07.31.08
Yekaterinburg aka Ekaterinburg
Every trip has high points and low points. We always hope to have more highs than lows and if it’s a particularly tough trip we hope for at least one high. Yekaterinburg is probably going to be noted down as the low point of this trip. Let me start at the beginning.
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So we left Nizhny and were back on the train to Yekaterinburg. We’re quite used to the double overnight train journeys now. Our staple diet consists of instant noodles, pringles and water. So there was a bit of confusion even when we boarded the train in Nizhny as it was a couple of hours earlier than the timetable had indicated. Trusting to the tour company to know what they were doing we paid this no mind and headed on our merry way. Surprisingly, when we arrived in Yekaterinburg at 1am instead of 3am we were not met by a transfer person. Having almost always found my own way to my digs in the past it’s been quite refreshing having someone waiting to cart us off at every stop. No, that doesn’t include money hungry policemen. So after waiting around a little bit we gave the tour company a call since they supposedly ran 24/7. As you may have guessed, they were expecting us at 3am. They dispatched someone to come get us straight away. I bet they too are very aware of the danger of leaving tourists wandering around a train station. We were picked up by a girl named Anya who seemed a good sort and spoke fluent English. When she heard where we were staying she almost looked scared. The driver threw his 2c in by telling us the showers were across the road. There is a fountain in the park across the road, for those of you wondering. We weren’t too bothered at the time since we knew it was a business hotel so were already expecting a two star establishment.
So you know how hotels are rated in stars? I think we’d need an alternative scale which uses black holes instead. The rooms themselves were basic, very basic. Clearly the hotel did not on a vacuum cleaner or even wet rags or a mop. The toilet facilites were shared amongst all the guests on the floor, each floor could hold about 40 guests so you can imagine the fun this was going to cause. Showers were located in the basement and consisted of three or four open shower cubicles. This shower facility was the only one that served the entire hotel. So 40 guests per floor by about seven or eight floors … hmmm almost three hundred people using four showers. Note how I said people? That’s because it was the same room used for men and women. The sex segregation was handled by a lady out the front who controlled access to the room and I assume made sure only one sex was represented at a time. Needless to say the girls found the whole arrangment somewhat less than appealing. The last straw was probably breakfast that first morning. We turned up to the eating area where breakfast was served. It was quite literally slop. I’m not even exaggerating. There was potato slop, I call it slop because you could drink it through a fat sraw if you so desired. There was also meat slop which was basically chunks of sausage in a watery tomato sauce, the sausages were few and far between. We ended up ‘upgrading’ our rooms to ones that had attached bathrooms instead.
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This little drama set the scene for the remainder of our stay. Next we tried to find the Ekaterinburg Guide Centre so that we could book a trip into the Ural mountains. We found a booking office that we ‘thought’ was the guide centre but turned out to be just the Hotel’s tour desk. In any case .. we booked a day tour to a Nature Park and this done we decided to walk back into town. Since it is a relatively small city we figured we could see the main sights of interest along the way. The Church of the Blood, built at the site where the Romanov family were murdered, is probably their main attraction. I had noticed a Museum of Military History in our guidebook but just like the Soviet War Machine it was a bit on the derelict side and apparently being renovated. Actually this is probably an incorrect assessment since Russia is currently pounding Georgia using conventional warfare. Aside from all this though my favourite place in Ekaterinburg is the Black Tulip war memorial. Built to honour the memory of those who gave their lives in the Afghan war it has since been expanded to incorporate other conflicts that Russians have been involved in. The centrepiece of this memorial is a soldier seated on the ground with his headed hanging and his shoulders slumped, holding his AK-47 in one hand. It’s one of the most beautiful memorials I’ve seen around, generally war memorials tend to be either quite bare, with an eternal flame of some manner or else a cold listing of names and such. This place on the other hand does nothing to glorify war but rather gives you a feeling for the cost of war on those involved at the front lines. So between this and the Romanove death site it was a bit of a bleak day, compounded by the grey skies and sudden showers. Honestly .. if Melbourne goes through four seasons in a day then Ekaterinburg must go through four seasons in five minutes!
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The next day was spent a the nature park. I had decided to wear shorts in anticipation of good weather .. bad choice .. not because of the weather but because of the insects. I’d made another brilliant decision - didn’t take the insect repellent with me. I learned my lesson that day as I was eaten alive all through the walk. On closer examination the next day I saw that it wasn’t just the little pin prick sized bites you’d normally get but I had little chunks of flesh missing from where I’d been bitten by some bizzare cross between mosquitoe and vulture! Nothing of too much interest this day .. on the way to the park we stopped at the border between Asia and Europe so we had the chance to take the usual photos with a foot on each continent. The highlight of the walk was our exploration of a cave looking for ancient cave drawings. We had come well prepared … for not much. With not a single torch between us we headed in using the light of mobile phones and the AutoFocus assist beams of cameras as light sources. Later another couple, that had entered with us, lent us their mobile which had a flash that could be used as a torch. Even with this it was still quite dark and slippery. We eventually made a very hasty exit when we discovered a small cave in which there seemed to be a small hibernating bear or a large sleeping snake. We’ll never know which it was .. or if it was just a large garbage bag … I don’t know who actually discovered it but the group suddenly started exiting and decided against being left alone in a cave with an unknown creature. On the outside the girls decided to compare bums to see who had fallen over the most while I did my dance of insect avoidance. That was pretty much it for the day … our guide was quite keen to get home I think and wouldn’t even let us stop for a beer at the German’s cafe. There was this German guy from Stuttgart that had arrived four years ago and decided it was a prime spot to setup a cafe. He’d been here ever since. I think he may just come ove rin the summer months though. On the way home we had a bit more excitement as a truck had gone off the road so we were delayed for another half hour or so as the truck was lifted out of the ditch. Traffic was banked up for about a kilometre or two either side of the acccident site.
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We left Ekaterinburg quite gladly the next day … this time bound for a little city named Tomsk. Not on the Tran-Sib line itself, unlike Omsk, but it had been recommended to us by someone’s Russian friends. It was to be our first homestay.