Hi All,
Not off to a particularly good start. We left the hostel with 1.5hrs to
get on the train. I guided us all the way to a building with no name
that turned out to be a concert hall. I asked a local for directions to
'moskovy' train station and showed the railway tracks and station on
the map. She looked confused and was not able to help. So it was a
matter of finding the random street signs in Russian to determine that
we were at the block before the railway station. Wishful thinking on my
part. We got to the train station with 1hr to spare so were on track
and the first electronic board had me scratching my head as it had lots
of information on the trains in seemingly random order but no platform
information. I was rapidly flicking through the lonely planet
transiberian train book looking for help and cursing as it had lots
about history of the train trip but nothing on reading the sign board.
We moved further into the large train station and found another
electronic board with our train and earlier trains with platform
information which was a relief. I was still nervous and starting to
get concerned again as our train had no platform allocated and it was
less than 30 min before the train was due to leave but in the end it
was fine. The train platform was allocated and our train arrived with
20 min to spare. We got on the train and must of had our invisible to
us but clear to locals 'we are tourists' across our foreheads and the
ticket checker was demanding to look at our tickets just minutes after
sitting down. Probably expected that we were on the wrong train and was
getting ready to clear us out of the carriage but we were correct.
The trip is fairly short and we arrived at the Velikiy Novgorod station
at 820pm in the dark with snow coming down and the wind causing the
snow on the ground to drift. Were only staying one day so decided to
leave our big packs at the station. Communication problem with the
storage lady as she only spoke Russian so there was plenty of hand
waving and then I wrote the date we would return on a piece of paper.
She wrote a confusing set of figures on the piece of paper and we
handed over the money but it was too much but it all seemed to have
worked out. We will have to work on our Russian as we were warned that
outside of the main cities people do not speak english and that was our
first challenging encounter.
So being such a lovely night with the cold, snow falling and wind
blowing the fallen snow into drifts, we decided to walk to the hotel.
We had a map and it went mostly well as we found the old city. Then a
puff of wind and the map went blowing off and started heading down the
road with the drifting snow. Oh no! Luckily I caught up with it and
soon after Vanessa spotted the hotel. Convinced that it was not correct
I took turn to a carpark beside the river which turned out to be full
of local hoons doing a bit of rally driving on the slippery ice and
snow. I decided that this was not correct and headed back to the wrong
road which led us to the poorly signed hotel that Vanessa spotted
earlier. It was actually on the correct road, the road we were walking
along. Doh.
Hotel turned out to be a 3star hotel located on the bank of the Volkhov river so was better than we had expected and just what we needed.
Bye,
David and Vanessa
