We had a couple of hours to kill in Khabarovsk, so we took the trolleybus down to the Amur river to take\u00a0a photo just as the sun had set.<\/p>\n
It was severly cold when we stopped to take that picture, with a vicious wind coming off the river.\u00a0 I took my gloves off for no more than two minutes before my hands ached with the cold.\u00a0 Khabarovsk itself was a lot smarter than I expected,\u00a0but it had been a while since I had been to a provincial city on mainland Russia.\u00a0 The city boasted lots of smart, either new or refurbished buildings, and clearly a lot of money had been spent and was still being spent.\u00a0 The outskirts towards the airport were as decrepit and tatty as one would expect anywhere in Russia, but\u00a0much of the\u00a0city clearly reflected Russia’s newfound wealth.<\/p>\n Getting back to the airport, which wasn’t a bad place by Russian standards,\u00a0my young colleague Andrei and I\u00a0thought we had plenty of time for a drink.\u00a0 No sooner had we ordered a couple of vodkas when we were told to board the bus which takes you across the apron to the plane, so like a pair of alcoholics we had to down them in one go and run for the door.\u00a0 More amusingly, a chap who we’d seen getting pulled at airport security in Sakhalin for having 3 bottles of cognac in his hand luggage showed up at the bar in Khabarovsk airport and was completely drunk.\u00a0 Perhaps he’d drunk his cognac rather than handed it to airport security.\u00a0 He asked the barmaid if they’d\u00a0serve him hard alcohol, and they said they would, but\u00a0he probably wouldn’t be allowed on the plane.\u00a0 So he ordered a beer instead.\u00a0 A soft drink, in Russia.<\/p>\n The flight from Khabarovsk to Irkutsk was 3 hours and 10 minutes of knee crushing misery which made me appreciate what I had previously considered to be poor leg room on Boeings and Airbuses.\u00a0 Lufthansa are still crap though.\u00a0 Did I mention that?\u00a0 Anyway, we landed in Irkutsk which is probably the crappest airport in Russia, and got ourselves a taxi to the Evropa Hotel, which according to the list we got from the travel agent, was the best in town.\u00a0 As it turned out, it wasn’t bad at all.\u00a0 The rooms were of a western standard, although too small to properly accommodate the large, double (or rather, twins pushed together) bed; you had to step over the corner to get around it.\u00a0 But there was plenty of running water, both hot and cold, and the TV worked and the curtains fit the windows.\u00a0 Shame you can’t get a hotel in Moscow which does that for the same price of $200 a night, breakfast included.<\/p>\n The next day was free, as the flights could only get us in with a day spare either side of the day on which we had our meeting in Angarsk arranged.\u00a0 First thing in the morning we had the bright idea of walking a couple of kilometres to the centre of town to try to find an internet cafe.\u00a0 It was -32C.\u00a0 As we walked, not daring to stop in case we froze to death, I noticed sparkles in the air in front of me the whole time.\u00a0 Fearing I was turning into some sort of hairy Tinkerbell or my breakfast had been laced with LSD, I realised it was my breath forming into ice crystals.\u00a0 I’d never seen that before.\u00a0 By the time we reached the centre of town, I’d seen enough to realise it wasn’t half as smart as I’d been led to believe, and was not as well maintained or refurbished as Khabarovsk.\u00a0 My face had also frozen.\u00a0 We’d not found the internet cafe, and the gormless people we stopped and asked hadn’t a clue where one might be, so we gave up.\u00a0 Actually, I should quit with the insults: why I didn’t use the internet in the hotel business centre is anyone’s guess.\u00a0 So we did the only sensible thing and jump in a taxi to go to the excellent bar we’d found the night before, an underground joint on Karl Marx street themed around a German beer hall, complete with sausages on the menu, huge beer steins, and\u00a0waitresses dressed as Heidi.\u00a0 It was warm inside.<\/p>\n Later on, much later on, we decided to head out to a nightclub somebody or other had told us about.\u00a0 It was across the Angar river, then left a bit, then right a bit, and went by the name of Cherdak<\/em>, meaning ‘attic’.\u00a0 It was larger, smarter, and a lot cheaper but otherwise identical to the 777<\/em> club in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.\u00a0 And there were no hookers in Cherdak<\/em>.\u00a0 We had a whale of a time in there.\u00a0 We got friends with a young local\u00a0man who got hopelessly drunk and introduced us to the DJ, who also got hopelessly drunk.\u00a0 And we joined them in also getting hopelessly drunk.\u00a0 My wife tells me she won’t read this blog post, but on the offchance she does, I will say at this point that there were no girls in this club whatsoever.\u00a0 Yeah, it must have been Siberia’s only gay club.\u00a0 All men.\u00a0 Anyway, it was a lot of fun, especially as the place didn’t see many foreigners or even many outsiders, and Andrei and I were somewhat of a novelty.\u00a0 Nobody spoke any English, except a handful of younger Next day our client had rung us early in the morning to say they couldn’t make the meeting, and postponed it until the next day, which gave us another day to kill.\u00a0 By this time we’d befriended an Armenian taxi driver who was full of funny stories and drove a lot better than most of Russia’s taxi drivers (we only had one near head-on collision with him in 3 days).\u00a0 We called him up and he took us the 70km down to Listvyanka, a small village on the shores of Lake Baikal.\u00a0 I had made it a priority to see Lake Baikal during our visit to Irkutsk, as it is one of those places in Russia which I’d heard was well worth an effort to visit at least once.\u00a0 When we got there, it was clearly impressive.\u00a0 Unfortunately, winter is probably not the best time to visit, as most of it it was frozen solid and the tour operators were not working.\u00a0 There were a handful of Buryat and Russian traders flogging overpriced souvenirs such as objects carved from Baikal jade (such objects included minature and not-so-mintature male genitalia) and furry shaman somethings or other.\u00a0 And there was a stall selling dried and frozen omul<\/a>, a fish found only in Lake Baikal.\u00a0 One burly female Buryat collared Andrei and refused to let him go until he’d bought a promotional CD of a place that I’m not even sure was anywhere near Lake Baikal.\u00a0<\/p>\n Here are some pictures.<\/p>\n Obviously, twenty minutes and a few snaps is not nearly sufficient for a visit to such an interesting and impressive place as Lake Baikal.\u00a0 But we were out of season and we didn’t have much time, and nevertheless I’m glad I have seen it and would love to go back for a few days in summer, when I was told it is horrendously expensive.<\/p>\n The next day we called our Armenian driver and headed out to Angarsk, an industrial town about an hour’s drive up the Angar river from Irkutsk, to meet our potential client.\u00a0 Angarsk was born in 1948 for the sole purpose of serving the enormous petrochemical complex built there in the early 1950s.\u00a0 The complex is one of Russia’s largest, and the biggest in Asia, at least according to Wikipedia.\u00a0 I can well believe it.\u00a0 From end to end, it measured 20km.\u00a0 One of the people we met at the\u00a0main offices\u00a0showed us the huge, 2m long plans of the place and told us of how they’d asked a European company to provide some sort of heat tracing\u00a0component on their pipework.\u00a0 The company had asked them to send a plan of the facilities so they could get an idea of the workscope, which they did.\u00a0 A day or so later the people at Angarsk got a call from the European company thanking them for sending the plan of the city, but could they point out which building was their facility?<\/p>\n Our meetings concluded, it was time to head back to the hotel, and then start the journey back to Sakhalin.\u00a0 Some bright spark had decided that 4:25am was a good time to have our plane leaving, so we stayed up until 2am when we arrived at the airport looking forward to getting some sleep on the plane.\u00a0 Only when we got there we found the inbound flight from Krasnodar was delayed until 7am, then 8am, and finally 9:40am.\u00a0 As I said, Irkutsk is probably Russia’s crappest airport, and we had an 8 hour wait to look forward to.<\/p>\n First thing we found was the cafe-stroke-bar, and the first thing we found in there was a an officer in the\u00a0militia in full uniform, unconcious in his chair beside a half-empty bottle of vodka.\u00a0 Fortunately, somebody had been smart enough not to give him is gun for the evening.\u00a0 The cafe in Irkustk airport, no larger than a squash court, sold 27 different kinds of beer and not much else.\u00a0 Andrei bought a bottle for 50 Roubles.\u00a0 I bought a coffee in a small plastic cup for 150 Roubles.\u00a0 Mineral water was 80 Roubles.\u00a0 Russia’s drinking problem goes deep indeed.\u00a0 Eventually two scruffy militiamen turned up to wake up the sleeping officer, which after a lot of shaking and jostling they managed to do.\u00a0 The officer took a few minutes to remember who he was and where he was, then shooed away the militiamen and staggered to the counter where he harangued the sales girl for ten minutes.\u00a0 Then he stumbled back to his table and persuaded two young Russian construction workers to join him in finishing his vodka with him.\u00a0 Just as Andrei and I had had enough and were leaving, the officer was generously offering his new companions to drive them around the city all night in his car, which was parked just outside.\u00a0 Sensibly, they declined.<\/p>\n A lengthy, overnight\u00a0wait in Irkutsk airport is\u00a0boring indeed.\u00a0 There was nothing to do, and sleep was impossible without being completely drunk, and we’d both had quite enough of drinking for the past few days.\u00a0 One amusing moment\u00a0came when the offices started to open and a blonde woman in a uniform came about asking to see the tickets of anyone who looked like he wasn’t a genuine traveller.\u00a0 She siezed upon one scruffy young man with a big blue bag between his legs and his head on his chest.\u00a0 He looked dead.\u00a0 Failing to get any response from the man, she lifted his head up only for it to fall back down again.\u00a0 Eventually he stirred enough to attempt to get his hand inside his jacket to produce his ticket, a task which he failed miserably, so the woman charitably got it out for him and looked at it.\u00a0 It appears that he was so drunk he’d missed his flight.\u00a0 Not by an hour or two, but a whole day.\u00a0\u00a0The woman\u00a0rushed off to fetch the militiaman, who was one of the\u00a0duo who had tried to wake the officer earlier.\u00a0 The woman made a big deal of explaining the situation to\u00a0him, while he stared at the ceiling with a look on his face as if she was telling him her dreams.\u00a0 Halfway through her explanation, he simply walked off.\u00a0 The drunk\u00a0bloke sat there with his head on his chest for another two hours, then finally woke up and wobbled off somewhere.<\/p>\n Finally we got on board our aircraft and endured an agonising three hours to Khabarovsk.\u00a0 We had missed our connection to Sakhalin by a few hours, but Dal’Avia had kindly rebooked us on that well known airline, Air Union, based out of Kranoyarsk.\u00a0 I think they buy their planes second hand from Dal’Avia.\u00a0 We had a couple of hours to kill in Khabarovsk airport, so we went back to the bar where we’d downed the vodka four days before.\u00a0 Amusingly, the woman behind the counter recognised us, probably hoping for more speedy business.\u00a0 Once again, Andrei bought a beer for 45 Roubles, and I bought a small cup of coffee for 160 Roubles.\u00a0 Sitting beside us was a group of seven or eight Russian men who had stank of booze and were drinking even more.\u00a0 Andrei and I were minding our own business, talking to each other in English (his English is better than my Russian, and I’m bone idle), when one of the Russians commented that I was English.\u00a0 His next comment concluded we were both English.\u00a0 After a few minutes, he turned round and swore at us in Russian, something to do with foreigners being in Russia, to which Andrei swore back.\u00a0 This surprised him more than a bit, and he asked Andrei if he spoke Russian.\u00a0 Andrei swore at him a bit more, built into an admission that he was Russian.\u00a0 I then cheerfully told the man, in Russian,\u00a0that I was a Brit\u00a0who spoke Russian and could understand everything he’d been saying.\u00a0 This was a bit of a lie, but it served its purpose of making him look like a complete twit.\u00a0 Funnily, he and all his mates suddenly got very friendly, and even more so once I’d told them I lived in Russia.\u00a0 They apologised profusely, asked me lots of questions, and got me half-drunk by breathing on me.\u00a0 Then they sent their boss over, who told me they were all drill operators from Okha working for Rosneft.\u00a0 The boss knew three words of English, but more significant was his missing index finger on his right hand.\u00a0 I’d be willing to bet a few quid this was pinched off by a spinning drill pipe, and a few more quid that he was drunk at the time.\u00a0 He told me the work for Rosneft was extremely hard and paid awful money.\u00a0 If he\u00a0and his crew\u00a0will be extracting the oil for the company which will be providing the western world with its energy for the next fifty years, we’re all in trouble.<\/p>\n Finally we boarded our plane back to Sakhalin, and I was too tired to even care when the pilot slurred and stumbled his way though the pre-flight announcement.\u00a0 Or maybe I’d simply grown immune to drunken behaviour over the past few days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am now back in Sakhalin after my trip to Siberia, which was pretty good fun. The best way to get to Irkutsk from Sakhalin is through the city of Khabarovsk, situated on the Amur river less than 30km from … Continue reading ![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/images\/Siberia%201.jpg\" "\\"The")
<\/a><\/p>\ngir<\/strike> men who had learned a bit at school and tried their best to remember it and talk to me.\u00a0 I was busy babbling Russian for all I was worth.\u00a0 It seems Siberians like foreigners who can speak Russian.\u00a0 It also seems Siberians like Brits who can’t dance.<\/p>\n![\"Lake](\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/images\/Siberia%202.jpg\" "\\"Lake")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Lake](\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/images\/Siberia%203.jpg\" "\\"Lake")
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<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Andrei](\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/images\/Siberia%205.jpg\" "\\"Andrei")
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