Back in the (former) USSR

Arriving, all bagged up, at Tashkent station after a rather complex but ultimately successful attempt to get tickets to Moscow, we felt rather short of melons.

In what has become our travelling style, we got tickets by first being invited into someone's home. The four of us de-shoed and sat four-abreast on a sofa and were shouted at in Russian and eventually understood this to mean that our hosts - one of whom was woman we had paused by outside the closed foreigners booking office - would reserve us tickets if we could give them our passport details. With the opinion of them teetering on the edge of suspect profiteers and genuine aidees, we sat muttering our options to each other and eventually were shown the local booking office. At which point, the two women were waylaid by the station's militia and we were spotted by an English-speaking ticket officer with one daughter as an Uzbek airways air hostess and another at Cardiff University. With her help we got our tickets and evaded the now yelling barbushkas, but not with out a mad twenty-minute dash by Andy through deserted Sunday streets of Tashkent in search of the last $50 worth of Uzbek Sum, while the cashier muttered nervously.

With three days on a train you develop an interesting gait; one that only improves with the cheap beer, vodka and fake Champange available at the longer station stops. Is is also very comforting to know that despite the fact you can sleep all day you will get to Moscow on time.

The route took us quickly out of Uzbekistan in an Sunday evening, through the blank, camel-scattered planes of Kazakhstan, into Russia with the stamp-happy border guards waking us at five in the morning after a short but pleasant second night's sleep and to Moscow mid-afternoon Wednesday through endless birch forests and factory towns of the Volga.

The CIS train network is staffed by a lot of nuttters. Each coach gets a set of light-blue-coated attendants who don hats and blow whistles nice and officially at stations but spend the rest of the time playing cards, listening to there walkmans and complaining that you're not wearing shoes, then that you are, then that you don't have sheets on the bed then that you do and get very enraged that you are trying to photograph the immaculately concealed military installations of the blank featureless planes. It's all very confusing. At all the big station stops a pair of guys in orange jackets make their way down the train with special hammers. At every wheel they stop and hit the hub cap and then the wheel itself. Tonk-tink, tonk-tink, tonk-tink, tonk-tink.

Anyway, we have made it to Moscow and, with far greater ease than in Tashkent, have bagged ourselves tickets to Saint Petersburg for tomorrow night. See you there.