Day 32: The End of the Road… in so many ways

PERHAPS IT WAS just accumulated tiredness from the European late nights that we have adopted.  Perhaps it was the emotions associated with being nearly home. Perhaps it was the weariness associated with being on the road, without a home for more than a month. Whatever it was, Day 32 was not a good day for two of the Invincibles – the smallest two – and the rest of us felt it keenly.

The Invincibles in Paris…

We had slept like Kings (and Queens) in our beautiful Parisien hotel, and were feeling optimistic as we lay in bed mulling the trip so far, and the day ahead in our favourite city.

That was before we opened the adjoining doors between our room and the Shinettes.

Zut Alors!

The black circles under Kitty’s wild eyes along with her wild hair should have set alarm bells ringing. As should have Ben’s pale face, his glinting eyes and fleecy well and truly attached to his nose.

They were both watching the same universal cartoons they have enjoyed in each hotel dubbed into a range of languages.  It somehow seemed less annoying in French.

Jasper looked OK but when faced with the chance to benefit from the volatility of the other two, it wasn’t long before they were all winding each other up, faux wrestling on the bed which always ends in — yes, you have all heard it before and said it before — IN TEARS.

We hadn’t even made it to breakfast yet.  This didn’t bode well.

We did make it down eventually, all of us keenly anticipating the fresh croissants washed down with steaming hot chocolates and café crèmes which we had missed out on yesterday.  I was especially keen to taste a croissant, having been deprived by Ben on our first morning in Paris (No, I still haven’t forgotten or forgiven him entirely).

Perfect Peter at breakfast

Kitty provided the first explosion.

She didn’t want to sit down but she did want ‘ham’ on everything. Mrs S was about to fetch some of the cold cuts that Jasper is so keen on but the shouts of protest from the smallest member of our troop indicated that ‘ham’ actually meant ‘jam’.  Framboise to be precise, s’il te plaise.

This ‘ham’ was to go on everything: croissants, pains au chocolat, her face and her t-shirt. And anyone foolish enough to get in her way would be ‘toast’ (probably some on that too please…’NOW’).

When she was corrected by Ben waving his pink ham on a fork and telling her that this was ‘ham’ and that was ‘jam’ you could hear the fuse fizzing to light.

I then made the major mistake of asking her to sit down, attempting to preserve the serenity of a peaceful breakfast room.

BOOM. Off she went. I rapidly moved her outside for the standoff to commence. It was pleasant enough standing in the morning sun opposite the Luxembourg Gardens, but perhaps less so for Kitty who was trying so hard to really squeeze out the tears and make me feel bad. I was trying very hard not to let her ruin my morning.a

I am NOT in the mood for this…

She finally relented and I returned, only to find Jasper sitting alone, his breakfast plate piled high with everything from the buffet as usual. He informed me that Ben was not feeling well and that Mrs S had taken him up to the room in case he was sick all over our pristine linen table cloth (well not so where Kitty had been sitting). When Mrs S returned Kitty was determined to give her a taste of what she had been missing, so very quickly she was whisked away and deposited next to Ben in bed so the three of us left could enjoy our breakfast (though now it became a challenge to finish the lovingly prepared orange juices and hot chocolates abandoned by the other two and less of a leisurely breakfast).

We did eventually make it out mid morning to find a gorgeous summer’s day in Paris.  It was forecast to reach mid-30s but the lovely European dry heat and not the swampy conditions we have endured for the last 8 years.  The sky was azure-blue and there was a hot breeze.  Paris could not have looked more beautiful and we were determined to turn the day around. 

Wandering through St Sulpice and St Germain de Pres we stopped and looked in the windows of all the alluring boutiques making a mental note to come back on a shopping trip without the kids one day.  Another life and another budget was required!

The Invincibles window shopping…

Shopping ladies…

First stop was the Eiffel Tower as voted by the boys.  There was also interest in the Louvre principally to see the Mona Lisa since both boys have now done topics on Leonardo da Vinci and were keen to see his most famous picture in the flesh.  Having set off so late we thought that the queues for this would be a nightmare and aware that we had some very fragile and volatile members of our entourage, thought that the Eiffel Tower might be less stressful and more distracting than a crowded art gallery.  It would have to wait for another visit and perhaps a solo one with one or other of the boys.

We jumped on the Metro full of anticipation.  Nothing could have prepared us for the queues, not even the number of tour buses stacked up on every corner or the hoards at Notre Dame the night before.  It snaked around most of the four legs of the tower and wasn’t moving.  The boys took one look and decided it was a waste of time.  Mrs S and I were delighted that team Shine was so sensible and pragmatic (our expectations hasd been particularly low as you might imagine).  We had been expecting a tantrum from Kitty, a long sustained whining session from Ben or at least a silent but still just as effective sulk from Jasper.  No, they ‘didn’t want to waste the whole day in Paris in a queue like those crazy people, Daddy’.

Getting an eye-full…

The Shines at the Eiffel

So we took lots of obligatory photos requiring me to adopt some embarrassing, strange and downright uncomfortable positions to try to get the boys looking ‘taller than the tower, Daddy’, ‘does it look like I am holding it up daddy?’…Still I couldn’t complain.  They had made such a good call.

We unanimously decided to do what Mrs S and I both think Paris lends itself to best, and that is wandering about soaking up the sights and the sun.  We pottered along the Seine, jumped on a bus when the little legs looked to be giving up, ran about in the Tuilleries and made full use of the kids playground before finding a shady spot for a much needed drink and some lunch.

Bouncing fun at the Tuilleries

We rediscovered what all good parents know, and that is that lunch outside in a park is so much less stressful than trying to get wriggly, tired, hungry, over excited children to sit still and quietly in a restaurant where every protest and whinge echoes off the four walls.  After a delicious lunch of baguettes and croques we continued our wanderings to buy some more tourist tat, survey the pyramid at the Louvre (Jasper not keen, Ben and Kitty not fussed) and then wound our way through the streets back to the hotel with a sleeping Kitty in my arms and a fast fading Ben. Stopping only for some mouthwatering summer fruit and some presents for the folk back home, we cooled down in our hotel room with the punnet of strawberries and juicy peaches whilst Kitty continued her transforming snooze and the boys got back to their first love: their iPads.

Lunch in park

While the iPads performed their job to perfection, Kitty and I headed out for Le Retail Therapy and a quick whizz round the clothes shops of the 6eme.

“This one niiiiiiiiice, daddy. This one pretty,” Kitty cooed as assistants melted. “This one goooooooooooood,” she insisted, hanging on to a blue shirt in the Serge Blanco shop, and the look the shop assistant gave me indicated that a refusal to buy would be tantamount to child abuse.

Fortunately the shirt was at half-price – note to self, bring Kitty shopping again. We were on a roll and Kitty assisted me in buying a pair of red jeans so my French look was (almost) there. We failed to complete it with pristine white trainers, a fay scarf and straw trilby, but you can’t have everything…  

As we walked into the hotel room each with a beautiful stiff cardboard bag tied with ribbon, Kitty announced to a bemused Mrs S that “me buy daddy niiice pyjamas”… 

Daddy’s new look after shopping with the Kit-ster

It suddenly dawned on us that this was the last night of our Long Trip Home and we should mark it in some way. We had planned to take the boys up to Sacre Coeur for a view over Paris that they had missed at the Eiffel Tower and to revisit one of Mrs S’s favourite haunts. We decided to book a nice restaurant nearby for a celebration meal, and found one that prided itself on being delicious, reasonable and far enough away from the tourist melee of Monmatre. We duly booked it, showered, dressed and set off again on the metro up to Chateau Rouge.  Whether it is that I am getting old, or it is having the family with me, or it really has changed, but the area I remember as a little bit edgy but exciting seemed this time to be desolate a little depressing and a touch threatening.  There were empty beer cans and other rubbish discarded all over the street, and groups of men sitting or standing about on every street corner.  It was interesting but not especially pleasant and the boys began asking us when we would get to the ‘touristy bit’.

Sacre Couer

Befriended by a nice middle-aged Algerian man we wound our way up to the bottom of the steps to Sacre Coeur and made a mental note to cancel the dinner reservation having passed the restaurant on the way up and not keen to take the kids back to that part of town later at night.

Tourist tinsel town here we come.

We climbed up in searing heat, Mrs S carrying Kitty the whole way and me losing them all briefly, to be rescued by Jasper.  Ben was too tired and hungry to scale the dome and Kitty too heavy to carry so I volunteered in my smart and so far relatively unsweaty shirt to stay down with the little ones whilst Jasper raced up the dome followed by a panting Mrs S who did not remember it being as high or as steep in her 20s.  Apparently the view was spectacular.   I only have the photos as proof.

View from the top

Stopping for a much need drink in one of the twee cafés , Mrs S and Ben plumped for one of Richard’s favourite drinks, a citron pressé. Something Mrs S remembers fondly from her childhood holidays in France and something Ben thinks is the pinnacle of drinks because you can put as much sugar in as you like.  Jasper went for some of the minty mouthwash, whilst Kitty snaffled a bit of everyone’s.

Ignoring our backpacker acquaintances from the trip, and our exhausted wallets, we decided on a cheesy restaurant right in the middle of the square with lots going on so the kids would be distracted, there was plenty of ambient noise to drown out our three and plenty of taxis waiting to take home tired tourists.

Kitty and Ben vied for worst behaved children in the entire restaurant, if not Paris.  There was shrieking, singing, dancing, running about, pulling each other off chairs, stealing food from each other’s plates, winding each other up.  There were a few moments of peace and quiet when Kitty decided to play with her Brats pony (shout out to Freja for so generously donating them to the trip) and when Ben needed to recharge with some fleecy action and had to finally eat some food to qualify for an ice-cream.

Anaesthetic

Still it was fraught.  Mrs S and I decided to toast the final night with a glass of champagne, and a lovely bottle of wine.  We then decided to numb the pain with a final glass reflecting on whether there are blogs and diaries written across the world in the past month documenting lovely days, dinners, trips, sights, only ruined by this awful English family who couldn’t control their rowdy children.  Luckily we will never know and we can stick to our rose-tinted (rosé-tinted?) version of the Invincible Shines.

A day in Paris:

 

Day 28: Copenhagen to Kolding: Seeing great friends and old beetroot’s volte face…

“MUMMY, SHOULD I fall asleep so they feel sorry for us again?” Jasper asked.

“He won’t feel sorry for us Jasper, he is fed up with us. He thinks we are idiots, doesn’t really want us on this train and we may well be getting off in a minute, so don’t settle down and make yourself too comfortable,” said I.

And so began one of the most remarkable turnarounds seen on this, or any, adventure.

The main players in this are the Invincible Shines, Mr Beetroot-face of the Danish Railway network and his only slightly less exasperated colleague, Mrs Harumph.

We’d climbed aboard the Copenhagen to Kolding train to factor in a visit to Claus and Bente – great friends in Singapore with whom we’ve kept in touch since they moved back to Denmark.

Great behaviour on the Kolding Express…

It was a sunny day, we were up bright and early, looking forward to visiting our old friends and their lovely children. It had all the makings of a great day.

“But this ticket is not valid.”

That all-too familiar feeling worked its way into my guts.

“I’m sorry,” I asked Beetroot-face, raising my eyebrows. We really didn’t need this.

“Where is your ticket. This is a supplement, it is not a ticket,” he insisted, rendering the piece of paper I had been nursing so carefully for the past few hours instantly worthless.

The you-have-got-to-be-bloody-well-JOKING look passed across my face before I had even realised it, and we were stuck at an impasse.

I didn’t have a clue what he was going on about and he clearly thought I was an idiot with an invalid ticket (and to be fair, we have displayed a bit of form in that regard on this trip).

Kitty squawked, Ben rolled around and put his feet on the chair, and beetroot-face pulled out his phone.

Mrs S suddenly twigged and it seems we should have stamped or activated our Eurail Pass before starting to travel.

This is not a valid ticket!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Swedes hadn’t noticed (or had been too cool to mention it) and nobody on the way into Copehagen had remarked, but Mr Beetroot-face wasn’t going to let this go. Or make it easy.

“The Germans will never let you travel with this,” he spluttered, after seeing our future destination was Hamburg. As if it was a German rail worker and not HIM creating the fuss.

I kept quiet. I didn’t need the lecture, I just needed old beetroot to fix this not carry on tutting at us.

“It is very expensive to get this stamped on the train,” he said.

Here we go, I thought, a shakedown, in Denmark of all places. But no, it was clearly just another angle from which to berate me for my stupidity. Another tool to poke into my side to heap on the discomfort.

He sighed. He shook his head. He went to find a colleague.

Mrs Harumph turned up a couple of minutes later.

“You haven’t got them stamped?”

“No we haven’t got them stamped.”

She shook her head. These two should enter the synchronized head-shaking world championships.

Once she’d tired of shaking her head, she checked the tickets, checked our passports.

“Where is the baby?” she asked, looking at the picture of baby Kitty in her passport.

“Here she is. She’s grown up a bit,” Mrs S said.

“That’s good,” said Harumph, who then told us some breakfast would be on its way, included in the ticket.

No more than three minutes passed before old beetroot was back.

“Can I see your tickets, please,” he asked.

I unzipped my bag and took out my tickets. Again. And handed them to him.

“They have not been stamped,” he said. “You know it is really, really expensive to have them stamped on the train.”

Was this some kind of joke?  “No, you know they have not been stamped. You’ve just seen them.”

Mrs S was thinking on her feet. “Can we get them stamped at Kolding?” she asked.

“There is no ticket office at Kolding. You will have to get off at Odense. But then you must get off the train because you must go to the ticket office.”

“But we have friends collecting us at Kolding,:” Mrs S said to his big beetrooty ‘so-what?’ face.

He shook his head again and disappeared, only reappearing to dump a wire basket of bread rolls and jams on our table. “It’s for you,” he mouthed with his mobile-phone clamped to his ear.

We debated our options while sending an email to Claus to inform him we had hit a spot of bother. His unshakeable optimism (“Don’t worry, we will fix it this end”) made us feel much better and I went to find beetroot.

I spotted him in a little cubby-hole near the loos, whispering to Harumph.

“Hi there, do you think we could get an earlier train tomorrow to the next station after Kolding on the way to Hamburg and get it stamped there before joining our train?” I asked him, outlining Mrs S’s clever plan.

“DO NOT WORRY,” old Beetroot shouted.

“WE ARE DOING EVERYTHING WE CAN FOR YOUR FAMILY. BUT TODAY IS SUNDAY AND MANY OFFICE ARE CLOSED. BUT DO NOT WORRY,” he added.

WE WILL DO ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING FOR YOU! 

I was more than a little thrown by the 180-degree change of heart and attitude, and returned to our seats to share the news.

No more than five minutes later, the beetrooty one himself was there.

“I have found a very friendly woman in Odense,” he told us, puffing up with pride. “She will come down from the ticket office in Odense and wait on the platform and she will stamp it for you. So, I need your tickets.”

This seemed too good to be true, but sure enough he had called in some favours or pulled some strings and that is precisely what happened.

“People just want to get rid of us,” Mrs S remarked drily.  “Just get them off our train… just get them out of our country… get out of our lives… it is a powerful tool,” she laughed.

She might have been reading the mind of the young woman sharing our carriage. She had been twisting and turning in her seat, contorting herself to get away from the noise the excited Shinettes had been making.

Mrs S apologised to her. “Don’t worry I have got my earplugs,” she barked back. Lucky her.

“This is the best adventure,” said Jasper, proudly wearing the white and green hat he had been given at a Tivoli Gardens restaurant. “My Mum and Dad are in the ditch” the writing on it read in Danish.

The sour woman sqeezing her head into her seat with bits of foam rammed into her lug-holes could not dampen our spririts, though, and the Invincibles had done it again.

We piled off the train at the little town of Kolding and Claus, Bente, Freja (now 14) and Mads (a whopping 20) were on hand to pick us up and load us into their cars for the short drive back to their house. If Tivoli was heaven in Copenhagen, the Dyrings house was heaven in Kolding – with a sun-bathed garden, rabbits, chickens, a dog and CHILDREN.

Bente and Mrs S catching up in Kolding… 

The great thing about good friends is that it doesn’t seem to matter how much time goes by between visits and so it was with Claus and Bente.

Mette, 10-years-old when we first met her in Singapore and now 18, had stayed at home and greeted the weary travellers when they arrived home.

The family had been in Spain with 40 or so friends and family to celebrate Claus’s impending 50^th birthday (“I’m still nearer zero than 100,” he proudly pointed out at supper. “For a few more days anyway.”) and he had brought back the entire hind leg of a giant pig along with some Spanish beer and we feasted at lunchtime in the garden, catching up on all our news while the children chattered down one end of the table.

It was still astounding how lovely their ‘children’ are, now 20, 18 and 14 and how much time they have always had for our little ones.  From looking after Jasper and Ben aged 4 and 2 on the beach in Sentosa during one of our legendary Sunday night BBQs or entertaining our 8,7 and 2 year old with painted nails, swinging in the hammock, playing with them in the playground or transfixing them with Top Gear and super-complex space ship building games on the computer, they were as kind, patient and interested as they were when we first met them…and most importantly afforded us some ‘grown up time’ which has been so missing on this trip!

Metta and Freja have Mads in a spin as Jasper and Ben look on…

Claus had been slow-cooking his famous pulled-pork recipe and he transported it from the oven to the barbecue for the final few hours as we dined on his monster pig-leg, prawns, black bread, white bread and various other marvels Bente had rustled up in the kitchen.

We walked off lunch with a tour of their village and a visit to the playground where the children ran amok and  then it was time for Claus’s pulled pork and Bente’s homemade buns followed by homemade ice cream. To say they were a triumph would be a major understatement and everybody dipped in for seconds and thirds as we talked deep into the night, exchanging Trans-Siberian stories – Bente has done the journey twice – and ending with the foreigners trying to bend their mouths round the most unpronounceable Danish words and phrases our hosts could think of.

Claus’s famous pulled pork…

The Shinettes nodded off one by one and were transported into their beds until only the olds were left.

And then there were none.

  

 

 

Day 27: Sweden to Denmark (from the sublime to the ridiculous)…

IT WAS DEBATABLE whether the humming, running, singing, playing, squabbling Shine crew could blot their copybook further with the supercool Swedes of the Rival Hotel but naturally enough we managed one final tweak of their upturned noses by arriving at breakfast half an hour before opening hours and while the muesli mountain sculptors were still sipping their mandarin pulp.

Our boisterous bums were already on the suedette seats before the man with the fighter pilot looks could tell us they weren’t “ready” for us.

I resisted the temptation of telling him they could never be “ready for us” and instead gave him the “what-can-I-do-about-it-smile” and waved at the boys as they were harvesting pastries like Biblical locusts.

Glorious, wonderful, child-friendly Tivoli

Back in our European comfort zone we are happy to handle getting transport to and from stations ourselves now, bypassing the ludicrously expensive hotel cars or unscrupulous taxis with their “tourist surcharges”…

We manhandled our bags down to the Mariatorget metro station, after a brief yes-it-is-no-it-isn’t chat with charcoal-shirted Björn about whether or not our hotel had already been paid for (it had!) and we scooted over to central station to catch our train to Copenhagen.

Where first class train travel had been necessary in Asia, it is no longer so, but regardless we are travelling first class, and the look on the faces of businessmen and solo travellers is priceless when the brood bustles into their seats.

It is a sad, but inalienable fact, that the further west we travel, the harder it is to travel with children. Fellow travellers are less tolerant, less patient, less understanding and it is a far more stressful experience for a parent. It is a lesson well learnt and I will try – really try – not to sigh or roll my eyes next time a noisy brat busts into my quiet-time… I can’t say I will succeed though.

Hey good looking…

Fortunately ours were engrossed in iPads which kept them suitably quiet and sedated for the duration of the journey: one which was delayed 15 minutes by a problem with the brakes – our first mechanical issue since setting off a month ago.

Food was served and Ben displayed Tetrapak skills to rival my own when he sloshed a carton or orange juice down himself which Mrs S managed to clean and artfully disguise.

The cappuccino and Early Grey linen tea-bags were a far cry from the paper cups we eeked out six days’ use from on the Trans-Siberian.

Meanwhile we sliced through wide open fields of crops, broadleaf woodland, dark red and white wooden houses, stud farms, fir forests and beautiful glassy green lakes.

And then Copenhagen, the city of gastronomy, Little Mermaids and Hans Christian Andersen.

If Stockholm was sexy but snooty, this was child heaven.

 

It helped that we stayed at the Tivoli Hotel, a large hotel just 10 minute walk from the station, featuring an enormous bouncy castle in the foyer, staff dressed in harlequin outfits, toy solider statues dotted around the place and pictures of clowns on the pillows.

We arrived in the afternoon but crammed in a swim and lunch before walking back down to the station and Tivoli Gardens.

My kinda joint…

It was around 30 years ago I last went to Tivoli Gardens – back then it was a school trip during which somebody’s dad told me a mildly inappropriate joke I still tell today (after the trip to the Tuborg brewery I guess) – and I have raved about it ever since.

But memory can have a nasty habit of playing tricks.

Not this time, however. It is a fantastic take on a theme park. Not too commercial nor tacky, and without the constant yacking soundtrack of music and cheesy cartoon voices that kids love but that drives adults insane.

We’d managed to borrow a pushchair from the Tivoli Hotel and so, for the first time in four weeks, Kitty was not hanging off Mrs S like a particularly clingy koala. We arrived at four in the afternoon and the time simply flew. We soared high, spun around, plunged to earth at stomach churning speeds, pulled Gs in spinning capsules, ate seafood, drank slurpies and before we knew it, it was 10pm.

We all fell into bed, exhausted.

“Do we have any other child-friendly hotels,” Ben asked, before nodding off.

 

Day 24: Saint Petersburg to Helsinki… swapping tracks for waves

A QUICK QUIZ. How do you pack enough clothes to cover temperatures from 35 degrees down to 15 degrees, containing attire suitable for Asian beaches, European capital cities and dirty trains, and yet be able to carry them all? Oh, and along with a growing plastic tat mountain?

Don’t ask me. If I knew the answer to that, Kitty wouldn’t be walking round a chilly St Petersburg in cut-off denim shorts, my wife’s jeans wouldn’t have a faint aroma of wee thanks to a burst nappy, and the locals might not be affording me such generous “personal space”.

And so instead of researching Stockholm’s Old Palace, Mrs S spent this morning researching city centre laundrettes for when we arrive in Sweden tomorrow morning. It really is getting quite desperate.

 
My editorial assistant in short shorts… 

We’ve been nowhere long enough nor warm enough to hand-wash since leaving Southeast Asia, and Europe is just too expensive to use the hotel laundries. We got away with it on the Trans-Siberian where everybody kind of stinks but our reintroduction to civilisation has thrown our cleanliness and hygiene levels into sharp focus. The burst nappy/wee incident has only exacerbated this.

Accordingly, we hummed down the stairs of the Pushka Inn as soon as we woke, ducked by the Pushka café next door to scoop up some breakfast and then  clambered straight into our taxis where we thoughtfully wound down the windows.

My taxi took a bit of a leisurely route as we discussed Chelsea, Roman Abramovich, Finnish hunting and swimming in the Neva River with our driver, before arriving at Finlandsky Station for the high-speed tilting train to Helsinki.

 
There is something fishy about this breakfast…

 Mrs S had landed kerbside 10 minutes earlier and was hyperventilating given she had 80 percent of our bags, 66 percent of our children, zero percent of our money, zero percent of our passports and zero battery on her phone.

We got there early and had an hour to kill. So while I pondered the case of the strange looking man who was punching way above his weight in the wife department, the boys obsessed about chewing gum.

I guess it was to be expected, having grown up in Singapore where gum-chewing is almost on a par with grievous bodily harm. Since learning that there are countries where you can actually buy this stuff – and chew it – the mere thought of chewing gum has them twitching and salivating.

This despite the fact Jasper had already coming to a sticky end in Vietnam when his favourite Sugi Island T-shirt was ruined by someone’s discarded gum attaching itself to his rucksack and from there onto his clothing like some rabid spearmint virus.

 They were a great match, once. I guess…

 Jasper’s affection is unwavering and Ben cannot stop discussing it. Mrs S loves Singapore for making it illegal.

“Why don’t you stay in Singapore then,” Ben asks as the chewing gum debate enters a new phase.

“I would love to,” Mrs S replies.

Ben pauses.

“Me too. But that is not available,” he says.

More than physically moving the Shine family from Singapore back to the UK, our trip has already had a profound effect on the family.

Ben has really come into his own this last three weeks (when he is not tired or hungry). He has always been a very thoughtful boy with a superb sense of humour and unmatched comic timing, but over the last 10,000km his confidence has soared.

As for Kitty, she has become much more independent. She is talking more, scolding more and asserting her personality at every opportunity. This is not always a good thing.

Jasper too has grown. He has become ever more mature and ready to distance himself from the general craziness of Ben and Kitty. Even though he is only one school year older than Ben he is charging at top speed – too fast – towards teenage behaviour. Never more so now we are in cooler climes and he is living in his Singapore Barbarians rugby hoodie.

Anyway, they got their chewing gum, Kitty squawked and had sweets instead and I made a fool of myself asking the money-changer for Finnish money (“You know… the money they use in FIN-LAND) before collecting my, ahem, Euros from her and boarding the tilter to Helsinki.

Off to Finland…

For the first time since Hong Kong, all the signs are in English and the staff understand us entirely. I can barely describe what a relief this is. The travel is less exotic, but more enjoyable now. We can communicate properly, the borders are easily navigable, there is abundant food all the family can stomach and so our bottomless picnic bag is now redundant.

We take our place in the half-empty train and, unlike Russia or China, the staff are fine about us regrouping together given the train is not full.

We fly by gorgeous Scandinavian scenery – forest, wooden houses with painted shutters and carved edging. It is similar to the Russian countryside but more picturesque and appears less functional.

I sit a little apart and tap on my MacBook Air, Mrs S gives me daggers, Kitty melts down and the boys eschew iPads for card games… And then we are there.

Peace and quiet…

Mayhem. Spot the difference…

We pull into Helsinki and head to the taxi rank. Every Scandinavian cliché is at play as first up in the rank is a young blonde cabbie who speaks perfect English and scoots us round to the South Harbour for our boat to Stockholm.

We are a couple of hours early and no Left Luggage locker can accommodate the size of our bags so we settle down in a café for coffees and sandwiches before we hit the seas.

A high school teacher from Chicago with General Custer hair and John Lennon glasses shares his unwanted views on Asian tourists with us, and advises us that our children are tired and “just need a playground”.

He doubts we could have arrived in Helsinki from St Petersburg by train (“well, you gotta have taken some sort of ferry”) before he looks it up in his guide book (“oh, okay, you *did* come by train), as though we got our kicks from duping strangers about the rail networks of Europe.

He then begins to share his feelings on the Trayvon Martin case before, mercifully, another hour of my life is spent and we can board the Silja Serenade.

Your kids need a playground!

Where to begin?

They call it the Silja Serenade, Mrs S calls it a Motorway Service Station (though do bear in mind here that my lovely wife’s nostrils involuntarily flare at any accent north of Regents Park). My view is that when Newport Pagnell’s Welcome Break features jugglers on stilts, a spa, a sauna, jacuzzis, buffets, bars and tax-free shops and casinos, all set against a Scandinavian seascape, I’ll fall into line, but until then this will have to be one of those rare occasions where we disagree.

That’s not to say I don’t see what she’s getting at, mind.

Ferry mayhem

Three-quarters trousers were the norm, and tattoos were aplenty. Plus this was a place of big appetites and even bigger back fat. And boobs.

They drank beer, they drank vodka, they drank gin, they drank cider. Their stomachs were scored with livid stretch marks like streaks of lipstick, and none of them got out of the jacuzzi once to have a pee. They staggered from port to starboard before we even left harbour. And the men were no better.

But everyone was having a fantastic time and there was no hint of menace in the air. That is where the Silja Serenade and Blackpool differed.

We toured the magical seventh floor, we walked the corridors, we hit the swimming pool and the Jacuzzi. We giggled at huge naked men in the sauna and supped pre-prandials on the sun-deck. We chit0-chatted, we un-wound and we dined well.

We then lost ba-bee.

Let me repeat that.

We. Then. Lost. Ba-bee.

Let me put this in context. On the surface ba-bee is a scrappy, smelly piece of pink rag with a lambs head attached.

Even a boil wash seems to have no discernible benefit to his appearance or smell these days. He is the soft toy equivalent of a boozer with chronic liver failure. The damage has been done and everything we do now is just careful maintenance.

To Kitty, though, Ba-bee is the world. He is pure catnip. She cannot relax without ba-bee, she cannot suck her thumb without ba-bee, she cannot even listen to stories without ba-bee. She certainly cannot sleep without ba-bee.

Me and my ba-bee…

So imagine, if you can, the panic when we discovered Ba-bee was missing.

We went though the stages of grief. Actually, I only went through the first stage – denial (did she even have ba–bee?) – before skipping straight to PANIC.

All bets were off. “Boys, you can have LITERALLY ANYTHING YOU WANT if you find Ba-bee,” I told them panic-stricken, while trying to juggle a squirming Kitty and pay a waitress dressed like a ship’s captain 99 euros for a fairly-average-but-not-too-bad-meal.

The bloodhounds were off. Both headed straight back into the Kidz Club (yes, it was with a ‘z’)  their tails up and noses down. Meanwhile, Mrs S was retracing our steps from the last three hours asking everyone she encountered in a uniform if they had found ba-bee.

The first sweep was unsuccessful but we Shines don’t give up, and again the boys went back into the play area.

The first I knew of any development was when Ben bolted over to me with good news to impart. The details were sketchy but the gist was ba-bee had been found lurking on a sofa by the on duty woman in Kidz Club. We could all breathe again, and our chances of getting a good night’s sleep had spiked.

Not for Mrs S, though. She is still really pretty ill. It may even be a variant of man-flu it is lingering so long. What it meant was her head acted as a kind of maritime baromoter/spirit level so her inner ear alerted her every time we changed course.

For the rest of us, though, it was time to quit while we were ahead – for tomorrow we face Stockholm and the laundry.

Reunited. At last…

Day 22 – Moscow, and life on the outside…

WE’VE ALL READ that prisoners can find it very, very hard to adapt to life on the outside, right?.

They lose a sense of the wider world. Become institutionalised, increasingly inward looking. They rely on their captors for everything, and live a life where even taking a shower is a noteworthy occasion.

Well guess what, folks?

Baaaaaaaasiiiiiiil… as Sybil Fawlty would say… 

Today was the day we stepped off the mighty K3 after riding the iron workhorse all the way from Beijing to Moscow, and we were feeling shaky.

This chunk of green Chinese iron had been our transport, our accommodation, our restaurant and our restroom for six nights and five days.

Before we’d even reached Moscow Mrs S was already suffering a major case of Stockholm Syndrome. A bigger Sinophile you’ll never meet, and she has loved being in our little Chinese bubble since getting on board at Beijing Railway Station and retracing the route she first travelled in 1989.

The landscape has changed from Chinese to Mongolian to Russian, but the sounds and smells have remained constant and comforting.

The five of us enjoyed a final round of ham and eggs at old redcoat’s Soviet café dining carriage where we finally solved the sourdough vs stale bread mystery by discovering a furry patch of green penicillin on the loaf he dropped on our table.

Our straight-faced “frenemy” warms up… 

We said our goodbyes to the Chinese conductors who had become friends over the course of the week, and left the remainder of our Chinese money with them. From cursing us on day one when we owned up to not having a Mongolian visa (and an invalid Russian one), even the most straight-faced of the lot came to say goodbye to us, bringing the children trinkets his wife had made in Beijing for him to sell in Moscow as souvenirs.

Feeling good about life after witnessing this show of generosity I chided Ben for not waving back at a Russian child who had waved from a small suburban station platform we had rolled past.

“Ben, if someone waves at you, why not wave back?” I asked.

“It’s embarrassing,” he said, looking at me as though I had asked him to drop his pants and sing God Save the Queen in Red Square.

 “It’s not embarrassing, it is nice,” I insisted. “And the world would be a much nicer place if everybody waved at each other instead of feeling awkward or embarrassed or just ignoring each other.”

Of course Mrs S loved this line of chat, and for the next hour or so insisted on waving at me whenever possible, recruiting the children to join in too, until I was forced to admit that waving to people – whether you know them or not – is pretty lame.

Give a little wave… isn’t that niiiiiiiiiiice?

You really do have to be careful what you say in my family…

As we got nearer to Moscow, all waving had stopped and the beautiful countryside of the Ural foothills was replaced by urban sprawl and graffiti.

Our Chinese friends were busier than they’d been all trip. They were boxing up food and trinkets, wrapping boxes in tape, lugging sacks from one end of the train to the other and working in perfect harmony as a team – each carriage liaising with another.

We pulled into the platform bang on time and had no time to say another Zàijiàn to our Chinese chums before we were saying Zdravstvuj to Russia.

Our driver was waiting on the platform as the train came to a halt. Spade-faced and broad-shouldered, he greeted us with a half-hearted wave of a laminated Hotel Mercure sheet of paper before striding ahead of Mrs S who struggled along behind with three bags and Kitty in her arms. The boys staggered under the weight of their rucksacks and I brought up the rear, lurching along with four bags of my own.

Moscow mules

We walked past lots of heavy smokers in tracksuits as we tried to keep up with Robo-Kremlin’s steady pace, and eventually reached his black Mercedes in a pot-holed car-park where we loaded our bags into his car and set off through the wide open streets of the Arbat district.

Five hot showers removed almost all the grime of the six-day train trip and we were ready to hit the town. With little time in Moscow there was no time to spare and we bowled outside with a map in hand.

We couldn’t really figure out if we were in a good neighbourhood or not, although the prices indicate we are. We encountered  a lot of people who wouldn’t look out of place on a Far-Right rally, but perhaps that is just the fashion in this part of Europe now.

We found the Metro stop near our hotel – and an ATM inside. Things were looking up. I delegated Mrs S to be the speak-to-strangers-person (as she is so good at waving) and pushed her to the front of the queue to speak to the sturdy baboushka behind the ticket counter.

“WE. WANT. TO. GO. TO. RED. SQUARE,” Mrs S said…

“Now look here, we want some of your ticket things to travel to RED SQUARE, yes?” 

Against all odds, baboushka’s stern features disappear when confronted with Mrs S and Kitty, and she explains in her best English how many tickets we need, which line to catch and where to get off.

I am still staggered by this when, moments later between platforms, a tall chap with an equine nose wearing a white polo-neck jumper leans in to her and helps her select the right platform.

By the time we are on the train and a tourism student engages her and gives her tips for Red Square I am looking for hidden cameras. This isn’t the harsh, unfriendly city I had been warned about. We are having to plead with people not to get up and give us their seats on the underground, and fortunately we only need to travel two stops before we are there.

Mrs S has spotted a number of shady people “checking out tourists” and “casing out bags” so I am reluctantly persuaded to wear our rucksack dork-style, ie back to front. At this stage I easily look like the biggest prat in Red Square (and that includes a couple of guys wearing bright pink fur hats) but I am not going to let it ruin my afternoon and, when I set eyes on St Basil’s cathedral, I am genuinely awe-struck.

I looked way more embarrassing than this

Nothing can prepare you for seeing this wonderful building with your own eyes. A perfect form in perfect scale, I couldn’t take my eyes off this beautiful cathedral which dominates one end of Red Square and, frankly, makes every other building pale in comparison.

Lenin’s mausoleum was not open to the public so we could not visit, breaking our tradition of seeing “dead dudes” according to Ben, following our visit to see Ho Chi Minh’s body in Hanoi a week ago.

Everybody is tired and hungry and there is a fair bit of bickering going on between everyone, led in the main by Kitty, but I am running her very close for second place by this stage.

We’d planned to eat at Café Pushkin as a reward for enduring food rationing on the train (caused by me forking out the bulk of our food money on visas and bribes in Mongolia) and that meant another foray onto the Metro, this time in rush-hour.

I think we are all buying into Jasper’s notion of the “Invincible Shines” now after all we’ve been through so far, and we head fearlessly underground once more, unable to read the Cyrillic station signs but otherwise well-equiped with our line-drawn tourist map.

Pushkin our luck with this one?

Incredibly we (Mrs S) nail it first time and after a little wiggle on the walk we arrive at the café, which is actually as five-star restaurant, and our children are the only ones in the entire building.

We needed have worried, the boys behaved impeccably and Kitty transformed herself  from a cranky little witch into a sparkling Tsarina.

A friendly, elderly German couple in the window seat near our table were goggle-eyed at the Invincible Shines appetite for exotic food as Ben ate quails eggs and noodle soup, Jasper went for the Borscht – with roast goose – and Kitty slurped down salmon caviar with sour cream on blinis.

Jasper ranked Russian food right up there in his top three behind Thai food and Vietnamese food, while Ben also put it at number three behind sushi in top spot and Hana’s lemon-glazed shortbread. “That was sweet, baby” apparently.

Mrs S had a pork brisket dish and I plumped for stroganoff. Russia isn’t cheap these days and this was eye-wateringly expensive but offset against a week of boiled noodles on the train, it was well worth the cost.

As we left the restaurant we got a better idea of the status of the Pushkin Café by the number of chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside. We found a taxi to take us back the long way and, after a few trips down unnecessary streets, our moustachioed friend felt he had driven sufficient metres to warrant a blistering fare. With Kitty already asleep in the back, him driving like a maniac, no seatbelts fitted in his vehicle and everyone desperate for sleep, I paid up – it was his lucky day.

We all collapsed into our first real bed in six nights and already the trans-Siberian train seems a long time ago.

Mrs S and Freddie Mercury’s big brother

The Pushkin palace…

 
Quailsh eggsh Mr Bond?

Apple Pie smile

 

 

Day 21: Racing towards Moscow (Orange juice: good for children… and good for vot-ka!)

A 3am WAKE UP for me as Ben bursts into my cabin and imparts the customary pat on the face.

He’d been woken by Kitty, it turns out, and felt compelled to share the pain.

If I can catch her in time all might not be lost and I pull her into my bunk before she is fully wide awake and she soon settles down again, the train’s rocking soothing her to sleep once we set off again from Ishim Station headed for Tumen.

A master of the star-shaped slumber, her presence leaves little room for anyone or anything else, though, and so reluctantly I creep out once her breathing tells me she is asleep in the dark.

I slide the dividing door open to find Jasper fast asleep with the overhead light shining brightly and directly in his face and the fan roaring at top volume. Ben is still awake and turning his bed upside down in a bid to find fleecy but to no avail.

I lift up the bunk and we find our sheepskin target tucked down near the safety box and so Ben wriggles back down into bed as I turn off the light and let myself into the corridor.

At 0320 the sun is a fiery orange ball on the horizon. It burns through a dense filter of tree branches in what strikes me a typically Russian scene and my mind wanders to tales of Peter and the Wolf.

Any wolves out there…?

The corridor is quiet at this time of the morning and I have it to myself apart from a Chinese mother and daughter who gingerly wander down from the next carriage for the relative privacy and cleanliness of the Carriage 10 WC. There are the five Shines in Carriage 10; and beds for 36 in our Chinese friends’ Carriage 11. That is a lot of nose powdering, so I flash them a welcoming and sympathetic smile.

I click the button on the top of the sliding window and pull it down. Cool dry air rushes in and I have not yet bored of this novelty after so many years of dank warm air in Asia.

All this breathing and smiling only goes so far, though, and if we hadn’t blown several hundred dollars on Mongolian visas and “facilitation fees” at the border, I would have headed off to old red-coat’s 24-hour Soviet watering hole and had a coffee and caught up on some loud Russian soap opera action.

As it stands, though, we are now rationed to one meal a day in the dining carriage until I can get to a cashpoint.

We are rattling along at a fair old pace as the train seems to be racing to get to Europe. Although the Chinese crew remains with the train throughout, in China we had a Chinese train driver, a Mongolian in Mongolia and now we have a Russian speed-freak at the controls.

There are fewer stops than earlier in the journey and we fly past a number of picturesque stations, many painted a bright turquoise colour, and past beautiful skylines including churches with shimmering golden onion domes.

Golden onions… 

Freight trains rumble past us frequently feeding the increasing areas of industry we come across cut into the countryside of farm land and thick pine forests.

Kitty wakes for a second time and seems to have finally kicked the cold that had left her sweaty and cranky for the last few days. That’s the good news. The bad news is she has passed the baton to Mrs S who is aching all over and struggling with a sore throat.

This is our last full day on the K3 and cabin fever is endemic. Kitty is full of beans and wrestling her brothers at every opportunity. Mrs S treats herself to a lukewarm shower in the torture chamber. When she comes out, Kitty tries to tap mummy’s back with her feet, over-reaches and down she comes from the top bunk like a sack of flour.

Incredibly in a tiny space crammed with the contents of nine bags – think of a VW Camper containing the luggage for a touring rugby side – she finds a patch of carpeted floor to break her fall. There’s no harm done but the shock of the fall and the energy of howling her anger leaves her worn out and she takes a nap.

 
Freight 

There is definitely some monkey-business going on in the corridor among the conductors. Suddenly one of their cabins is crammed with Bodum teapots and there is much excitement, and caution about their haul.

Conductors I don’t recognise are suddenly in our carriage along with a muscular Chinese man in a black singlet and black ninja plimsolls. When we walk past their stash they are careful to block our view with their backs. It is not long before all the employees are swaggering about the train with Bodum mugs full of Chinese tea.

The Great Bodum Cover-up aside, the conductors are increasingly friendly as we troop up and down to the restaurant car for a feed with old red-coat.

 
Chinese food smells emanate…

Kitty especially has captivated them. The boys have taught her to say “ni–hao” to the conductors and they stop to speak to her, crouching down to her level to say ‘hello’. Tiger the translator seems especially enamoured and pops in to say hi to her often. The delicious smell of Chinese food continues to waft along the corridors and is increasingly incongruous as we eat deeper into Russia. The conductors are from all over China and their shared feasts reflect this, with Szichuan dishes side-by-side with Hainanese recipes.

As the trip has gone on we have been increasingly left to fend for ourselves, especially once we  left China. It feels as though it is less their job to look after us, now, and more a trip for them. There is something of a festival atmosphere or holiday spirit and the blue-shirted workers are more like fellow travellers. Often they can be seen texting on Samsung smartphones, or lying in their cabins watching movies on their iPads and laptops.

Sometimes old-tech is best

The contrast between their hi-tech gadgetry and the coal fires they cook on and straw brooms with which they brush the carpets is a striking one, and in many respects is an allegory for modern China.

Still, though, Mrs S loves our Chinese train. She loves the smells and the sounds of the language and finds comfort in it when we enter strange towns. 

Our breakfast of muesli bars and orange club biscuits now a distant memory, we decide to head up front for a re-run of the red-coat/sour-face show in our dour, Soviet café.

You’ve guessed it, eggs and ham plus some borscht again, despite 80 percent of our team suffering from upset stomachs and some blaming that on the soup… Jasper in particular is a firm convert to the Russian speciality.

Kitty is on sparkling form since her sleep and pole-dances around the place, swinging around, moving from seat to seat, helping herself to food from Ben’s plate, scolding her brothers and basically confirming that she is back to her old self.

I will not tell you naughty boys again! 

She hits the hay again with Mrs S as the boys and I pay red-coat. Jasper and Ben have a 20 minute lie-down to recharge their batteries (and give me 20 minutes peace) followed by a viewing of the 1973 Tom Sawyer movie.

Besides being the place where Tsar Nicholas II and his family met a brutal end at the hands of the Bolsheviks, Boris Yeltsin’s hometown of Yekaterinburg is also a place where very fat, ruddy men, with lengths of rope as belts, sell tomatoes and melons from a wheelbarrow on the railway station platform.

K3 pulled into a middle platform and the exit was down a subway. We had a 26-minute stop scheduled, so I asked Mrs S to man the doors and headed underground. Down below it was a labyrinth with signs in Cyrillic only. I was followed underground by passengers from a local train which had just pulled in alongside and pretty soon was entering what looked like a bus depot. Still no sign of an ATM, and I began to get twitchy. I doubled back and jogged up the steps to Platform 5 where our Chinese conductors were still standing on the platform manning every door with their backs to the train.

With my remaining 110 roubles I visited a platform booth and ducking down to speak into the hatch said the words ‘orange juice’ loudly then stood up tall and pointed to the carton in the window way above the assistant head.

She reached up out of view – my view was hindered by all the cartons piled high in the windows one on top of the other – and pulled down a carton of grape juice.

“Niet,” I said proudly, then “orange juice,” again.

Once more the young woman reached above and I could only guess what she would produce. After a few seconds a carton of clear apple juice was presented through the hatch to me.

“Niet,” I repeated. “ORANGE JUICE… ORANGE,” I said, as though she were hard of hearing, and helpfully repeating the word she did not understand. Again she reached up and I waited for the lucky dip. This time the orange juice was pushed under my nose through the hatch.

“DA!” I exclaimed in delight, grinning. “Good for children… and good for vot-ka!” I said. The quip got the response it deserved as she took my notes and turned her back on me.

After leaving Yekaterinburg we had only a few kilometres to go before we crossed into Asia. The boundary line is around 1777km to Moscow, and is marked by a fairly modest white obelisk.

Mrs S took a picture of it when she rode the Trans-Siberian in 1989.

Unfortunately the obelisk was to be on the south side of the train – the side our cabins are situated. The north side, or corridor side, provides a great platform for pictures through the open windows, but the cabin windows are sealed shut and grubby after thousands of kilometres of Chinese, Mongolian and Russian dust and grime and rain.

I perched myself in our empty cabin, resting my elbows on the table and tucking the camera close to my body to keep it still.

I set my camera to rapid fire so it would shoot 10 frames in a second and found a patch of window clean enough that the lens would focus on the outside and not on the grime streaks or squashed insects.

Now patience would be a necessity.

I successfully received torn paper gifts from Kitty with my eyes fixed on the trackside, pushing my head against the window at an award angle, straining to see what was coming up.

I counted down the kilometres. 1790, 1789… 1781, 1780, 1779… and there it was in the near distance, about the size of an English post box but white and tapering towards the top.

I half-depressed the shutter button, the autofocus motor whirred, and, and, and yet another dirty great freight train filled my window blocking out everything. By the time its containers of coal or ore or steel or oil or whatever the hell it was lugging across Russia finally gave me my view back the obelisk was long gone and we were in Europe.

 Welcome to Europe…

We pull into Permi at around 1730 – our second last stop of the day – and it coincides with a local train’s stop.

As we come to a halt, the platform is full of Russian life. There are women in hotpants, men in tracksuit bottoms and nothing else, men guzzling cans of beer, drips falling onto their sweaty stomachs and more nylon singlets than at a Diamond League Athletics meet.

A very large woman with bright red hair and a voluminous canary yellow T-shirt walks up and down the platform selling crisps while another older woman with equally red hair, but this time in a bushy hair-do like a microphone, winces into the sun.

Leo Sayer’s mum… 

Mrs S urges me to take pictures of the scene so, like a tourist at the zoo, I do. She then urges me to get off the train and join the throng. All this urging is because while she is clearly fairly appalled by them, I think she is also a little wary of them too, as if fat beer guzzlers with appalling hairstyles are a different species. She seems them as a cross between something out of My Big Fat Gyspsy Wedding and Far Right football hooligans.

I see plenty of parallels between country-town Russia and market town England, though. There’s nothing to fear here, although given I have been hanging out of the window with a lens and shamelessly papping them to their faces, I have some reservations about stepping into this particular cage.

I needn’t have worried, they are a friendly bunch.

One of our number on the train is a 72-year-old who is cycling round the world (apart from when he is on a train, clearly…) and he sets up a tripod, unfurls a flag and has some guards hold it up for a picture with him in front of the train.

This intrigues and amuses the shirtless masses and they pull out cameraphones and stand behind the tripod firing away.

The local train pulls away just minutes before ours and there is some waving between the travellers as we part again to go our separate ways.

Mist rises and settles from the marshland as night falls and there is now just one more night and four more stations between us, a warm shower, large double bed and a Muscovite hotel.

Almost there… 

Images of Day 21:

 

Day 20. Russia, Russia and more of Mother Russia…

WE HAD ENJOYED the best night’s sleep yet and I woke at around 4am to an eerily still carriage. Pulling the blind up I saw we had stopped at Krasnoyarsk Station and quickly pulled on my clothes to investigate .

The conductor let me climb down onto the platform and as I wandered down towards some buildings a Russian worker waved at me. Two-minutes he said, smiling, urging me back to the train waving his arms.

I jogged back and sure enough within two minutes we were on our way.

We were around halfway between Beijing and Moscow now – we would cross that point at breakfast – and the landscape was one of grassy forest and flowers.

Meadowsweet, daises and campion, Mrs S advised, and when I plunged my head out of the carriage window it was like walking into a florists, such was the fragrance filling the air.

Beautiful scene. Smell-o-vision would be useful here

It was like an Alpine scene as we passed wooden villages with painted shutters and pretty flowers in gardens – like a typically European scene but in Asia. Both boys were thrilled by the clean, cool air and the pretty scenery which bodes well for our relocation back to Europe from Asia.

The pastoral scenes were punctuated by heavy industry, endless freight trains and railway yards, all used to transport minerals and coal. The Lonely Planet tells us that in freight terms this is the world’s busiest section of railway.

Men in orange jackets pockmark the track, their big bellies, worn faces and dirty hands a constant as we watch out for the white kilometre markers trackside counting down the distance to Moscow every 100 metres.

By breakfast we were still 3,932km from Moscow, the mid-way point from Beijing.

Red-coat is really warming up, he served our eggs and ham with a flourish, getting some cold water out of a secret locker for us. He even changed some US dollars into roubles for us after the supply of station ATMs had dried up in Mongolia.

A legend of the K3…

He laid down the notes in a fan and explained to me what each of the pictures on them illustrated.

“This, Moscow,” he said sternly of the 100 rouble note.

“This, Krasnoyarsk,” he added of the 10 rouble note. “Krasnoyarsk, just now. Just now,” he added, referring to the city I’d flirted with getting stranded at at around 4am.

He smoothed out the 500 rouble note and said with some pride: “And this… this Archangel.”

Archangel only lasted in my pocket until we stopped at Mariinsk. There was certainly little evidence of the riches this town had enjoyed during a Siberian gold rush in the 19^th century at the small station in 2013.

There was one small hut open on our platform in between lines.

Jasper and I climbed down the steep folding stairs of the train and hopped onto the platform.

An old baboushka was manning the stall crammed full of cartons, boxes, packets and bottles in a higgledy-piggledy fashion.

She showed her gold tooth after we had grinned at her, but you wouldn’t really call it a smile.

 

Baboushka, baboushka please press your button

Jasper spotted some Pepsi in a fridge alongside the small shack, and began to explain in great detail how it was good for people with upset stomachs because it contains all the right sugars and salts etcetera, but he needn’t have put so much effort in – the air was fresh, we had roubles in our pocket and it is not everyday you are strolling through Siberian sunshine with your eldest.

I went to slide the weathered door across the decrepit cabinet but it shifted only a millimetre or two before holding fast.

I tried again, exerting a little more force. Still no joy.

I tried the door on the other side but that too was stuck.

All the while the baboushka was watching me, expressionless.

I looked at her plaintively, and made a gesture of pulling a door aside. Slowly she reached out of her little hatch at the front and pressed a small button in a plastic housing, like a doorbell.

Instantly the door was freed.

 

This stuff is Da Bizness

We took a bottle of Pepsi, a 2-litre bottle of water with a picture of an elk on the front, some Da apple juice and what I thought was a carton of milk which turned out to be drinking yoghurt (the churn should have given me a clue, Mrs S advised later after Kitty had rejected it at the top of her voice…).

Baboushka was waving a calculator at us showing the total price when we spotted some plastic glasses filled with fruit.

There were deep red cherries in one, and small, rounded Siberian strawberries in another – almost a different species to the large, watery fruit we have all come to accept.

If their appearance had sparked a Proustian moment, the instant I tasted them I was transported back to a time when food tasted like food – they were exquisite, sweet and bursting with flavour. It was the second time I had remarked to everyone how great the simple foods were, having raved about the Russian eggs and ham.

 

Going like hotcakes. Yummmmm. Can I fit any more in?

Not all of our party was having such a great time, however. Today was the day Kitty decided enough was enough. She had clearly gotten out of bed the wrong side despite there being only one side to get out of.

Crotchety and vocal, she lay on her back and kicked her brothers. She pushed an off-balance Ben into an iron step-ladder, causing a large egg to grow on the side of his head.

She shouted at Mrs S, complaining and squabbling, and in Red-coat’s dining carriage swung around the seats wandering up and down the carriage refusing to sit for her eggs.

Fortunately, red-coat’s place of work was customarily quiet, and his sour-faced side-kick woman never allowed her eyes to drift from the Russian soap-opera even once.

I’m not listening to Kitty, I’m still thinking about strawberries…

There was still nobody else on our carriage but Tiger the interpreter to hear Kitty’s protests – and he spent large chunks of the journey in Carriage 11 dining like a king.

When we walked past one of the cabins today a feast was laid out complete with soups, wontons, vegetables and flatbreads all cooked in the coal-fired furnaces used to heat the water for our samovars.

Tiger was tucked in there, pinned in by fellow conductors either side and he grinned at us as we trooped past, the delicious smells wafting after us.

On the third or fourth attempt Kitty was persuaded to take a nap in the empty cabin and emerged a different child.

“Yoghurt?” she asked, pointing at the little carton with the moustachioed man holding a churn before sucking half of it straight down. “Is gooooooood,” she smiled, flicking a thumbs-up. She then polished off half a packet of dried mango and was all smiles as the rain streaked our windows.

Delicious. And. Nutritious.

 We pushed on, passing many small stations, some so small they were just stones and rubble surrounded by white lines. No building just a sign and a track leading off into the forest.

At Taiga we pull up to a grand, elegant turquoise station which is almost entirely deserted but for a man speaking into a comb, a man looking moody in sunglasses and a woman weeding the verges.

A smiling Mrs S scans the scene catching the eye of the man speaking into his comb. BINGO, he thinks, and comes to try to make friends, causing her to wind her neck back  away from the window like a startled tortoise. Every village needs its idiot, and I shall call this man Kenneth. 

 

Turquoise Taiga. Colour co-ordinated Kenneth.

More borscht, more blaring soap opera and more sour looks from old sour-face.

We pull into Novosibirsk at around 4pm, and Siberia’s capital provides something of a culture shock after all the greenery.

There is something very Soviet about the place. Freight trains are loaded and unloaded by grim-faced men driving tractors. The approach to the station and the route away from it are lined by beaten-up buildings, Soviet-era housing blocks and factories.

I could eat this till I borscht

Shortly after leaving the city the countryside grabs back Siberia and we find ourselves among greenery again before crossing the Ob on a 870m bridge. The falling sun glints off the wide expanse of water and huge barges and rafts float in the centre.

Only freight trains interrupt our view of the verdant surroundings, but they are frequent.

Shortly after crossing the River Ob a train carrying scores of Russian tanks passes us, their guns pointing potently ahead.

 

 Obviously the Ob

Kitty settles down with The King and I on her iPad and we ease into open marshland as Rodgers and Hammerstein hits drift down from the top bunk. It makes a welcome change from the Peppa Pig theme tune.

Mrs S plunders the bottomless supplies bag once again and produces a feast to rival our Chinese conductors as another day riding the rails draws to a close.

Tomorrow we leave Siberia to enter the Urals and already I feel a little sad to be leaving this beautiful and harsh part of the planet.

Day 17 – The trip dangles by a thread

WHEN it finally came – finally – it was the most beautiful sound in the world. 

In a dimly lit ante-room in the desolate Mongolian border town of Dzamynude the midnight thud of stamp on newly minted visa brought a close to the most anxious and stressful 12 hours of our trip so far.

And so thank you, you beautiful, wonderful, compassionate, pragmatic Mongolian government officials.

Women A and B finally put us out of our misery…

This had been a 12-hour period during which the travelling Shines had become convinced the Trans-Siberian leg of our Long Trip Home was to be derailed on day one.

Horror scenarios had plagued our thoughts throughout the day as we hurtled towards our fate and the train ploughed through China. 

And to think, we had been so euphoric after we’d battled the early morning crowds to get into Beijing’s old railway station.

We’d lugged three children and nine bags through the streets having been dropped off round the corner, we’d navigated the unfamiliar signs, we’d found the train — our magical K3 — and we had set up home in our adjoining two-berth cabins.

We’d breakfasted on croissants and pastries and drank coffees and hot chocolate as we’d pulled out of Beijing on the famous old workhorse headed for Moscow.

We had been simply joyous. But that joy was squashed like a lemon under a mallet just a few hours into our journey with the awful realization we had no Mongolia visas and, contrary to the advice repeatedly given to us by our Singaporean visa services company, we most certainly needed one.

Without one we would be kicked off the train before Mongolia.

It was Mrs S who first raised the alarm tentatively while reading a guide.

“No”, said I, “We’re not getting off, that can’t be right, and anyway they told us we only needed visas for Vietnam, China and Russia and we have those. I’m sure we’ll be okay.”

But as she climbed up top for a post-lunch nap, the doubt started eating at me. I googled as best I could with imperfect search phrases and patchy telecoms. Everything I could find suggested we would all need visas, even just to transit, and everything indicated we would not be able to get one on the train or at the border.

By the time Mrs S woke up, I had played out every scenario from us being stranded at a Chinese border outpost, stranded in Mongolia or stuck in no-mans-land with three small children. None of the scenarios was pleasant.

I put another call in to Melissa back in Singapore who had arranged a lot of our trip, but not the visas, and once again she was amazing, calling embassies and consulates from Britain, Mongolia and China. Nobody, though, knew what would happen, although in all likelihood we would not be allowed out of China, I was told. 

And still we hurtled  towards our fate as the train ploughed relentlessly through China, past beautiful wooded hills which flattened out into grasslands and then grew into mountains again.

We informed the train conductor of our plight and he was less-than-pleased. An official interpreter said he would try to help us and advised we tried to get visas at Erlian, the Chinese border town where we  stopped and the trains’s bogies  or wheelbase was changed to fit the Mongolian gauge. 

He did his best, I guess, but returned to cheerily inform that no, Erlian could not issue a visa, but we could always try at Dzamynude.

This would be a point-of-no-return for us – where we to leave Erlian we would not be able to get back into China with our single entry Chinese visas. This would scotch our best Plan B which was to stay in Erlian for the night – we had a room protectively booked at the grandly titled Erlian Pacific International in Xinhua Street – and then fly back to Beijing and on to Moscow two days later (once our Russian visas kicked in on the 20^th) to pick up the train again.

We had only enjoyed a brief evening in Beijing, but in that time managed to cram in an amazing evening driving through Tiananmen Square, passing the Forbidden City at sunset, checking into an über-cool boutique hotel in Sanlitun and educating the boys on the art of eating Peking Duck at the fun Da Dong.

No, the thought of returning to Beijing left us all with a sinking feeling.

Instead, if we got through Erlian, we would be throwing ourselves on the mercy of the Mongolians, entering their country without visas and facing possible deportation – if there was any way to deport from Dzamynude. (the Lonely Planet lists precisely nothing to do in Dzamynude. Nothing. I could find nothing online and there is certainly no airport.)

We were trying to figure out what the appropriate penalty fee we should have to offer to resolve the problem when green-suited Chinese border officials swept onto the train at Erlian. Our passports, along with everyone else’s, were taken away while we waited for the wheels to be changed.

Not until four hours later did the official return having stamped exit on our Chinese visas and waved us on to Mongolia and our fate at the border. At least we would have a fighting chance of bribing a Mongolian official, we reasoned, since we were being given the opportunity of meeting them face to face.

The children slept fitfully in their bunks and I waited in the darkness. My stomach was in knots as the immigration team boarded the train. A burly female passport official stood in the doorway blocking out all the weak yellow light from the hallway.

“Passport” she said, holding out an upturned hand.

I handed over all five, making it clear I had three sleeping children next door 

Our train conducter mumbled something. She glanced at him, and again at me, before flicking through my passport’s pages with the dexterity of a money counter.

“Ah… slight problem there,” I began to stammer, before she spoke over me. “Mongolian visa?”

I shook my head and tried to begin my rehearsed spiel about how it was all a terrible mistake, how we hadn’t deliberately boarded the train like stowaways knowing we were breaking Mongolian law, and that I had US dollars and obviously knew there would have to be a “penalty fee” if she could only help me out of this whole mess.

But before I could even get into my stride she had walked away and turned to Mrs S next door with the same questions: “Passport? Mongolian visa?”

All the while she shook her head gravely, flicking through the passports again and again as if a Mongolian visa might suddenly appear. 

“You come with me,” she said finally, pointing at my chest.

We climbed down the steep iron ladder of the train onto the tracks and towards an austere block as Mrs S peered out the window after me.

I was led through a reception room, down a corridor lit by flickering fluorescent tubes, and into a small room inhabited by two women. They seemed less intimidating than their muscular colleague, were dressed in blue rather than white, and lacked the military-style decorations on their uniforms.

These women too shook their heads gravely, however, and their English was as bad as my Mongolian and so we were left with shrugs and smiles and pleading looks.

On the table, though, was a calculator and a pen and some papers – this looked promising I thought, as I reached into my pocket to separate the US dollars from one fold into two bundles.

Woman ‘A’ gave me a level look through her oval glasses but didn’t appear without sympathy as she looked through the passports. Among her Mongolian I could here ‘Katt-er–eeyn’. She was telling her colleague about Kitty.

The clock ticked and we had less than half an hour before the train was due to head into the Gobi.

“So, please, if there is anything you can do to help me, I would really appreciate it,” I told them both. “Anything. I have U.S. dollars, and know this will be more expensive than usual because it is an emergency.”

Woman ‘B’ sighed and picked up the calculator.

“You will need 10 day transit,” she said, before tapping into the keyboard.

She handed the calculator to me. $280. It was much less than I had been prepared for and barely more than the price of five visas obtained the more conventional way.

“Okay, of course,” I nodded after a brief pause, and she nodded back, handed me five forms and a pen. It was one of those pens with four coloured inks in it and she spent 10 seconds clicking them round before smiling at me and handing it to me.

We were almost there.

I filled in the forms while Woman ‘A’ tapped away on her computer and printed out visas. Woman ‘B’ smiled again when I handed her $300, and showed me the $280 on her screen.

I smiled back. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said, waving away the money. I didn’t expect $20 change – or 30,000 Tugriks. The tip was the least I could do for them.

Woman ‘B’ seemed happy and spoke to Woman ‘A’ before collecting up our passports. We walked back through the corridors to another room where a row of white-uniformed officers were stamping passports.

Ours were handed to the stern black-haired woman who had marched me off the train. She looked up at me, back down at my passport, and then brought her stamp down on the visa with a loud thud.

“Go back to train,” Woman ‘B’ told me, and led me out to the front of the building.

I crossed the platform walking on air.

The doors to the train were locked and I banged on the side of the carriage. This brought me to the attention of a combat-uniformed soldier who walked towards me, but the train conductor opened up the door and I clambered in.

I smiled at Mrs S as I walked towards her along the thin corridor, not wanting to celebrate until the passports were in our hands and we were off. Minutes later our stern border patrol officer handed back our passports and the train began to edge off into Mongolia.

I flicked through the passport and all our visas categorised us as Irish in our British passports, but we were by now rattling through the Gobi desert, illuminated only by the stars and my mac screen.

For the last few days, Jasper has been saying that as a team we are invincible. I had my doubts today at times, but you know what? I think he might be right.

 

 

Day 9: Hoi An (or four wheels bad, two wheels good)

YOU JUST know a day which begins with a couple of perfectly fried eggs, exquisite French bread, strong Vietnamese coffee and the freshest of croissants is going to go well, and sure enough Day Nine of our Long Trip Home was a belter.

I’d even say it went a long way to restoring my faith in mankind, given that it revealed the very best of Vietnamese hospitality: warmth, charm and diffident humour.

PLENTY TO SMILE ABOUT

And I had needed some reassurance.

I’m not suggesting for a second that the gimlet-eyed opportunist who, just yesterday, had hustled past me into the train carriage I was vacating to rifle around behind the seats seeking anything I might have dropped (WHILE I WAS STILL STANDING IN THE DOORWAY) was representative of this fine nation… but, well, you know what I am saying…

And so I couldn’t have been more delighted to be shown the gentler side of Vietnam, the side a million miles away from the Vietnam of the business press or the bustling tourism trail.

To do so, we had to saddle up, clap on our bike clips and slap on a Non La – the ubiquitious conical hat designed to keep the fierce Southeast Asian sun at bay.

MRS S SUITED AND BOOTED FOR THE TOUR

Our guides Hoa and Linh showed us traditional boats being built, mother-of-pearl furniture being created, mats being weaved and basket boats being sailed (as well as a hapless dog being carted off to a “special butcher” and a carrier bag full of ducklings who, I am guessing, weren’t about to be released into a duckling orphanage…

Big shout out to the stupendous Sarah Lazarus for putting us onto Heaven & Earth Bicycle Tours (www.vietnam-bicycle.com) for this.

BEST NOT TO ASK SOMETIMES, ISN’T IT?

The tour was only around 10 kilometres in total, but took in boat trips, bicycles, floating bridges, lunch (caramel chicken with steamed water spinach of course) and best of all a glimpse into the heart of rural Vietnam, complete with hard-working women and booze-swilling men.

Attitudes are changing throughout Vietnam, but it takes time, and nowhere do attitudes change more slowly than in the sticks.

Sexism is still a problem, according to Linh, but with Vietnamese men in the countryside increasingly dying as young as their mid-forties with stomach cancer caused by a spike in rice wine consumption, and smart women like Hoa and Linh taking control of their destinies, it cannot be long before Vietnamese women enjoy a more level playing field.

The trip took almost seven hours. Mrs S remembered how much she loves cycling and grinned from ear to ear throughout, Kitty pinched me in the back and giggled throughout from her seat perched behind mine, alpha-male Jasper led the group from the front most of the time while Ben began the day tottering on his tippytoes on a bike a little too big, and by the end was lying in Hoa’s lap having his head stroked (I really don’t know how he does it)

DON’T ASK ME… BEN AND HOA

Pool action to cool off and then into Hoa An for supper and some lantern shopping. In the event, Mrs S couldn’t decide between the white or the blue silk lanterns, and it seems I wasn’t overly helpful. I liked them both and they are, well, lanterns, so… but if you have any strong feelings either way, feel free to leave a message…

Till tomorrow…

 

A TOWN OF LANTERNS

 

MORE IMAGES FROM DAY NINE:

LINH TELLING IT HOW IT IS…

 

BEN AND LINH TACKLE THE BASKET BOAT

 

HITTING THE ROAD

 

WHO’S GOING TO BLINK FIRST?

 

WHAT A DYNAMIC, ADVENTUROUS FAMILY!

 

WORKING THE LAND

 

A HAIR-RAISING SUPPER

 

CALLING IT A DAY…

 

YES, I LOVE YOU AGAIN, VIETNAM. FICKLE, AREN’T I?

 

July 8. Danang and Hoi An. A day of two halves.

I won’t lie to you, I was a bit over Vietnam when I woke up at 05:40 this morning, my train carriage rocking and Vietnamese cigarette smoke still seeping under the door as it had all night. A crone was rattling the handle of the heavy cast-iron door trying to get in — to offer us some coffee, it turns out — and the cockroaches were leisurely heading back to their holes after a night, presumably, crawling all over my family.

Dear GOD, let it be over…

SE2 is a beast of a train in which nothing seems to fit. The doors don’t quite fit their frames, and swing and rattle about as the train lumbers along. The carriages don’t fit together snugly, leaving fairly large gaps of daylight to step over when moving from one to another. The windows are scratched, or dirty, or both, the nylon curtains hang limply in a forlorn twisted ponytail and I won’t begin to describe the mattresses.

In all, we were penned into our mobile cell for something like 16 hours, only slipping out for a sporadic paddle in some urine or, as others might call it, to go to the loo.

Oh come on dad, it isn’t THAT bad, smiles Jasper the ultimate glass-half-full boy

If a train’s purpose, though, is to transport from A to B then fair’s fair, it did its job adequately and if the journey was a low-point in our Vietnam experience, then our arrival in Danang — or more accurately, Hoi An — was definitely a high.

Shut UP, Jasper, it IS that bad, says Ben, the glass-half-empty one…

The Victoria Beach Resort proved just the tonic after our journey, and after a particularly long and vigorous scrub in the shower we headed out for a swim.

That magical elixir of pool water instantly put a stop to the Shinettes’ squabbles which had plagued our day since waking. Mrs S disappeared off for well-deserved massage (did I mention she didn’t get any sleep all night because she was sharing a sliver of mattres with a headbutting-tossing-and-turning Kitty) and all was well with the world again.

Kitty did fall headfirst into a fish pond while I was in sole charge, but we didn’t let that spoil the newly positive tone.

And relaaaaaaaaaax. Pool action…

All was well with the world (so long as we banished from our minds the prospect of the Danang to Hanoi train later this week on the same accursed SE2) and it was with a spring in our step that we gathered up the kids and jumped on a mini-bus to Hoi An.

This city on the South Central coast of Vietnam contains a World Heritage Site in its Old Town, and is a marvel of care and careful planning.

While much of southeast Asia is racing to turn itself into a building site/rubbish tip in the pursuit of dollars, Hoi An, or the Vietnamese government, hearteningly sees profit in preservation.

Smile, you’re in Hoi An

The riverfront, illuminated by hundreds of lanterns, is breathtaking and each winding street is lined with colonial style buildings and shophouses.

Hoi An must be one of the cleanest cities I have visited, with the least aggressive hawkers and friendliest locals. There is a clean, friendly feel to the place at stark odds to our train experience. The food was spectacular, the streets safe and appealing. We only poked our noses into it for an hour before scooting the kids back to bed, but look forward to adventuring more tomorrow…

Images of Hoi An:

Riverfront

 

Someone’s been drinking falling down juice by the look of it…

 There *is* no wrong turn in Hoi An…