Today, now I'm writing this blog, it's been exactly a month ago since I left South Korea and a fair amount happened since then. I hope you enjoy reading one of the final blogs of this crazy trip.
Japan
I only transferred in Japan. I was planning to meet Shoko at first but in the end she couldn't manage because of her busy job. Since I booked two separate flights I still had to go through immigration which went fairly easy. Of course they asked a couple of questions since I spent almost three months there, went to South Korea for a couple of weeks and came back. A lot of illegal workers in Japan are there on a tourist visa, make a short trip abroad and come back to work on a tourist visa again. Anyway, I could prove that I would leave the country again the same night so obviously I didn't get into trouble.
Hong Kong
After receiving my 8th entrance stamp for the special administrative region of Hong Kong I decided to crash on the airport for the night since I arrived after the last train left the airport. Early the next morning I went to the same hostel where I always go to (Tin Tong in Kowloon), left my backpack and went to the Russian tourism agency (which is just across of the Russian embassy) to sort out my visa. Everything was pretty much settled within a couple of minutes since I prepared everything on forehand. However rush service isn't available for non Hong Kong residents which meant that I had to stay in Hong Kong for more than a week, since the train to Beijing doesn't depart every day. I was a bit afraid that I would be bored to death since I've been to Hong Kong so many times but fortunately I wouldn't be. Outside of the city there was and still is a lot to explore, so I went trekking with a Slovakian guy called Martin outside of the city and we went to an island together. I had to kill the time in the evening so I visited a huge amount of cinemas and saw a bunch of movies including Django and Skyfall.
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| Believe it or not, this is Hong Kong. |
With my double entry Russian visa in my hand I boarded the direct train to Beijing where I would just stay for one night. There I met at the same hostel where I always go to (Sanlitun) Wang Xue who is also known as Christine. Also I bought there my Russian style hat which I needed for my next destination in China: Harbin. I bought my Chinese train tickets in advance in Hong Kong since the Chinese New Year was coming up. It costed me EUR 10 per train ticket extra but it was worth it. Otherwise I would have been stuck for an unmentioned amount of time in China. During the day I went back to the Summer Palace, where I was one year ago. However I liked it that much at the time that I wanted to come back there, so I did.
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| Summer Palace during the Winter. |
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| Huge snow castle. |
Russia
The bus goes from Suifenhe to Pogranichny and the distance between the two cities is only about 40 kilometers. However, it would take a ridiculous 6 hours filled with checks and especially waiting for hours for no obvious reasons. Because of the 3 hour time difference I arrived at Pogranichny at 5:30 PM. From Pogranichny I took the 6 PM minibus to Vladivostok where I arrived one and a half hours later, more or less. From Vladivostok I had to go to the hostel which would turn into another adventure...
In broken Russian I asked the bus driver how I could get to the train station, since my hostel was located there. The administrator who collected the money, a big and tall guy around my age said that I could join him for a (unofficial) taxi. When the price was discussed the hassle started. The guy who I joined said that the price would be 500 rubles which I should pay all (EUR 12.50) which I obviously didn't agree on. The price went down to 300 rubles so I explained him that I would pay 150 rubles since we were sharing the ride. He started shouting a lot and kept on talking in Russian which I didn't understand and he seemed to be stupid that he couldn't understand that I didn't understand him. After that he wanted to have my wallet to take out the "right" amount to make me understand, which didn't seem a good idea to me since I had like half a month of a Russian salary in my wallet. The alarm bells immediately started ringing like I had with the Iranian bandits and the corrupt police in Kyrgyzstan. Eventually the taxi driver explained me in broken English that his price was 300 rubles and who paid what wasn't his problem. Fortunately my backpack was next to me in the back, so I just gave 150 rubles after arriving and left the car. Even though I was on the main road the city was really quiet for 8 PM and there weren't too many people in the streets. It was hard for me to find the right building of the hostel and I figured that it might be up the stairs somewhere in a back alley. I saw a couple walking up somewhere but lost sight of them when they went around a corner somewhere. I thought that I probably went into the wrong direction and turned around and saw the same guy who I was in the taxi with. First he seemed to act normal but suddenly he grabbed my backpack and started to shout and behave aggressively. He didn't let go of my backpack and the situation started to become very dangerous. I started to make as much noise as I could, like I did in Iran and shouted in Russian to him "Ya ni ponimayu, ya ni ponimayu!!" (I don't understand you, I don't understand you!!). The stairway was slippery and I started to move down to the main street while I was shouting at the guy. The main street was just a couple of tens of meters away and I was hoping to get the attention of somebody and hoped that somebody passed which didn't happen during our struggle which would last a couple of minutes in total. Unfortunately (or maybe not) I got kind of experienced in fights and can kind of estimate where a fight is going and in this case it seemed that it was going to be okay as long as I moved slowly to the street. However it seemed to get very nasty when he was holding my backpack firmly with his right hand and started to look for something in his left jacket pocket with his left hand, which I assumed to be a knife. Thank God it seemed that he couldn't find and just after that he slipped and fell on the ground. He let go of me and I felt his breath in my face, which smelt like alcohol (what else). I ran down the stairs to the main street where I finally saw people, made a left where the hostel should be and while running I turned around. I saw that he was following me, though it was on a slow walking pace. I went into the first possible restaurant on the left totally out of breath and asked them if they spoke English and showed them the address of the hostel. Outside of the window I saw my aggressor passing by, he probably didn't notice me going in there. The guys from the restaurant helped me out and showed me the place on their smartphone. It was indeed up some stairs, but not the stairs I climbed initially.
After finally checking in the hostel I contacted my Vladivostokian friend Valeriya who I met more than a year ago in Beijing. She took me around that evening and the next day and helped me with buying all my train tickets all the way until Moscow for which I'm very thankful. She is a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Vladivostok so she also kind of interviewed me and wrote an article about me which I will upload sooner or later.
I only stayed one night in Vladivostok and took the train in the evening to Irkutsk to visit lake Baikal. I would be three nights on the train in total in one go. I think the first part of the trip was the most interesting for me because I met quite some characters. The most interesting one was a guy called Andre who is the captain of a special task force for the military. His code name is "Typhoon" and he didn't see his occupation as his job... he actually called it his "hobby". He told me that his "hobby" was to get rid of, as he put it, the crazy Muslims and terrorists (they're the same in his opinion) and his dream was to be stationed in either Dagestan (Caucasus) or Chechnya to serve the country. He also had some interesting opinions on "niggers" like a couple of other Russians who I met afterwards with which I won't bother you as a reader. Racism is very much alive in Russia indeed, but that's something I already heard and was aware of.
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| "Typhoon" and me. |
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| Lake Baikal. |
Fortunately the hostel in Moscow made everything better. I had an amazing stay there and the people who ran the hostel were just amazing and fluent in English. After their working hours they took us to all kinds of special places where the locals didn't go so it was just great. If you're ever around I highly recommend you to stay at Apple Hostel. In the Kremlin I had an issue with one of the security guards because I accidentally walked into an apparently forbidden direction but he didn't make clear where I was allowed to go so I made the same mistake again and started to ask for my passport and stuff. Of course the last thing that you trust are the people who protect Putin so I pretended like I didn't understand Russian and ignored him. Almost two and a half years ago I was stopped by the Russian police while I was cycling from Saint Petersburg to Narva and was asked to pay 50 US dollars for no reason, which was the first thing that came up to me when the Russian security guard asked for my documents.
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| Saint Basil's Cathedral at the Red Square, Moscow. |
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| At the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg. |
The train was really good and there were power plugs for every seat so I plugged in my phone and watched the movie "Les Miserables" twice in a row before I finally arrived in Tallinn. I almost did 15.000 kilometers by train from Hong Kong in about three weeks. Two years ago when I was in Tallinn I met Trevor and Lisa who were travelling for two years nonstop. They stayed for a week or more in Tallinn and loved it that much that they decided to open up a hostel there which is the best rated hostel right now in Tallinn. So of course I stayed with them and obviously we had a lot to talk about. I also met up again with Anna who I saw two years ago for the final time in Narva. She is studying now in Tallinn so we went out for dinner and had a good time. Her and my friend Albina is studying at St. Andrews in Scotland which is a country on my to do list, so hopefully I'll meet her again very soon as well.
Latvia, Lithuania and Russia... again
Tonight I'm taking a bus from Tallinn all the way to Kaliningrad which is between Lithuania and Poland. It is a part of Russia but it's supposed to be quite interesting because it's separated from "mainland" Russia and is heavily influenced by the Germans and the neighboring countries of Lithuania and Poland. One night should be enough to cover the place but we'll see.
After
After Kaliningrad I'll take the evening bus to Warsaw where I'll spend two nights and after that I'll take the night bus to Berlin. Both cities I've never been too and it's much too short to properly visit everything but at least I'll get the feeling of the place. From Berlin I'll take train directly to Amsterdam and from there to home. I'm due to arrive at 5:33 PM at the train station and I'll be home 5:37 PM if the trains ride on time. But in The Netherlands you never know of course.
See you soon!!