Trips and Tales (Part 18)
I hope you enjoyed the St Petersburg section of Trips and Tales. I could have continued, but where do you draw the line? I figured it was time to leave that particular location behind, for the moment at least.
As you may have noticed, I do like to head off at random (though related) tangents without the slightest warning if something (or someone) comes along to provide a different perspective, or to broaden the overall picture. All of which is a round-about way of saying that I’ll be dropping in non-Trips and Tales blog posts from time to time on aspects of St.Petersburg and other places, as special-interest one-offs, just to keep things fresh. I’ve already got some ideas for those, and if you’ve got some too then please post a comment suggesting them. Let’s be democratic about it, eh? I don’t have a monopoly on good ideas!
The next stop is Moscow. To be honest, there’s a whole lot of ground between there and St. Petersburg – ground littered with towns, countryside, history, culture, stories… But we can’t, OK? We just can’t. Imagine all that’s packed in between London and Glasgow (or thereabouts) and you’ll get an idea why.
Moscow: The Trip West to East (or south-south-east, if you want to be pedantic)
Seeing as St. Petersburg isn’t on the Trans-Siberian line, it wouldn’t be “cheating” to get there by some means other than rail. For the truly masochistic, or those wishing to be very “real” about their trip, there’s always the road by bus, car or motorbike, though I hear that most of the approximately 400-mile journey proceeds along congested, often hazardous 2-lane stretches. Online winter-time photographs of a lorry/car head-to-head and a “spot-the-trucks-in-the-ditch” photo-shoot have put me off that particular route, I must confess. But if you’re game for it, I suppose you’ll need to allocate a whole day, give or take.
A St. Petersburg-Moscow flight, on the other hand, takes about an hour and a half: an altogether more attractive proposition. However if you intend to start as you mean to go on and do the whole lot by rail, then the fastest train will get you there in around four to five hours. Alternatively, you can travel for eight to ten hours on an overnight sleeper. Goodness knows what the fare will be, but in most cases it seems reasonable to assume that price is inversely proportional to travel time (though proportional to comfort).
Here at the tail end of 2010, a (very) rough guide would be £70 for a single flight and £30-£90 by standard train. I use the word “standard” to distinguish the kind of train journey I envisage from the more luxurious hotel-on-rails kind, which with enough cash is certainly possible for your Trans-Siberian trip as a whole (Stalin’s personal train was apparently converted along these lines). I haven’t looked much into that side of things as I assume I’m writing for fellow mortals, for now at least!
Next time: Trips and Tales (Part 19)
Some nuts-and-bolts info on Moscow.