The way to go

As our Polish train approaches Moscow, the scenery looks quite different from the rolling English countryside I wrote about in the last post. It's a lot flatter for a start. The buildings are commonly made of wood. I must admit, I'm a bit in love with Russia after only two hours.

It feels good to be here at last; a day later than planned. Less than twenty four hours into our trip and our first significant* blunder made itself known. As we were about to board our train for Moscow at Warsaw, we realised something odd: the train was to make a stop in Minsk, Belarus. We don't have visas for Belarus. In fact we had specifically chosen this particular train, on the advice of Seat 61, because it did not go through Belarus. The train had other ideas.

So we disembark at the Polish border town of Biala Podlaska. A kindly taxi driver shows us the embassy, followed by the bank where we need to pay for our visas the following morning, and then to a nearby hostel. The entire journey, he is telling us all sorts of useful information. Unfortunately he's telling us this in Polish and he doesn't seem to understand that we don't speak the language. In fact his response to our puzzled looks and shrugs is to talk louder and faster. For reference, if this happens to you, you shouldn't pay 50 Zlotys for a taxi from the station, 10 is more than enough.

It all worked out ok though and we got back on the train and even ended up in a better carriage. A big thank you to Marcin in Warsaw, whom I met at the Do Lectures last weekend. He helped us do battle with re-booking our reservation at the ticket counter.

Strangely enough, had we not made a complete pig's ear of it all, the section of our trip from London to Moscow would have been comparable in price and time to flying. Unless you fork out a small fortune to fly directly, you must stopover in Copenhagen. We've seen so much already and the trip has only just begun. Despite our best efforts to sabotage ourselves, or perhaps because of it, we're having a great time already.

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*I did also walk into the gentlemen's toilets in Brussels Midi, startling a small urinating boy. No (more) Manneken-pis jokes please!

Once upon a time there were two impatient adventurers, waiting to go off galavanting ...

It's now a little over two weeks until lift off and we're frantically sorting out all the minutae of our trip that have (inexplicably?) failed to sort themselves out. Our Russian and Chinese visas were relatively untroublesome to obtain, with hopefully the Mongolian to follow in a similar manner this week. We've been repeatedly jabbed in the arm by a worryingly scatty nurse in a travel clinic just off Russell Square. We're still trying to work out the least savings-squeezing method of getting our grubby mits on three months worth of Malarone anti-malarials, so if anyone has any suggestions they'd be hugely appreciated.

We hopefully now also possess the means to update this blog at least once a week, in the form of an unlocked mobile phone (for use with local sim cards) and broadband dongle. The gods of internet access allowing, we will be uploading writing, pictures, videos and audio of the interviews, stories, thoughts, poems, ideas and discussions we discover along the way.

I'm starting to get a little nervous about the trip and the project. I'm very much in two minds about whether to contact the relevant authorities about the project and the standard foreign office blurb hasn't so far been astonishingly helpful. Technically we're not journalists but it may appear that we are, and therefore there's a very real possibility that we may be deported or, far worse, cause trouble for the local people we speak to. This is something we must avoid at all costs.

Most worrying is my progress with the beautiful (but evidently bastard-hard) Russian language. Several months ago Will and I made a bargain that he would learn Mandarin and I would learn Russian. While Will has diligently completed a whole audio course [two courses! - Will] and can now get by in basic conversations with the Chinese [admittedly unproven - Will], I am not doing quite so well. In fact, it would be fair to say I'm still struggling with “hello”, “don't touch me” and “where is the toilet?”.