suggzy

Back to 2009. My then wife and I had scoped out a four-countries-in-ten-days trip through very eastern, Eastern Europe. Fly to Kiev, train overnight into Minsk, bus to Vilnius, bus to Riga (forever more to be sung, excitedly, a la Peggy Lee’s ‘Fever’). It really grabbed me as a holiday, and an exercise in map-grabbing,  as I planned to get to 40 countries visited at the point I turned 40 (actually, I got to 41 in the end – 50 by 50’s going to be a breeze – I should nab four more, next year).

Didn’t care for Kiev very much. Didn’t hate it, but didn’t take to it either. Unfriendly, difficult to navigate, expensive and it was so bloody hot that the underground was the only escape. By the way, watch yourself on the doooooowwwwwnnnnnnn escalators into the Kiev underground. They go down a long way (there were signs for Canberra, Brisbane and Auckland, honest there were) and they are very steep. Down escalators always give me the heebie jeebies. I’m so rugged.

There was a nice park, the view of the ‘tin tits’ statue (Rodina Mat) was cool, as were the catacombs and the Chernobyl Museum (just bung this lead apron and go and clear that up, will you? Oops, sorry, you’re all dead – the way the employees were treated and subsequently expired was horrific). We ate at a Georgian restaurant where I had a magnificent cheese pie.

For all that, I was not sad to leave. Sorry, Ukranians one and all, I am sure you are all lovely – oh, apart from your weightlifting team; they were a right pain in the arse on a flight out of Skopja – I shall save that sorry tale for another time, however). We scoped the massive train station, and headed for the supermarket in search of a picnic for our overnight sleeper train into Belarus.

Belarus. I was very excited about this one. Always am, when you need a VISA to get into a country. Always feels a bit James Bond, to me, in a very safe, paperworky way. As if you’ve got some sort of cover story to get you behind enemy lines, somehow? Not for the first time, it’s probably just me.

Not just the lure of bureaucracy, and form filling though. No, I was all over the notion of Minsk, Gorky Park, and all that post-Soviet MASSIVENESS. Dead excited. Even the incredibly rude and dismissive guide book to the city wouldn’t have put me off. And it really was an extraordinary document, written by a man who’d been to the place a zillion times and yet seemed, by his tone, to hate it. He had the sort of offhand and patronising delivery of the two big green aliens in The Simpsons: Kang and Kotos. He also sounded a number of warnings about crossing the borders into the country, but by then I was cross with him and blithely ignored whatever points he had to make. Which, looking back, was an error. As we shall see.

As ever, I digress. Bags went into the left luggage and we shuffled off to a supermarket. Subterranean, wholly scripted in the Cyrillic alphabet, and confusing as all get out. It’s all very well being able to recognise turnips and raw meat, but that ain’t stuff you can scoff in a sleeper cabin. It took some time to lay our hands on the immediately edible, but it was good stuff; anchovies, cured meat, olives, a bit of this, that and the other. A crucial feature in our (very reasonable) shop was a bottle of Ukrainian vodka.  Following our first anniversary trip to Tallinn, some time back, and a very memorable evening in a Russian restaurant (must write that up, one day – oh the perils of a menu where the lines between descriptions and prices don’t quite line up right), I had come to learn something from my wife’s appreciation of vodka. A night of salty snacks and local smooth-as-silk vodka had a lot of promise, as we rolled our way to the border. Most exciting.

And so, back to the station, for only my second overnight train experience. Years earlier, my old chum Nicholas and I had made the trip from Prague to Warsaw, on a sleeper. A trip made memorable by the light bulb above our bunks that could not be extinguished, at least until the obliging and luxuriantly moustachioed guard grabbed it through his handkerchief and wrenched it, with a scream, from its housing, as it burned his wrist. Bless him.

We found our ‘first class’ bunk in no time. Lockable easily enough, teensy sink, and a couple of parallel sofas/beds. Not the final word in luxury, but amongst other things it seemed a secure enough unit, so the chances of anyone pumping in knockout gas (whatever that actually is) and harvesting our organs as we slept, seemed low. Kang/Kotos seemed to be suggesting that the inadvertent donation of a kidney was pretty much obligatory.. but what did he know, eh?

We set out to explore. It wasn’t the most executive train. Every gap between carriages featured groups of folk smoking at a feverish rate. Kiev had given us the impression that smoking was pretty much compulsory. Not an issue, given we were both smokers at the time, but the stipulation that the cabins should be smokeless was rendered pretty much pointless as the whole snaking, clanking beast reeked of knock-off Gitanes.

And so to the buffet car. A Spartan affair. Amongst other deficiencies, there were no tables. On the plus side, courtesy of the extremely friendly staff, a bottle of ice-cold Baltika was about £1.50. Take it, head for the nearby gap between cabins with it, and drink alongside ciggies at £1 per packet. Repeat three times, enjoying your experience, and then reel off to your cabin. No worries.

By now it was about 10.30pm. We fell upon our food, and very lovely it was too. There was a certain amount of sipping of vodka, but, in fairness, it was at room temperature so we did not get carried away immediately. It complimented the salty food very nicely. And before we knew it, the train halted and Ukrainian border police were aboard, checking our passports and generally bidding us an agreeable farewell.

And so to the problems. Looking back, they were not unadjacent to a tipping point in the consumption of the vodka. We weren’t ingénues in the world of alcohol consumption, exactly, but these celebratory moments can and will catch up on you. If I remember right, we did take the passage through the Ukranian border rather enthusiastically. And the gap before the point of entry to Belarus was, fully, an hour. More than enough time to nip away at the supplies, and so to be less than coherent.

The train stopped. There was some manner of announcement. In Russian, alone. And then, evidently, a number of fellows boarded the train. With, as it turned out, a series of massive dogs, laptops and, to a man, big fuck off guns. At least those appeared to be the standard accoutrements, once they arrived chez nous. Rarely does one sober up so much, as the knock at the door comes and such things are exhibited.

You hope, at times like these, that the whole thing will be dealt with at the door. No such luck, our boy, his chum, their canine, firearms and all that appeared and made themselves very comfortable indeed. A period of my life I would cheerfully have back. We’d only had our visas imprinted on our passports a day before we left the UK – a real rush job. We were, it’s fair to say, a trifle Brahms, and the questions were searching. It was quite clear that our documentation was not going to pass muster. And all the questions were directed to me. Looking back it annoyed the crap out of me that my wife, a woman of far greater intellectual and general acumen than me, was never addressed during the process. She was considered little more than luggage, and luggage I should speak for. All manner of documents were re-addressed, and all of them via me. A charming experience, but it was, in the end, done.

Phew. Sort of. Final signatures were eventually gathered and the guns, dogs, and bureaucrats departed our cabin. I drank more, drew breath, congratulated herself on not having grabbed a gun and gone postal in the face of such rampant misogyny, passed into sleep.

Next thing you know? Well, yep, you guessed it. “Minsk, this is Minsk, get up you bastards this is Minsk”. 6.30am on a Sunday morning in Minsk. Ow. Never, ever, have I re-packed a bag so quickly. Oh so very quickly. We staggered onto the platform inside three minutes.

As hangovers go, it was oddly clean. That feeling of still being a bit ‘wobbly dog’, but super-aware? No hope, it turned out, of gathering local currency, but we levelled out a bit with credit-card-purchased fizzy pop and coffee. Theory went that we would head to our accommodation for 9.00am, so we hit the underground in the general direction. Found it oddly quickly, as I remember. Barely alive through exhaustion, after a few mere hours of disco sleep, but there we are, and there we were. Reached for the phone to call the guy we’d booked the apartment from and.. nothing.  Left a voicemail, thinking all would be well after a while. A stroll followed. Then, eventually, breakfast, Belarusian style.  Everywhere, people wandered around with highly elaborate cakes, which was a very Sunday thing, it turned out.

Back to the supposed chez nous. Another call, another ansaphone message from me. Another zero. And here comes my poorest admission from this little foray. There was a park behind our supposed gaff. There we went, to pause for breath. Seats surrounded a play park, and there we settled in. And there, with my little canvass bag behind my head, on the naked park bench, I inevitably succumbed to sleep, and began, as a much heavier man back then, to snore in a way I can only imagine would have reverberated quite powerfully off the walls of the surrounding apartment blocks. Two hours later, my ex-wife woke me, to tell me everyone, children included, had left. Evidently I had not, in sleep,  cut the most agreeable figure, even as a former teacher. More so, I had cut the figure of a ‘tired’ reprobate. Hair rather wild, dribble in some quantity. Charmed, I was, at my behaviour. I had entered Belarus as a blundering, vodka-addled drunk, sleeping on park benches. Terrific. All going well. On the plus side, the armed police had not reappeared to move us on, or ship us off to somewhere nasty. A narrow escape. More water with it, next time.

Another phone call, and, finally, a miracle. Our man was, at last, awake. Tired (boo hoo, poor you, I’ve had guns pointing at me and just fell asleep in a park – get up, you last bastard – were the words I did not say) but on his way, he assured us. We fought our way into a local convenience to evacuate (I had to beg, beg, being without readies). And we waited. Forever.  And yet, in the end, our man appeared and, to our surprise, whisked us away in his motor. He was quite a rough chap, but not without a certain charisma. We weren’t immediately clear what was going on, as we zig-zagged away from where we had been stationed.

We had been very clear, after so many hours, of where we were going. We’d even sussed out where we thought the apartment was within the block we sat outside. But no, we were told by our new landlord that the previous occupant of our gaff, had had “too much disco” (an expression I have quite shamelessly passed off as my own on a number of occasions since then, for I adore it), missing his flight in the process. As such we found ourselves delayed by the fact he was sleeping it off upstairs, whilst we (alright, I) slept it off in the park in such charming dereliction. Our boy behind the wheel had been making some calls, when he was awake, trying to frantically source an alternative.

As we pulled up next to a bin store, he assured us that the all new place was “very nice – much better then old apartment – you will like”.  Head rather clearer now, it seemed foolish to argue with him – he was a cheerful soul, but I rather thought, were his mood to darken, that he would be quite capable of snapping us like twigs.

And in any case he was not lying. There were innumerable locks to get through, in a sequence we were never quite to learn properly, and our front door appeared to be padded several inches thick, which I rather feared was to stop gunfire making it though. He was keen that we should lock the door at all times, irrespective of what side of it we found ourselves. Gulp.

Having had not insufficient disco ourselves, we bade him farewell and slept.

A wonderful three days followed. Minsk was ace. I’ll never forget three off-duty soldiers (what is it with me and soldiers?) whom did everything together. One about 6 foot 8, another about 6 foot, the other about 5 foot 4. All in a line, at all times. Buying an ice cream, going on the big wheel in Gorky park, they were utterly inseparable, comedy gold, and our constant shadow.

At other times, England won the Ashes back at The Oval (many a text between Mother and I), which we toasted, now feeling up to drinking again, with Belarusian champagne.. which is disgusting. We walked almost into Lithuania in pursuit of a much-recommended Chinese restaurant. Guide book, torch, utter confusion, a few embittered words.. I seem to recall getting there at about 11.00pm. Not a problem to the owners, but it’s rather foolish to fall upon the spiciest hot and sour soup you have ever tasted with quite such wolfish enthusiasm. My lips burned for two days.

And that, dear readers, is how we arrived in Minsk.

Come back next time for a shorter, but hopefully entertaining piece on my recent experience of kayaking. It did not, as you can imagine, go particularly smoothly. It speaks volumes for the calm approach to life taken by the lovely SWK, however, just as it reveals what an unstoppable git I am. Happy days!