The golden domes of Chita’s new cathedral entice train travellers to hop off and explore this historic, patchily attractive city. If its architectural gems were less widely dispersed the city might be considered one of Siberia’s more appealing. Sadly, each attractive area is a little too diffuse to make the overall impact particularly memorable. Nonetheless, [...]
At the attractive junction of the Chemal and Katun Rivers, ever-expanding Chemal is heavily touristed in summer but remains a good base for regional explorations and makes a very pleasant day trip from Gorno-Altaisk, 95km further north.
Chelyabinsk, 200km south of Yekaterinburg, is another city of contrasts - a sprawling industrial town set amid the gentle hills and inviting lakes of the Urals.
The two mountain destinations most visit- ed by foreigners for wonderful skiing, hiking and climbing are Dombay and Elbrus, accessible from Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk and Nalchik.
A stop in Bratsk neatly breaks a Krasnoyarsk to Severobaikalsk trip into two overnight rides, but a day here is plenty. Its raison d’être is a gigantic 1955 dam (GES), which caused the drowning of the original historic town. New Bratsk is a confusing necklace of disconnected concrete ’subcities’ with a high-rise Tsentralny area that [...]
In 1812 Napoleon invaded Russia, lured by the prospect of taking Moscow. For three months the Russians retreated, until on 26 August the two armies met in a bloody battle of attrition at the village of Borodino, 130km west of Moscow. In 15 hours more than one-third of each army was killed - over 100, [...]
According to legend, when Andrei Bogolyubsky was returning north from Kyiv in the late 1150s, his horses stopped where Bogolyubovo now stands, 11km east of Vladimir. Apparently they wouldn’t go another step, so Andrei was forced to establish his capital in Vladimir, and not his father’s old base of Suzdal.
About 110km south of the trans-Siberian tracks, where Chinese and Russians rub shoulders, is Blagoveshchensk, a city set on the wide Amur River across from the Chinese town of Heihe. Since opening as a free trade zone in 1994, folks from either side swish-swash across the border (Russians for cheaper goods, Chinese for jobs - [...]
A narrow coastal strip edges the Black Sea from where rolling hills ascend fairly rapidly into mountains in the southeast and low uplands in the northwest. This is Russia’s seaside playground. A long summer from June to October gives rise to warm to hot weather, plenty of sunshine and a warm sea. Several resort towns [...]
Friendly Biysk, 160km southeast of Barnaul, is not worth a special detour but its modest attractions may warrant a brief stop en route to or from the Altai Mountains, for which it’s the nearest railhead.