Thursday 11 September 2014

Day 68 Thursday September 4th Vlafovostok

We all slept as late as we could just to try and use up time in what we knew would be a long day. The weather at least was back to sunny.

We stayed in the hostel until throwing out time at 12:30 and made publicity videos for the hostel people who just came along with a camera and asked you to say something about the hostel. I notice nobody was saying anything about just two bathrooms to serve 20 people!

The young girl who had stayed in our dorm came to say goodbye and insisted on a photo with all four of us and our motorbike helmets.

Next we went to the train station and saw that our bikes were still in the baggage area warehouse. Geoff went and talked to Sergay who said the bikes would be travelling on the same train as us in a separate wagon all on their own. He said when he knew the wagon number he would text it to Geoff and then we could go straight to the wagon and get the bikes off the train as soon as we stopped at Moscow.

We then walked around town and back to the waterfront to repeat the photograph of us all in the Pacific Ocean but in focus thus time.















At 6pm we returned to the hostel to pick up our bags that were stored there and did the hot sweaty walk carrying the heavy bags to the railway station.

Every day right outside our hostel there is a man who stands in the middle of the pavemen area in the same place and just stands there. We have not been able to work out whether he is a performing artist or a person with a particular learning difficulty. Although it may have been in bad taste we took a photo of him.





In fact we first went to a Chinese restaurant and had a three hour meal and booze session. The food was fantastic we had a very varied selection of food but very different to the choices you get in UK Chinese restaurants.

So here we are waiting the two and a half hours before we can board the train for our six and a half day journey. We are all confident that the train journey is the right decision, nobody wants to ride the bikes back to Moscow (a three week journey) but the prospects of being cooped up in a small carriage for seven days is somewhat daunting. We have downloaded as many newspapers as possible, and also got a chess app on the iPad, but six and a half days feels like quite a problem.

When Geoff and Frank first arrived at the waiting room of the station they took off their shoes and since then nobody had sat close by!!

We are now in our compartment and it is shite. They are compact, just a mattress with no top sheet, no power point to recharge the iPad other than a communal one at he end of the corridor, hardly any space to store your bags, no opening windows in the cabin, but apart from these small discomforts it's perfect!! Dave is stomping about the place saying this can't be right!!!






More later
RRs


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