Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
And that, for me, is how the expedition began.
It wasn't the beginning of the journey, of course. I was an Australian taking a
train from Romania to Moscow, and I'd obviously done a bit of travelling to get
there. But in the two years between the decision and the destination, that moment
when I lost sight of Nat was the moment in which the fun and excitement of the
holiday ended and the challenge of the adventure began. I was leaving Nat and the
comforts of Europe behind and heading out into a vast unknown. There, I was to
meet Tim, a friend I hadn't seen in sixteen months, and together we were hoping to
cycle to Beijing. It was going to be a hell of a challenge, not only for Nat and I, but
for Tim and I.
The train rumbled on and the days and nights merged. I paid little attention to
anything - even the need to eat. I remember once looking up from a patch of torn
fabric on the seat opposite and realising that I'd been staring at it for hours. I lifted
my gaze to the window and noticed the gold-plated, mushroom-shaped cupolas of
a dazzling cathedral sliding by majestically. I returned my indifferent gaze to the
torn seat, and it wasn't till an hour later that my stirring consciousness registered
that I'd just seen the grand cathedral of Kiev. I thought about it for a moment, then
returned to the cold comfort of my gloom. I just didn't care.
Occasionally, my depression lifted and I was able to reflect on what the begin-
ning of such an adventure might mean. My thoughts drifted backwards over all
the events that had brought me here, and forwards to the vast uncertainty that lay
ahead. Backwards was safe: there was no unknown and nobody in my past had
ever tried to kill me. But forwards was something else again. For months, people
had warned me against going to Russia. 'It's a country of desperate poverty,' they
said and predicted that I - a rich foreigner - would be mugged, robbed and killed
as soon as I crossed the border. Previous experience had taught me to ignore such
warnings. The people who made them generally had no first-hand experience of
what they were talking about, and often they were simply voicing the sorts of fears
that would always stop them reaching out to achieve their own dreams. On the oth-
er hand, I had only a very basic knowledge of the Russian language, knew almost
nothing about the country or culture, and I was about to be dumped out into the
mega-metropolis of Moscow on my own. I was, to say the least, a little scared.
I remembered the day the first seed of the trip had been sown. It was two years
ago - I was eighteen at the time - and halfway through my first big adventure: a
year-long cycling trip around Australia. I'd met an American man in a pub in Dar-
win. His name was Tom Stone, a retired US soldier. He'd been on the road for the
