break. You couldn't call it peaceful: everything was motion and noise. The river rumbled past us, buttercups swayed across the fields, wasps and flies busied themselves, butterflies floated before my face... only the mountains were dignified, silent and ancient. Fuck this, I thought. I poured a bottle of water over my head and got back to cursing everything around me.

The oasis that kept us going was a village, a little before our camping spot. If we made it before the local shop shut we could replace the daily sludge with pies, chocolates, even a tin opener to actually eat the canned meat we'd been pointlessly lugging along in our backpacks, unable to open. As the Mongolian horsemen turning out in the fields to point and laugh at me came more and more regularly, I knew were getting closer.

When we'd passed through the village, before dawn, it was a sleeping collection of hovels. Now, to my fevered eyes, it looked like salvation. Idyllic. Children and cattle meandered along the single dirt road, local drunks slumped against corrugated tin walls waved at us, those who could stand stopped us to shake our hands and ask Vitali our business. I don't care what he was saying about me and wouldn't like to know.

There weren't any tin openers in the shop - it wasn't a Waitrose, funnily enough - but there was enough variety to lighten our steps for the last kilometre. I looked dreamily ahead as a young boy chased cows with a stick while his mate pelted them with stones.

"That boy is throwing stones at the cow!" I said to Vitali.

"Oh, yes yes," he answered, as if this were something to be positively encouraged. All is right with the world.

We still had an evening and another full day to kill when we reached the base camp, but I've learned that time passes easier with access to consumer goods. That's my gift of knowledge to the Russian people. We were able to ignore one another and concentrate on our crisps.

When the rest of the party got back, of course, Mari told me Vitali had been right all along. I would've been fine if I'd just managed to keep going for another half hour round that narrow, terrifying corner. Mind you, I'd only have found something else to be scared of: apparently while they were on top of the mountain they saw some bear shit. (And yes, folks, it was in the woods. I don't know if they also saw the Pope up there proclaiming his

Catholic beliefs, or ducks demonstrating the watertightness of their arses.)

The most fearsome animal I saw was a snake - a fucking snake! - but I got told to calm down. It whipped around my feet and under a rock when I was coming back from fetching some cans of lager I'd stashed in a plastic bag in the river. I reported what I'd seen to Mari, who told Vitali. By this point I thought I better not bother him direct.

"A snake? Here? No, there are no snakes."

"I've just seen it! Over there!"

"Oh. Well then... it was a good snake."

That's when I knew they were bullshitting me. I ask you, when did you ever here of a good snake? Even the bloody bible can't come up with a positive role for snakes. If I'd seen a bear they'd probably have told me it was only Baby Bear and I'd be alright as long as I didn't sleep in his bed or eat his porridge. Bastards.

Anyway, I was justified the next morning when one of the women, Svetlana, went to the same river and came running back screaming and doing jazz hands in front of her face. Everyone went to see what the fuss was and there was our snake, about half a metre long, writhing round a tree like that fucker out of The Jungle Book.

"Oh, that snake. It is a bad snake."

Of course it's a bad snake. Everyone kept their distance except Vassily, who tried to pick it up by the tail. Christ knows what he wanted to do with it - maybe slap Svetlana about the face with it and tell her to pull herself together, or fasten it round his head like a Rambo bandana. Luckily, the snake wanted no part in the whole farce and buggered off. Later Vassily admitted he'd put all of us in trouble by provoking the bad snake. Cheers Vass, that's what we're paying you for. Nutter.

Then it was over. Nobody fell off a mountain, nobody got eaten by a bear or poisoned by a bad snake. Just an easy 10km hike back to the lake and another long, slow boat trip past countryside that so unendingly beautiful it gets really boring after a while. We have two days staying in a wooden shack at a sort of no-frills Siberian Butlins with extra cheesy disco karaoke canteen hell and squat shitters, then it's the 12 hour coach trip back to Novosibirsk. Siberia's Birmingham will be the closest I've got to civilisation for a long time.

8. OMSK

Never go to Omsk.

7. THE COMMANDANT

There are a great many trees in Russia, and I think I've now seen most of them from the window of a train. Lots of different types, but mainly the silver birch. The silver birch is Russia's national tree. Do we even have a national tree in Britain? If so, does anybody know what it is? Maybe the oak, but I don't imagine anybody really cares apart from Bill Oddie. For Russians, the national tree is close to their heart. In the case of the carriage attendant on our first Trans-Siberian railway journey, I think this may be because her heart is made of wood.

She barks commands, witholds tickets, prowls the corridor with an angry hoover, thwarts any attempt to escape to the rest of the train, and probably spends the rest of the time hanging upside-down in her cabinet with her wings folded across her chest. Bryn Thomas, in his smugly rose-tinted "Trans-Siberian Handbook", says that exploring the train is one of the great pleasures of the journey, but he offers no advice on getting past the gimlet-eyed robobitch who bars any egress from your designated area.

We aren't welcome in the restaurant car, either, after an early dispute with another hardliner behind the counter who considered it acceptable to sell us a different beer to the one we'd asked for then charge us twice the price. Apparently the difference will have to come out of her wages now. My heart bleeds. But that's because I've actually got one.

Confined to the safety of our private cabin, Mari and I play chess to pass the time, but she's already beating me three frames to nil and I can't have any more of that. So the view from the greasy window becomes my constant companion. Journeying into the heart of real Russia we pass a catalogue of geographical and historical landmarks, but unfortunately I've slept through most of them: the obelisk where Europe ends and Asia begins; the slow climb into the Ural mountains, and the wonderfully named city of Perm, where I hoped to see bubble-haired scousers mooching on the platform, all passed overnight as we slept.

I had hoped to stay awake for all these - I've waited a long time for all this - but it was impossible. The previous night was spent almost sleepless in the waiting room of Vladimir station, which turned out to be a dosshouse. We had hoped the 31 rouble entrance fee would serve to keep out the nutters, but it simply reserved the space for a more flamboyant class of dosser.

A man splayed out on the bench behind us had an emotional, two-hour, one-way conversation on a mobile phone that can't possibly have been connected to anyone, and in front of us two carrier-bag laden babushkas played out absurd Russian comedy of petty disagreements and pantomime gestures. It all seemed quite amusing until dawn, when one of them sat, rested her tiny head in bony hands, and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.

As well as being the residence of the Russian Bum Improv Theatre Co, the waiting room seemed to serve as the last post for young Russian army recruits to say goodbye to their families before being carted away to whatever hell awaits them. Every few hours an officer would lead in a squad of sullen recruits and order them to sit before they were joined by wailing mothers, rigid fathers, awkward girlfriends and determinedly boisterous mates. If they paid the entrance fee. The woman in command of the waiting room made absolutely clear that they may be the Russian army but if they didn't pay their 31 roubles they weren't coming in. Those who didn't have the change could only wave and reach out hands through the metal fencing. If Russia had put it's women alongside its men on the frontiers of Moscow, Napoleon might never have set his muddy boots in the city.

So the upshot of all this is that I was a bit tired by the time we got on the legendary train, and I slept from one continent to the next. What I did see, as well as trees, is a succession of post-Soviet shitholes: Kirov, named after the rising star of Communism who was assassinated in 1934 by a "lone nutter" probably acting under the distant orders of a jealous and paranoid Joseph Stalin (if Stalin really wanted rid of Kirov he should have just shown him the town he planned to name in his honour; the man might have died from disappointment); a place famous for the production of fireproof bricks; and the town of Bum-Kombinat, which may be the last word in shitholes. And onwards, into the night.

I woke up in Yeketarinburg. The last Tsar and his family were held prisoner in a dingy merchants house here in 1918 before being shot in the cellar by Bolshevik heavies and dumped dead in an old mine. It is a pivotal point in Russian history. I can't appreciate the gravity of my surroundings, though, because I'm desperate for the toilet, but am not allowed in before, after or during station stops. This marks a pivotal point in my deteriorating relationship with the carriage attendant.

200km on from Yeketarinburg and we are, at last, in Siberia. Changes creep into the landscape: trees occasionally give way to a flush of purple flowers in a boundless meadow; the village hovels are more gaily painted; we cross broad, lazy rivers and brooding swamps. Then the oppressive trees close in on us again.

All the way, the cheesepop being piped through the cabin's speakers by the commandant is compulsory, breaking down resistance like the Barney theme tune continually inflicted on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. But there aonly eight more hours to go until we reach Omsk, our destination for this leg of the journey. I never thought I'd say "only eight more hours" about a rail journey, but when we get there we will have travelled 2,500km, in 41 hours, across three time zones and two continents. I shudder to think what the chess score will be by then.

6. IVAN

St Petersburg was a gentle introduction, as European as it is Russian. After that we took am overnight train to Moscow, which is so Russian it slaps you in the face, offers you some smoked fish, insists you drink a glass of vodka, then accuses you of being a spy and threatens to revoke your papers.

The insistence on vodka, at least, came in the aptly bear-like shape of Big Ivan, the first person we met when in the city. He was sat alone as if expecting us in a cafe where we ordered beer and and greasy meat pasties called cheburak.

"Vodka is better," he said from his table nearest the counter, and invited us to join him. That was it. I already knew he'd be called Ivan.

He bought the first (large) vodka. Mari, being female, was allowed to decline, but I'd read my Russian ettiquette guides and took the whole 100mg glass in one. Ivan looked horrified.

He bought the second one too, a smaller measure. "Please, not all at once," he said.

Ivan was a crime reporter for one of the Moscow papers - I didn't believe this until he showed me his photo in his regular column - and sketched a grim picture of guns, drugs and immigrant tension in the city. He also said he was a tourist guide (I assume he uses a different spiel for that one) and a police officer.

"The problem is there aren't enough jobs for people," he told us later. No Ivan, and that's probably because you've got them all.

He seemed to have a lot of time on his hands for a man with at least three jobs and it was me who eventually had to call an end to the session, feeling I'd had more than enough. If you are going to get drunk in Moscow, it's a good idea to do it with the local crime correspondent. The conversation serves as a constant reminder why you must get too witless.

We swapped phone numbers, but didn't see Ivan again after that. He texted me a few days later and asked me if I wanted to watch the England game with him in the bar, but I was already tucked up in bed, exhausted with the baking hot claustrophobia of the city. And besides, I think Ivan probably gets too see enough high-expense misery and suffering in his job, as a tourist guide.