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.
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.
