Novosibirsk

Although this well-known Siberian city lies at the half-way point to Lake Baikal, in fact there is very little here to interest visitors.  There’s a very dull City Museum (the usual stuff about how heroic locals threw-over the nobles and established Communism, then the events of WW2 – and some stuffed polecats in dusty glass cases). Frankly there’s nothing else, and this is why we don’t promote Novosibirsk as a destination.  However, it makes a very handy routing-spot for access to the Altai Mountains, and so it appears in some of our Altai programs as a place for rejoining the Trans-Siberian route – the reason being that we can obtain guaranteed onward train reservations from Novosibirsk because it’s a large city.  We realize that the more we tell you that it’s a dull old place, the more you will want to go there and disprove this – but we’ve spent endless hours kicking our heels there in grotty pizzerias waiting for trains, and have never found the marvelous things you firmly now believe are there…