05/08: Restricted border areas
Sometimes, really odd things happen. On Monday, we had an interesting discussion at our Transport Travellers Club webforum. One poster reported that he travelled from St. Pete to Sortavala, and they have a border control checkpoint in the village of Hiitola (Republic of Karelia), somewhere at the NW of Ladoga Lake. The checkpoint was there for ages, but usually uninhabited. Last months the border officers were showing up from time to time, but they just checked the ID and waved off. This time, the lady told the poster that in two weeks they are going to start checking border passes - something previously unheard of in this area. Another poster recollected that he has, indeed, seen some vague document on Leningrad region. The third one found more documents. Finally, we got about 30 of them and started reading. And then...
04/08: Riga and Registration
Three months was up and the dual necessities of having a break from Moscow and refreshing my dodgy hotel registration were bearing down upon me. Busy with work and too low on cash to stray further afield, I decided on a Baltic holiday, Riga to be precise. Failing to learn from the hell of the last overnight international bus ride I took from Sofia to Istanbul, I decided the bus was a better option than the train - about half the price and a couple of hours quicker. Of course, as last time, I couldn't sleep and went through the process of dividing the total time (16 hours) into smaller and smaller fractions and slowly counting them off with a sense of accomplishment. In some ways it was a relief to finally reach the Russian border at 4am, just to break the monotony. But it was a break I could have done without.
