One of the things you miss out on when you spend most of your time travelling in the third world is fashion, however hanging around in Helsinki for a couple of days I was a little disturbed to notice that the eighties was back in fashion. We had a late evening picnic in a park in town and where joined by a couple of groups of teenagers dressed up like they were in Bon Jovi - leather jackets, big hair, white gym boots. I felt like yelling at them, "Stop it ! Stop it ! I was there the first time and it was bad enough then, why do you want to do it again !!" From Helsinki I headed to Estonia with a boatload of Finns heading to Estonia to buy cheap booze and bring it back to Finland, but many had already started to knock a few back on the boat ride over. They say that with fashion if you wait long enough whatever you wear will always come back in, and based on that principle the Estonians are finally getting their turn. It seems most of them never actually managed to get around to changing their eighties wardrobes, and now they would have young hipsters offering them big bucks for the shirts of their backs. You can picture pale white skin, bleached blonde hair and mullets (or just ridiculous bits of hair hanging down the back), plenty of shiny tracksuits, high heels for the ladies, beer guts and trainers for the blokes, lost of gold medallions, and plenty of guys with their shirts off in the soaring 20 degree heat.
Tallinn, the city, was a big contrast to Finland, immediately on arrival you could notice that you were entering part of the former Soviet block, lots of big, grey, concrete tower blocks with tiny little windows all built using the exact same plan. Plenty of industrial use of concrete - large warehouses and factories, but all looking in the same state of disrepair and disuse as the rusting silos, cranes and other large machinery that sat on weed infested open lots. The sky was grey, and it rained every now and then, making it easier to see how depressing actually leaving in the Soviet bloc must have been.
I spent most of my time in Estonia stressing. The train I planned to catch to Moscow was full, and there wasn't any space on a bus to St Petersbourg until 2.30pm, meaning I wouldn't arrive until around 11pm. Compounding the stress was that I had read that the train ticket office in St P closed at 8pm and when I checked on the internet all the tickets for my backup train had been sold and there were only 3 (out of 100 or so) tickets left on the train I needed to catch the next day in order to get out of Russia before my visa expired and saving me from being sent off to Siberia for a couple of years of hard labour. (I had previously read on the net that Russian immigration officials take great pleasure in catching out those who overstay their visas, and can send you all the way back to Moscow to get the matter fixed) At one point I started searching for flights to Asia and was thinking about skipping the whole Transsiberian affair. However I thought it was too great an opportunity to miss, so I threw caution to the wind, and bought a bus ticket, figuring I could take on those Rusky bastards, and that if I failed and ended up in Siberia it might just be the one chance I get in this life to write a great novel !!!
So trying to put the whole thing out of my mind, Sari and I headed in to the old town to have some lunch and see the sights. Tallinn had the good fortune of not being too badly destroyed during the War, so a great deal of the old city is quite picturesque - a thick 3 metre high wall with round wooden towers looking out over the city, cobbled streets and narrow walkways. We had lunch at a pub, it was the nearest thing open when it started raining and it was so cheap compared to Finland Sari insisted we eat there. After drinking a small beer (small in Estonia means 1litre) I was almost ready to hit the road, so we wandered back to the bus station, bid our farewells and I stepped into the breech - Russia here I come.
I had a good introduction to Russians with the passenger sitting next to me, a surly middle aged Russian guy who said nothing to me for the whole eight hour journey, and alternated between knocking back pre-mixed vodka drink after drink then sleeping (and snoring) then waking up again to continue drinking. After about two hours on the road we started passing trucks parked bumper to bumper in the emergency lane and I knew we were getting close to the border. However this actually went on for around another thirty, yep thirty kilometres before we reached the border - one can marvel at the efficiency of Russian customs service. We reached the border and handed our passports over to the Estonians and after twenty minutes or so we had them back and were on our way to Russia. As we arrived at the Russian border post there were a bunch of immigration officials milling around outside, mainly women they were all dressed in their blue uniforms all shiny buckles and gold stripes, they had on their small blue hats with straight peaks along the middle of their heads, balancing on almost uniformly bleached, permed and teased blonde hair. All were wearing high heels, and they reminded me of images of those 1950's movies with futuristic waitresses - the look was very Soviet, trying to be at the vanguard but looking like a future from the past. The bus stopped and we all had to get out and drag our luggage through the small building that held two opaque cubicles from which more blonde haired, blue uniformed Russian women processed us. It took each person no more than a minute to get the required stamp and within twenty minutes we all piled back on the bus again and were motoring in to Russia.
The first thing I noticed was the terrible state of the road, as I was thinking, it feels a little like cheating for it to be so easy to get in to Russia so easily. From the Blind Traveller in the 1800's to the Soviet days (as described in all the spy books I have read) it always seemed near impossible to get behind the Iron Curtain - and live to tell the story. And the more difficult or impossible it was to get in to a place the more appealing it is, so despite my normal dummy spitting, which holds that filling in an application form is way too much, I felt a little let down. It was easy (if costly) to get a visa, there was no interrogation at the border, no bag search and I was in, perhaps I was just born a little too late !!!
The countryside looked similar to Estonia, which looked very similar to Finland - very lush and green, forests of trees lining the road on both sides, with the odd cleared field and a few small wooden cottages grouped in twos or threes here and there. Most of the cars of the road were newish looking Japanese or European models, driven a little bit more erratically on the cracked and potholed roads. Every so often we would pass a huge, old seemingly abandoned factory, and a town which seemed to consist solely off ugly, concrete tower blocks which all looked the same. As it began to grow dark, around 10pm, we arrived on the outskirts of St P.
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