Into Moscow
Being hungry just added to the slightly melancholy air of my final morning. I actually didn’t really want to arrive in Moscow, and I would have been quite happy to sit on the train for another six days. It had been a fantastic journey. The kilometre posts were now in triple figures, so we’d travelled more than seven thousand kilometres, and I watched them slowly count down. It seemed odd to feel so close to the end, when were still a few hundred miles away yet.
We got to Moscow’s pointy-roofed Yaroslavsky Station fifteen minutes early, after a journey of 132 hours. Just before I’d left Beijing I’d e-mailed a hostel to book a bed and a lift from the station, but they hadn’t replied so I wasn’t sure if I would be homeless or not, but there was a man outside the station with a battered car and a sign saying ‘Roger’, so off I went to the Hostel Sherstone.
I headed straight out into Moscow. I got lost on the way to Vladykino metro station, which was a good distance away through grim-looking estates full of box-like apartment buildings, and then got lost at the other end as well. Borovitskaya metro looked quite close to Red Square on the map, but I walked for quite some distance before I suddenly found it. I’ll never forget the sight of St. Basil’s Cathedral - a classic symbol of Moscow which I’d seen plenty of pictures of before, but it was far more impressive in the flesh.
That night, back at the Sherstone, after I’d gone to bed and was laying in the dark, I had the sound of the train in my ears, and felt like I was still rocking about as we clattered along the longest railway in the world. It was strange to be back on solid ground again.
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