St Petersburg : First stage completed (July 3rd 2006)

The first part of our trip is done! We arrived in St Petersburg yesterday afternoon.

St Petersburg in magnificent, and really really huge! Not to be compared to Dublin. It took us more than 3h from the entrance of the city to reach the hostel which is in the city center.

It is very tricky to find our way through Russia as the alphabet is different, especially if the map is in Roman alphabet and the signs in Cyrillic alphabet. If the map and the signs are both in cyrillic, it is like comparing two images! And when we want to ask someone we have to show them the place on the map, as we cannot prononce properly the name of the places. I finally got a russian phrasebook in Tartu thanks to Jenni, but it takes time to get used to it.

The stories of the last days include an extra 50km ride in the evening due to a russian Police checkpoint that we were not allowed to pass as tourists. The thing is that this road which follow the west cost just before St Petersburg was lost in a forest of the countryside, and the only option was to cycle back and do a loop around the forest. No other road or path through the forest. (From Narva to St Petersburg, more than half of the land is forest, and less flat than Estonia!). After this extra ride, we stopped in a pub of a village in order to watch the football match. By the end of the match, some drunk people tended to be very sticky. A bunch of sober women dragged us out of the pub and started to talk in russian. We didn't have a clue about what they were talking about, but they seemed to be concerned about us. The only thing they were able to say in english was something like "you go now, good bye", pointing the way to St Petersburg and meaning they didn't want to see us in there village anymore, and that we should never come back. We tried to find out why, and apparently the people of the pub were bad people. We assumed these women were concerned about us, non russian speaker, being possibly robbed by those locals of the pub. Anyway, we left the place, amused by the reaction of these locals. We found a place to camp a few km further, set the tents by a lake with the help of nasty mosquitoes and midges. Andrea and Joa Marc dared to go back the pub and watched the second matched. I stay in my tent and literally fell asleep.

We are staying 3 days in St Petersburg. We will take the night train to Moscow on wednesday evening. The ticket is cheaper than a night at the hotel! (600 roubles, 17euros). We were told we shopuld be able to stick our bikes in the train with us in the luggage area under the beds. We can also give some money to the driver if he is not happy with that (usually about 50 roubles).

The adventure continues...
Steph.

PS : I added some pictures to the previous posts.