Train journey was lovely, 3 days watching beautiful countryside slide past - mostly a succession of more or less wide or narrow river valleys with gorgeous but frustratingly fleeting wild flowers. Absolutely no wildlife tho. Not sure why, trains don't usually bother animals much. I mights have seen an owl sat in a tree in the distance. Once. Maybe. But none the less, I laid on my bunk for the best part of three days watching the scenery intently scanning for any sign of movement. I didn't even read much and I loved listening to the train more than than my mp3 player, which didn't get a look in.
There didn't appear to be any other foreigners on the entire train as far as we could tell, which made us objects of interest. One lady, Raisa, who is an English teacher, was delegated by her compartment to come and find out about us and report back - in the nicest possible way! Everyone was very helpful and friendly, and probably would have been more so if Andy and I had felt well enough to socialise more, but as it was we got to know Natasha and her daughter Alyona, and chatted to them (in our now-fluent gesticulish) for a while - ending up in hysterics when Natasha, failing to find what she was looking for in the phrase book, asked us if we were intending to swim to Japan rather than fly!
A sample of how hospitable and generous Russians are, was when our previous companion left us (at a 3 am stop) she had arranged her family to bring us a bag of freshly cooked blini, a jar of jam, some potato salad and some salted cucumbers. which she left on the table for us. Unfortuately Natasha (who got on a few minutes later), thought the bag was ours and we thought is was hers, only discovering our mistake after we had stuffed ourselves with potatoes, boiled eggs, roast chicken for Andy, home grown tomatoes, blini, home-made honey cake and little sweet aryekh with banofee-goo filling, before going to bed. What a shame! We struggled to manage a few of the delicious blini purely out of a sense of duty. Russia is very bad for my diet as blini are a real and irrestisable weakness of mine.
Vladivostok is lovely, very pretty and cosmopolitan, sort of French Bournemouth meets St Petersburg via Korea, but our HC host let us down at the last minute, so we are slumming it in an expensive hotel for a couple of nights while we get something else (going to the counrtyside) sorted out.
We are also trying to get going to Japan sorted out. It looks like we can get a ferry from Vladi to Fushiki for a few limbs worth of dollars. It will take ages and be really rough and we will all be seasick, to paraphrase the sales blurb. And we can't buy a Japan rail pass going that way. But it's that or taking the cheap, easy, convenient, well organised, comfortable flight. No contest!
And we have decided in that case we will try to hitch round Japan as much as possible, which is very safe and easy, as apparently Japanese love giving lifts to foreigners! Japan is going to hammer our budget whatever we do, but we will try to escape without complete denudement of our bank account. Off to book tickets now!