I know all this bollocks sounds like the moaning and of complaining of a petulant, privileged, selfish c@nt. Which it is.
My currently installed personality is exactly that. I know it. I confess to you and through that I absolve myself. But I’m still a c@nt, same as any other. The exact same person before entering the confessional as the one leaving the booth.
I do receive regular treatment though. The other day when I left Baikal I stopped in a small petrol station when my foot got too hot to carry on. I was just sitting there. A spoiled brat. Someone who doesn’t know how lucky they are. There was a petrol pump attendant sitting next to me. A youngish man of obviously limited intellect. I asked him if there was a hose I could use to cool down the bike. We wandered round the back of the petrol station amongst the rubbish and we came to a small hut thing. It looked like a converted unit of the back of a small truck. The door was open and I could see that inside was a bed. The room was absolutely filthy. Deep in grime and absolutely unfit for human habitation. I asked him if he lived there. He looked at me, shook his hands and said he ate in there. But there was definitely more too it. I rode on to the bike stop. And he will still be there.
And it does make me think. Honestly it does but my fucking brain is always in such a rush and so busy arguing with itself it quickly forgets. In my more lucid moments I do think about luck. Luck and good fortune can take you amazing places and to incredible highs, but luck can also stop you from falling back into massive shit and a life of misery. As long as I’m feeling ok and I have the means to get home, however convoluted that journey is, then I know I’m a lucky man.
Until my brain finds its next rabbit hole to run down
I was woken in the night by someone announcing Australian traffic reports over the radio with Lady Gaga singing in the background. In my head. What the actual fuck is wrong with me. I’m beginning to think I should not be left alone, especially by soapy short shaven shower maidens with long nails and rough loofahs…. Here we go again.
So I leave my most precious and irreplaceable travel essentials safely locked behind a very worn 50p door handle at a cheap hotel in area full of transient people and go to get some money changed.
Get to another bank. Walk in and it’s like Britain’s Got Talent. There are 4 desks with 4 people staring at me. It’s empty but they still make me take a ticket from the machine that immediately points me to kiosk 7 where a pretty lady has obviously been waiting for me since yesterday. I ask her to change some money and she smiles and points to her exchange rates. “Very bad” she smiles. She gets her phone out and gives me the name of another place round the corner. “Much better”
“But I’d rather pay the extra and watch you and your pretty slim hands count out money for me..” says the voice in my head before the financial controller tells to stop being such a twat and to do as I’m told. Go to the suggested bank. Empty again. Straight to the exchange. Brush the dust off the teller. I cannot begin to think of the mind bending boredom sitting in a 3 foot square booth every day just to serve someone once every 6 months. How do they do it? Anyway, the rate is 6% better, and she’s got nice hands too. I have a thing about hands. Is that normal?
But why is this happening? Where are shit and happens? Perhaps they slept in. They really have been excelling themselves lately. A mate of mine swears he heard chuckles in his wild camp site before finding himself locked in the next morning in Austria. If they’ve been screaming about Europe they’re going to be tired. Hopefully their Russian visas have expired anyway, the little shits. I also get a love/hate message in the senders typical staccato style that nails my feet to the ground. Things like that help to keep me on the right side of sanity. Just.
I’m after a fridge magnet. There is an underground shop selling all sorts stuff from swimming awards to bullet bubble gum. In typical old soviet style there is a 10 to one staff to potential client ratio. I wonder if it’s a bit like that “if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound” question. “If there are no clients in the shop, do all they all turn to stone?” Keep them occupied. Keep them quiet. The old soviet maxim.
Go to the supermarket to get some provisions for the train. I went on the Trans Siberian from Vladivostok to Moscow in 2018. 7 days straight 3rd class. No food onboard. Had to buy food where I could from nanas secretly selling it out of bags on remote lonely platforms. Starvation. Hallucinations. Considered eating my own arms. Never again.
Go the station and wait. Should be fine. The notice board is all nice and obvious.
This first leg is 28 hours and around 1000 miles. Cost me £50. Again there is no restaurant car, just a hot water boiler, and again I’m travelling 3rd class in an ‘open sleeper’. I booked late so I got an upper bunk. There is nowhere to just sit unless you have a lower one, or unless someone invites you to sit with them. I’m across from two mums and their kids. A couple of them speak good English and want to talk. Nice people. Polite people. Smart people.
This train only stops at a few stations overs its journey. Most are for just a minute but every so often they pause for 15-20 minutes to let the dogs out for a poo and let the passengers coat their lungs in enough nicotine to make it to the next stop. People come, people go, like a bath being filled with the plug out.
Got to Novosibirsk about 10pm, said до свидания to my temporary train mates and trudged to the same hotel I was in here about 10 days ago. I wouldn’t have predicted this but maybe that’s what the constant tightness in my chest was warning me about. Maybe that was the finger of fate pushing trying to push me back from trouble ahead. Who knows how it works. As long as I have a plan then it keeps the gate of my mind’s chaos corral closed. It’s when I don’t that things very quickly get out of hand.
This morning I have a plan for a plan, but looking at the Russian train website there are only 2 tickets available on leg 2 and 1 on leg three. At this point the corral gate gets shaken. Someone goes to my armpits and turns the irrigation on max while another goes downstairs and draws in the cock drawbridge to the absolute max to the point where I now have what looks like the small red on/off button to your remote control in place of any male identifying equipment. I’m currently identifying as “plangender”
Go to the station, get a ticket for a ticket and manage to not loose it before being directed to grumpy nana number 5. Google translate is great, for opening the door to a verbal torrent. I show nana the details of the first train I want to take tomorrow. She’s bashing the keyboard and asking quick-fire questions and I get flustered. You’re speaking through mics and it’s all very fast and she looks furious. I just keep nodding and sticking my thumb in the air until she stops talking. Seems the easiest way. And I get a piece of paper that looks right. Then I do it again for the train to Moscow, getting the last 3rd class bunk on the train. Thank fuck for that. Either shit and happens are taking therapy or they’ve got their little arses arrested somewhere. Well they overstretched themselves this trip and they deserve it
Coffee and cake. Sit and unwind the drawbridge out a bit and let the steam flow from my armpits. Lock the gate. I have a plan.
I have all day to kill. I step into the Novosibirsk pinball machine, someone pulls out the hammer and BOOM, off I go. Taking whatever direction pedestrian crossing is showing green, listening to the chimes, watching the lights flash, pinging off to the next bump stop.
I’m in a small mall. Walking off the top of the escalator. It’s the gun shop. I imagine it feels like walking towards a sex shop. I’m intimidated but curious, slightly stimulated but scared. My Winkyometer can’t decide on a drawbridge setting either. I set it to “stumpy” and in I go.
FUCK ME This is serious stuff in here. There is absolutely everything you could want here. I’m wandering about thinking Jeeesus Christ Almighty. I think about taking some surreptitious pictures but I’m worried they might put a rocket up my arse, quite literally. So I hatch a plan.
I’ve spotted some army rations. I ask if I can eat these cold because I want some for the train but he says they are better hot. He shows me some special bags you can buy to warm them up with “in the field”. I ask if I can take a picture, he says yes, and just points around the shop. Ok then.
You’ve got rifles, scopes, pistols, knives, crossbows, axes. You’ve got all the kit. Camo, boots, gloves, hats, numerous fuck knows what to do fuck knows what. You’ve got full on body armour including thick metal plates tag weigh a TON. You’ve got helmets and full forest camouflage/chubacca suits. Everything.
Including RPG launchers
With clear instructions
I’m guessing they’re doing good trade at the moment. There are certainly significant numbers of soldiers walking about round here. I’ll go back tomorrow and get my rations, and maybe a few grenades for presents when I get home. The kids will love them.