Ahead of us stretched a sandy beach about a kilometer long. A small pond sat back from the beach with some evergreen trees surrounding it, like an oasis.
We walked along the dark road huffing and puffing, each breath crystallizing in the frosty air, with only the small patch of light from our headlamps leading the way.
Other than Yvonne’s little slip and a slightly scraped knee we managed to escape unscathed. The sun was going down so we decided to get out of the forest before we got lost.
Our Trans-Siberian handbook mentions to not even consider riding platzkartny for the entire journey from Moscow to Beijing. Well, this was only about half our journey, so we figured we were fine.
We don’t have enough words in our arsenal to describe Moscow properly. It is a hell of a crazy city. So crazy we don’t know whether to laugh or cry most of the time.
The typical way to take a banya is to sit in intense heat and hit yourself or, better yet, have someone hit you with a besom – a bushel of birch branches and leaves.
Just before our last metro stop an old Russian man behind me tapped me on the shoulder. He said something I couldn’t understand and then grinned. He had a smile like a crocodile – yellow, rounded teeth interspersed by black spaces.
