Day Twelve:

Slept on a hard bench at the railway station last night.

As I've said before, Russia (particularly the Far East, but elsewhere also) is not very tourist-friendly. My guidebook observes that this, the largest country in the world, contains only THREE tourist information centres.

Three! Even the last couple of Korean stops on my journey (Samcheok and Sokcho, each with a population of 90 000) has helpful, English speaking information kiosks.

Believe me when I say that at most, Samcheok probably receives 200 English speaking tourists in a year - mostly Japanese nationals. But still, the city has an information desk with English materials and a staff of two (!) English-speakers. Khavarosk as a population of 620 000, and they don't even TRY to make things easy for tourists.

But that doesn't really matter. The silliness of it all makes me feel like Marco Polo with a stylish backpack and muddy boots. No, the real problem here is something else. It's the paperwork! Oh, the fucking paperwork!

See, I got off the train at about midnight, after a 30 hour ride. It was too late to go wandering the streets looking for a hotel, so I set about getting a cot in the train station's rest area.

But no dice.

See, in any other country, one would just pay some money and then flop down for a quick nap. But not Russia. In Russia, there is paperwork to be done before one can sleep. There is the showing of proper identification. And then there is the ubiquitous ledger. Even the Russians on hand that night were having a tough time jumping through all of the hoops - filling out the forms, showing the ticket to prove they had just arrived, being catalogued... when I came to the head of the line, the clerk shrugged and with a curt "Nyet," sent me away. It would be simply impossible for a foreigner to even THINK about filling in all the proper forms to get a bed.

And it's not only a problem when trying to get a cot at the fucking train station. See, even native Russians need to use a passport to travel domestically. And when I went to the post office to mail an old t-shirt back home, I had to fill out three forms. Three IDENTICAL forms! I don't even know what the forms asked for, since I just passed them to the guy standing behind me in the queue to fill out. The kicker is that I didn't get to retain one of the forms, which leads me to believe that from now until the end of time, three forms in three separate filing cabinets in Russia will record that once upon a time I mailed my favorite punk rock t-shirt back to my Grammie in Nova Scotia.

And... And... fuck, it just goes on...

I visited the railroad museum in Tynda today. It was a great place to visit, but I took me about ten minutes to get past the front desk, since the Babushka manning the desk had to sell me separate tickets for each of the four rooms of the museum, and then another one to allow me to take some pictures! And while I had to spend time finding enough pockets to store the stack of ticket stubs she handed me, she had to busy herself recording my presence in five separate ledgers!

And, well... then there are the public toilets. But. Well. Another time.

8:51, Tynda