:: zone3 ::

Four nights on a train makes for quite a long time, from Moscow to Irkutsk
and then a one hour bus ride to Listvyanka. Can get up to a fair bit of
antics on a train for that long, including a little tormenting of the trainee tour leader (sorry EJ :)).

Listvyanka was nice for a short stay, a small town on the shore of Lake
Baikal. Still largely frozen over from winter. Had an evening of fun
playing on the ice and taking photos.
Some people even thought the ice was 'safe' right before going through it...

Siberia is pretty cold still, between 0 and 5 most of the time, with some
snow...

An interesting city to get around. On the way back to the hotel last
night, was about to turn the corner. The women ten meters in front was
stopped by a man that would look in place in a Russian mafia movie dressed
all in black and directed to cross to the other side, I promptly decided
to do the same. As was crossing, could see why. About ½ a dozen mafia
looking guys had the house on the corner surrounded and about a dozen
uniformed Police were milling in the entrance with sub-machine guns. Would
have loved a photo, but thought better of it.

Had a nice walking tour around the city, a lot more beautiful old buildings
to see. St Petersburg is one of Russia’s younger cities, ‘only’ 350ish
years old. A lot of the buildings are over a hundred, they’re the young
ones.

Well made it to St Petersburg...

Made for about the worst set of connecting flights have ever had. Wlg to
Akl was fine. Got fun from there.

The plane to Shanghai brunt up a lot of fuel due to the weather on the way
and with fog in Shanghai had to divert to Naha, Japan to re-fuel. That put
things a bit late getting to Shanghai, had 60min to until my plane to
Moscow took off. Shanghai customs etc was fast lucky (fastest I've had in
any coutry), check-ins for my next flight had just closed, but they let me
on...

Then that flight was delayed in Shanghai, so got to Moscow with again
60mins until my next flight, however there is no way can transit Moscow
that fast... Getting myself on to a later flight to St Petersburg was fun
considering I about 5 words of Russian and the airport staff don't speak a
lot of english. Had some Russians that were on the same flight me to
Moscow and also going to St Petersburg, they were pretty friendly and helpped
me get re-ticketed and on the right plane.