Russia

1st Visit

European Russia offers the grand city of Moscow, the great Volga river and the Caucasus mountains. Mark Howard and I travelled to Russia with two objectives. The first was to conquer the highest mountain in geographical Europe; this was Mount Elbrus at 5642m (18,510ft). The second was to explore a country making the difficult transition from communism and where only recently foreigners could supposedly travel freely. After a tough 2 weeks trekking with an Exodus tour we had a fascinating 2 weeks touring independently via various modes of transport.

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2nd Visit RUSSIA-SIBERIA

The Trans-Mongolian train eventually crossed from Mongolia to Russia; it took 11 hours to cross the border. After exploring Lake Baikal we headed into the Altai mountains. The long journey by BAM train took us through the Siberian taiga; the world's largest forest. We completed our trek just before winter began to set in. In Krasnoyarsk we hoped to head north into arctic Siberia but no timely boat was found thus we flew to Moscow. After Moscow we made a brief pilgrimage to St Pertersburg to visit the amazing Hermitage. From there we crossed into the Baltic state of Estonia.

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