Alex and Christina's honey moon
Russia - Siberia - The Altay
24th August 2004 to 12th September 2004
This trip was to accompany Alexander and Christina on their honeymoon. They wanted a holiday that would require guides, translators and the hire of horses, drivers and cooks. It would have been uneconomic for them to go on their own and they did not want to go as part of a larger group of tourists. Their preference was to go with friends so we accepted their invitation to join them on their trek across Siberia. This story is how Alison and Rebecca saw the trip.
Day 0 (August 24th): The day before we left, Daddy cut his finger cooking a courgette. He was very annoyed with himself but it looked okay in the dressing although it was still bleeding a bit when we took a taxi to Heathrow. We met up with Alex and Christina for the flight to Moscow. On arrival we made our way through the stringent Russian passport control and still got to baggage reclaim before the baggage, some people must have been waiting for their bags for a long time.
The security checks at the Russian air terminals were relentless. The domestic terminal was not too bad, but the international one checked our bags about half a dozen times.
We walked out into the main part of the airport and looked for the transfer to the domestic flights terminal. We found that we had missed the half hourly bus by a couple of minutes. We were being pestered by a Russian taxi driver, so we relented and took his taxi for the 7km ride to the other terminal – a small car we only just fitted into. We met the tour company’s representative, Elena, who helped us through the airport check in process. We would have missed the flight without her. We had only had two hours between the arrival of the international flight and departure of the domestic, but the flight from Heathrow had left an hour late and the passport process was much slower than we had expected. We carried our own bags onto the plane and stowed them ourselves. The plane was very big and very high inside, so the air vents and other bits normally over one's head were in the backs of the seats in front of us.