Days 14–17, Krasnoyarsk
Krasnoyarsk is a working class city. The contrast is strong with Kazan or Moscow. Countless rows of ugly flat blocks and a dozen factory chimneys polluting the air do not make for picturesque views.
Here, no machines washing the streets twice a day. Streets and buildings are unkept.
Walking to our hostel on the first day, we cross what looks like a poor part of town: roads, pavements, houses and cars look like they haven’t been maintained in 50 years. Vegetable patches in every garden. Half the homes are made from assembled pieces of wood, leaving an impression of a shantytown.
However, a number of things stand out. The city is very green, with trees, bushes and floral arrangements almost everywhere we look. There is a lot of construction work going on. Whole streets are blocked off for heavy works, and many pavements are just sand, where we sometimes walked amid workers and construction vehicles. Many cars are dirty, to the point where number plates are unreadable.
There is a big traffic congestion problem. Our bus ride from the hostel to the train station which should normally take 20 minutes, lasts for almost an hour.
On our first day, we arrived at the hostel towards mid-day, checked in and immediately had a shower (remember we had just spent 48 hours in a train, we were tired and dirty). After the shower I nearly went to sleep, but resisted, going out instead.
The shantytown-like part of town is on the top of a hill which splits the city in two. Our hostel was at the back of this area, close to the second half of the city, which is just a collection of blocks of flats in a competition for kitch and ugly. One end of the hill is higher and more visible than the other. This is where stands a chapel, surrounded by a park in full construction works. They guys who laboured into the evening were paving the pathways and digging deep holes here and there.
This is where we went after our shower, I was trying my best to avoid the sun in an effort to postpone that sticky feeling as long as possible. The view was… well, we could see the mountains of pine tree forest in the distance. But boy is that one ugly city!
We then wondered about the close-to-empty streets of the area, remarking that there were some pretty nice houses amongst the makeshift shelters. And yet, despite the seemingly decrepit state of most homes, we were pleasently surprised by the well kept floral arrangements which stood alongside the streets, painted car tyres serving as pots.
I took pictures of the pretty houses only.
Our wandering took us behind the first block of flats. We are far from the jungle of grey one might find in a Parisian suburban social housing town. Here the buildings are, still ugly, but colourful in a kitch kind of way. Also, vegetation everywhere. And many flower beds.
We end up on a main drag, (no vegetation on this 6 lane road.) But there is an “Auchan” hypermarket in the distance, as we walk towards it we notice a smaller supermarket and do our dinner and breakfast shopping there instead. We returned to the hostel and call it a day.
The weather was quite bad on the second day, many clouds in the sky and some looking rather menacing. We were going to go for a trek in the mountains but changed our minds looking at the weather. We were going to go to an island in the middle of the river where locals go to relax and enjoy a bit of nature.
About ten minutes after we left the hostel, it behind raining quite heavily and we find some shelter, giving us time to decide what our next move is. Looking at Google maps, we see the Eiffel tower isn’t far. Yes, you read that right: the Eiffel tower, in Siberia.
On the way there it stopped raining so we continued on to the island. It's mostly a park, but to get there we walked alongside a main artery. Stopping to take a few pictures of the view, as the bridge was quite high up, we noticed a couple of pipes spitting water out into the river. This water must be dragging everything from the streets because it looked dirty.
We arrive at the park, and suddenly, a friendly prairie dogs appear. There are loads of them. A little further into the park is an enclosure where we see two mooses. We walk a while, sit down a while, and then, looking at the approaching black clouds, decide it’s time to move.
On the way back to the hostel we stop by Auchan. It's big and modern, and has something I've never seen in France yet. Plenty of things you can buy per weight, hence reducing packaging. From pasta to rice to breakfast cereal to biscuits and dried fish. And tea. And some more things we couldn't identify. I helped myself to some of the cheapest pasta, 30 Rubbles a kilo.
On day 3, we take a bus to the train station to buy our tickets for Irkutsk. Tickets for tomorrow are too expensive so we take the following day, extending our stay by one night.
With this extra day, we postponed the hike till the next day and headed towards a park nearby. There was a fun fair with attractions. The little number of people, the decaying state of the attractions, the odd choice of music blurting out of speakers which are spread out through the park, gave an eerie air to the place.
We had picnic on a bench and then meandered around, over a bridge and then down beside the water, where we sat on some deck chairs for the afternoon reading.
Some guy came to bother us, but gave up when we spoke English. I’m pretty sure we were supposed to pay for the right to sit on the deck chairs, seen as he kept coming back every time someone sat down on one of them, either claiming money or chasing them away.
Birds kept us company.
We took a couple of buses on day 4 to get to the small ski station at the foot of the mountains we could see in the distance. As we couldn’t find a footpath, we ended up walking up a red slope.
At then left the slope to join a small footpath which would lead us to our picnic spot.
From here, we had a good view and ended up staying a while to read. I finished my first book of the trip, “Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age” by Nicolas Colin.
We then went back down the mountain (or hill) using the path this time.
Back in town after another bus ride, we went hunting for a cheap place to eat in the evening and found a burger joint. We wondered around town a little before eating.
They gave us latex gloves to eat our burger!
Day 18, catching the train to Irkutsk
We left our hostel at 13:00 to get to the station for our train which was leaving at 14:40, plenty of time one would think. We took the bus, and began stressing as the bus was stuck in traffic, should we get out and walk/run for 40 minutes? In the end we stayed on the bus, and after a certain junction traffic was more fluid, what a relief!
