Places

Sometimes, really odd things happen. On Monday, we had an interesting discussion at our Transport Travellers Club webforum. One poster reported that he travelled from St. Pete to Sortavala, and they have a border control checkpoint in the village of Hiitola (Republic of Karelia), somewhere at the NW of Ladoga Lake. The checkpoint was there for ages, but usually uninhabited. Last months the border officers were showing up from time to time, but they just checked the ID and waved off. This time, the lady told the poster that in two weeks they are going to start checking border passes - something previously unheard of in this area. Another poster recollected that he has, indeed, seen some vague document on Leningrad region. The third one found more documents. Finally, we got about 30 of them and started reading. And then...

Three months was up and the dual necessities of having a break from Moscow and refreshing my dodgy hotel registration were bearing down upon me. Busy with work and too low on cash to stray further afield, I decided on a Baltic holiday, Riga to be precise. Failing to learn from the hell of the last overnight international bus ride I took from Sofia to Istanbul, I decided the bus was a better option than the train - about half the price and a couple of hours quicker. Of course, as last time, I couldn't sleep and went through the process of dividing the total time (16 hours) into smaller and smaller fractions and slowly counting them off with a sense of accomplishment. In some ways it was a relief to finally reach the Russian border at 4am, just to break the monotony. But it was a break I could have done without.

While almost every member of KTP is somewhere in faraway lands, I'll take a minute and speculate on the topic what are the most interesting towns in Russia. Of course, I understand that it's 100 per cent subjectively: first, I haven't attended lots of Russian towns, among which peculiar Pskov, Ufa, Habarovsk and Vladivostok (and many others). Second, everyone has his own criteria of town 'quality'. For me it is not even the places to see, but the best balance between places to see and opportunities to stay and even live. Russia lacks simple facilities, you know.

But, as far as I'm quite and experienced traveller and a journalist, I think, my list can live.

So here it is.

I use to say that KTP is a bunch of (lonesome) heroes, because travelling around Russia can be filled with surprises, often unpleasant. Last Saturday I've got a nice example of this.

Last week I played soccer and finished with a hand in plaster. Other KTP guys were on their big trips (Alex Fetisov heads to Pripolyarny Ural, Wsewolod S.Putnik is somewhere near Baikal now etc.), so I decided to go to Serpukhov town by myself and ride a local ship line there.

Serpukhov is less than 100 km from Moscow, so could I expect any surprises?

There are two types of people who will approach you and start talking to you in Russia: drunk men and homeless men. The two groups, of course, are frequently intermingled. They don't target you necessarily because you're a foreigner: they would talk to anyone. It's just that Russians have the sense not to indulge them. That said, some of the most interesting conversations I've had with Russians have been with the homeless. On my first trip to Russia I had encountered a well-educated homeless man who spoke excellent English, even though he had never been outside of the country. He explained that he had been an historian during Soviet times but since the collapse of Communism “no one needs historians anymore”. And so he drank and lived on the streets. But that one is probably too depressing to recount at length, so it will be more fun to write about the "bomzh" I met in Suzdal.

I recently got a text message from a Moscow-residing American friend on his first trip to St Petersburg: "The streets are clean, there are no passed out vagrants anywhere and the woman at the Produkty smiled at me! What kind of strange alternate reality have I stumbled into?" Bizarro Moscow: it seems to be a common impression. Every time I go to St Petersburg I start making plans to relocate there from Moscow. The relative serenity, beauty and ease of life is such a refreshing change from the unwelcoming, over-populated and ugly Moscow. But on my most recent visit to St Petersburg "ya byl v shoke". It has become even more foreigner friendly than I remembered...

Gavryusha - diminutive form of old Russian name Gavriil or Gavrila. Nowadays, frankly speaking, it sounds pretty funny, especially after 'Troe iz Prostokvahsino' cult cartoon. Double-Trouble calf was named Gavryusha there...

Aprroximately in 2005 we heard that in Tolmachevo, village in Leningradskaya oblast (St.Petersburg region) a craft named Gavryusha makes trips along the small river Luga. It was a huge surprise - navigation on such small rivers in Russia ceased to exist during 1960-1980.

It turned out that Gavryusha is a project, or even a hobby, of a Cossack who long time ago came to live to Tolmachevo. He built the craft himself and once a week carries people to their villages and dachas along Luga river.

We still haven't managed to ride Gavryusha, but I made some brief trip to take pictures last weekend.

So this will be the first of my reports with pictures.

It will be quite short, I'm still testing... In February, 2006 we reached famous wooden architecture museum Kizhi in Karelia. As for me, that's probably one of my favourite places in Russia, but it's broadly visited from people all over the world mostly during summer, when you can get to Kizhi Island by 'Kometa' hydrofoil from Petrozavodsk.



In winter you can reach Kizhi by foot :), by helicopter that goes twice a week from local airport (or any time you like if you rent it) and by the hovership you also need to rent. Hovership variant was quite ingenious - nowadays hydrofoils are in a huge decay and ports that need vessels like that buy hoverships. But they do not know often what to do with them, confining themselves to service needs and taking people to a short trips on ice on weekends.

Before posting some reports with pictures, I'll say a few words about one of our project - collection of transport timetables of ex-USSR countries All-Transport.Info (AT).

Frankly speaking, I don't care much about timetables, but when we understood that most part of Russia is still Terra Incognita we felt obliged to start a project of that kind. Mostly it contains buses timetables, then river ships, then suburban trains (in Russia suburban trains can ride up to 6-7 hours, heh) and rare airplains. Regular airlines and Intercity trains ARE NOT covered due to several on-line sources somehow happened to appear in recent years. There are also some intercity trolleys, sea ports, one subway and scheduled tractor as exceptions.

Unfortunately it's still not translated, but our computer genius Alex Fetisov promised to invent something. Funnily Enough, but I consider AT project one of the most important social web projects in Russia. Probably we should nominate it for some grant, but we are too lazy (or too busy).

So if you know Russian, bring your maps and explore how everything goes (or often doesn't go) here.

Hi Everybody!

My name is Mitjan Kryukov. I'm the coordinator of Russian Transport Travellers Club (Klub Transportnyh Ruteshestvennikov aka KTP).

KTP was found presumably in 2000 by ex-railway officer Wsewolod S. Putnik and at those times was more a group of friends hanging round Moscow region.

Nowadays it developed to a unique non-governmental organization for Russia which tries to visit unnkown, but interesting places of the country, create challenging routes, ride exceptional means of transportation etc. etc.

We have quite a large amount of articles and other texts and photos summarizing our experience. We also have several side projects, like biggest ex-USSR transport timetable web-project or some guides. Most eccentric side project is KTP team in 'Chto?Gde?Kogda?', most popular Russian brain game, but we'll talk about it another time.

We would like to present some of our reports, news and surely pictures here. We hope they'll be of some interest to you.

So, POEHALI, as we say here.