DETOUR

Do you ever get the feeling that something is not meant to be, that maybe it’d be best to cut bait and do something else? I got this feeling after innocently emailing a hotel in the small city of Tynda, up in the northern part of The Amur Region to confirm a hotel reservation that I thought I had made a few weeks ago.

I emailed the hotel and received a standard response of, “What day are you coming”. I answered with my dates. The Hotel Safari subsequently asked for my surname. When I didn’t get back to them within two minutes, they fired back saying “we’ll just put it under no surname”. Concerned this may jeopardize my reservation I wrote back with seconds that my surname was Borgford.

When I got an email back, I expected a kind message saying, “your reservation has been confirmed, thank you and we will see you then”. Instead of this, I get a one-sentence terse response saying, “are you a foreigner?”. I said yes I was a foreigner and why does it matter. They answered “sorry we don’t deal with foreigners!!”.

Wow……….I was shocked and even a bit hurt. Here I wrote in all Russian, trying my best to use perfect grammar and they say they won’t take me because I’m of a different nationality. I’m not sure why I was shocked, after all as I wrote in my last article one should never assume anything will ever be easy when you are dealing with Russia!

I started looking for other hotels in the city, but came up with hardly anything except an old run down Soviet hotel that had reviews with such words as: DON’T GO and AVOID at all costs written in it with pictures to prove it. Without being able to stay in Tynda, I knew my BAM (Baikal Amur Mainline) itinerary would not work! So I decided it’d be best to cancel my route and blaze a new trail to Moscow.

So here I am in Wagon 7, in seats 5/6 (I bought out the cabin as I prefer privacy over having someone literally breathing down my neck) on the Rossiya number 1 train to Moscow, except I am not going to Moscow I am heading west to the Burytian town of Ulan Ude near the Mongolian border.

My ultimate goal is to get to the city of Krasnoyarsk, about a day or so west of Ulan Ude where I may either go north to Tomsk, a university town known for its wooden architecture or head south toward the town of Chelyabinsk, where a giant meteor unexpectedly hit outside town in 2013 causing lots of rattled nerves and broken windows. I will keep you updated as I move west!