Moscow

As I mentioned, we arrived in Moscow after an overnight train from St Petersburg. It was 7.30am and already hot and dusty and there were a surprising number of people about for a Sunday.

We eventually found our hostel, aptly named the Trans-Siberian Hostel after trudging up and down the street. The temptation was to sleep, but we wanted to make the most of our first day.

We decided to take a walk down by the Moscow River stopping off to see interesting sights along the way. This involved our second trip on the metro and stop off for a Russian brunch of blini (pancakes) and sour cream.

We were impressed by the metro, not least because of it's stunning architecture - high ceilings and stunningly ornate cornices.

The stations are deep and accessed by long escalators. At platform level I was impressed by the space - long and wide platforms, a lot less claustrophobic than the London tube and with trains arriving every three minutes you could be sure of a seat on the trains.

It took us a while to find the river and we spent a good thirty minutes walking along a dusty freeway as the hot sun beat down. This was mainly due to our inability to read maps and to understand directions given in Russian.

Eventually we turned right and skirted around the edges of Gorky Park (a popular park in Moscow filled with amusements and interesting sculptures). We walked west along the riverfront, rather aimlessly but with a broad plan.

It was nice to see Russians out for Sunday recreation - biking, walking, roller-blading and even swimming (oddly in the space between two signs that said in no uncertain terms 'no swimming here'). The swimmers were women and men of a certain age and shape, unashamedly wandering around in speedos and with tight, nut-brown skin.

We stopped for a break from the relentless heat in the courtyard of a monastery before heading up towards the Moscow State University. We walked up the route of a ski jump to give ourselves a bird's eye view of the city. The ski jump seemed quite incongruous within the 'end of July' landscape, but offered a glimpse of the winter city that most people associate with Moscow.

We wandered for a few hours before heading back down to the riverfront intending to take a tourist boat back upriver.

There was quite a commotion at the riverside -huge crowds, interspersed with police and TV camera crews were looking out to the river. They seemed to be looking at a large barge and a few small men in a row-boat. This seemed quite odd to us and not at all interesting, but whatever was going on, there were no boats heading in either direction from that point. [Later on we discovered that in the early hours of the morning a party boat had crashed into the barge and sunk; the small row boat was winching up dead bodies (six in all). If this wasn't bad enough, only a week before a tourist boat had sunk due to overcrowding with even more deaths! I think this may have influenced our decision not to take any tourist boats during the remainder of the trip].

So, we trudged back in the oppressive heat to the nearest metro station and eventually ended up (quite by accident) in Red Square. Suddenly we were in Moscow! Or the Moscow we knew from films and news stories! What a beautiful square, with the entrancing St Basil's cathedral, a temple of swirling colour at it's gateway. The square was filled with tourists, cameras flashing and posing groups, whilst bored soldiers looked on.

We spent day 2 at the Kremlin, one of those tourist spots where you have to plan in time to queue for the tickets, to queue to put your bags in and to get in! The Kremlin comprises a whole suite of buildings (but largely government state buildings and Russian orthodox churches). The Kremlin in Moscow is the sight of the original walled city, well appointed, with views all around and close to the river. We had decided to just wander round ourselves, armed with a free leaflet and our travel guidebook and I think we managed to amass sufficient facts and information. A lot of the buildings are just beautiful in their own right as well as harbouring icons from as early as the 11th century, memoirs of the empire of the Tsars which was eventually destroyed. We finished with a tour of the bell tower of Ivan the Great, the tallest of all the buildings in the Kremlin complex at 81m, built in the 15th century. At 5pm we really just wanted to climb to the top and admire the view, but our ticket provided us with an hour long, descriptive tour of every floor!

Today was Sarah's birthday and we had intended to have a slap-up meal to celebrate. We had spotted a cute, mezze-esque restaurant near where we were staying and decided to go there. This was start of the Russian scorn at vegetarianism... the menu was pretty much unintelligible and using our pidgin Russian Sarah ended up with a plate of salad dishes (essentially tomatoes, cucumber, a bunch of fennel, and some radishes) and bread! There was no dressing in sight.

On our final day in Moscow the weather had taken a turn for the worse - it was 12oc and rainy (bear in mind that the previous two days at been 29oc and humid), so we were freezing. We returned to the red square to queue up and see Lenin's embalmed body. Lenin (of course, one of the original Russian revolutionaries who established the Bolshevik party and through his death in 1924 paved the way for Stalinist communism) is still revered in Russia and Moscow is no exception. The Lenin mausoleum is on the west side of Red Square and the entrance takes you past statues of former leaders, down a series of dark, gloomy steps into the tomb. Decorum is everything (I was reprimanded for having my hands in my pockets and I've heard that loud heels are a no-no on the marble floors). On entering the tomb, you shuffle round a badly lit perspex box that houses the immortal Lenin. He is dressed in a dark suit, with eyes closed and hair and beard immaculately trimmed. He looks tiny and it feels very weird in this small, oppressive space, gazing at a man who was partly responsible for the most tragic period in Russia's history. Of course his body has long since decomposed and you are really looking at a waxwork dummy of the real man but it is still unsettling. What surprised me was the sober, respectful behaviour of the Russian visitors. They really seem to worship this man.

In the afternoon we visited the Gulag museum, which gave us a cursory taste of gulag life. It struck me how horrific this piece of cultural history really was - so many people were sent to Siberian gulags for pitiful crimes, sometimes for nothing more than hold a certain political view. In these freezing, barren places the 'criminals' were put to work, surviving on meagre rations for an average period of 2 years or less.

We left Moscow on an overnight flight to Vladivostok in Russia's Far East, the end point of the trans-siberian railway and the start of our journey proper.