We tried to fly
'Be careful out there,' the man from Sovenz warned us as we prepared to leave Moscow. 'They'll slit your throat for a thousand bucks.'
Yeah right, and they accept American Express on every street corner. Even the government prefers payment in US dollars to roubles. The several thousand dollars we possessed felt suddenly heavy clasped against our chests. We'd come to Russia to visit its mountains, but getting there wasn't going to be easy. The mountains we'd chosen lay in Siberia, near to the borders of China, Kazakhstan and Mongolia.
I hailed a taxi out on Tverskaya Street, a sooty granite canyon filled with hurtling Ladas, to take us to the airport. It wasn't a real taxi that stopped though. This was a man on his way home from work, perhaps in the newly privatised Bolshevik Cake Factory. The foot pedals of his Lada were fitted with rubber bear paws. It suited him.
In the fading summer light we sped between the endless apartment blocks that house the city's nine million inhabitants. Somehow I'd imagined Moscow to be still in the grip of well ordered authoritarianism. I was not prepared for the seething chaos erupting on its streets. The population prowled and hustled. An armless Afgan war veteran begged in a subway. A small woman in a shawl tried to sell three tomatoes and a bulb of garlic. Down a side alley off the tourist thoroughfare of the Arbat a swarthy giant in tight black t-shirt and sunglasses guarded a black American limousine. Outside the Dynamo sport stadium boys hung out with their cars by the beer stalls in a grim parody of American Graffitti. Prostitutes invited business. On the video black market Chuck Norris and Bruce Willis were most popular, overdubbed in a harsh male Russian voice.
'Intourist?' asked the man carrying our luggage through Domodedovo Airport.
We shook our heads. Not for us the packaged group tour, staying in overpriced hotels where the toilets didn't work. That's what we thought anyway. The reality was never so simple. One Englishman we met travelled across the CIS pretending to be an Estonian sailor, which explained his terrible Russian, and so got to bribe his way into the cheap hotels that Russians stayed in. The toilets didn't work in them either.
Domodedovo bears some resemblance to the old Wellington aircraft hangar domestic terminal, but the chaos in Wellington was mild by comparison. We struggled from queue to queue, and were eventually pointed away down the end of the terminal to Room One, the Intourist check-in. From there a bus took us out across the tarmac to the 'International Hall', an even more unprepossessing room where foreign influence is kept at bay. By now the plane was long gone, but we at least had found the Germans we were planning to travel with in the Altai mountains.
We flew next day to Barnaul, a drab town constructed, like most in Russia, from one of Krushkev's prefabricated concrete slab factories. From there the Ob river makes its shifty way over the Siberian plain, largest area of flat land in the world, to the Arctic Sea. But the beer is good: the brewery was imported from Pilsen in Czechoslovakia.
What is one to do at nine in the evening of a warm close Siberian night? In the square outside the railway station a drunk accosted us for cigarettes. He got very excited when he learned we were from New Zealand. Did he know the man from Sovenz too? After a while his girlfriend, a peroxide blond in high heels and leopardskin lycra, dragged him home to their apartment. We went looking for the Intourist hotel.
The foyer was inhabited by several dark-haired men in leather jackets, with gold teeth and impossibly shiny shoes. At first, the receptionist refused to change any money at such a late hour, but she relented, and pointed to the cashier.
My dollar bills were treated with disdain. The cashier held it up to the light, then rubbed it hard, had another close look, tore a small piece off the corner and inspected the result minutely. She shook her head. I offered another, but that, too, was unacceptable. She called across the lobby to one of the pairs of shiny-buckled shoes. He glanced briefly at my money, pulled a large wad of thousand rouble notes from a jacket pocket, and handed me some of them.
It wasn't until months later that we heard the story about the US printing press, obtained by the Shah of Iran and then used by the revolutionary government there to finance its war with Iraq. So are there two economies at work in the former Soviet Union? One operating on a currency nobody wants, and the other using fake dollar bills?
We shuffled upstairs into the Intourist restaurant. The men's toilets were boarded up. Water seeped under the door. The women's were merely blocked and overflowing. Despite the large menu, only one dish was available, Schnitzel. There was only one beverage on offer, also. Neither beer nor wine nor even vodka: Russian champagne, brought by an immaculate waiter across the huge, utterly empty restaurant.
From Barnaul we bribed our way on to a train headed south. At Gorno-Altaisk, regional capital of the Altai province, progress appeared to come to a halt. The buses were filled with Russians on summer holiday. No one wanted to risk their vehicle on the 12 hour metal road to Ust-Koksa in the mountains.
We tried to fly.
'Passport.'
The woman's face hardened. As foreigners, we needed to buy tickets through Intourist. The nearest Intourist office was, unfortunately, several hundred kilometres away in Novosibirsk.
I remembered a card the man from Sovenz had given us just as we were leaving him. We found a public telephone that was still working. In Moscow they had all been cut off due to the effect of inflation on small change, and were being replaced with American owned card phones. A card cost about a week's wages.
Mr Michael Mitrokin, first secretary for agriculture, sent an immaculate white Volga limousine to meet us in the bus depot. A heroic painting of Lenin striding through the wintry countryside hung in his office. His secretary took our names and passport details and told us to be at the airport early next morning.
We passed a pleasant night in a Komsomol camp by the river with some Poles, who stayed up late singing, and in the morning payed the bus driver an exhorbitant sum to get us to the airport on time. Mr Mitrokin's secretary arrived and, having assured the military we were a traveling folk group, we purchased our tickets, in roubles, and flew south into the steepening hills.
For the first time since entering Russia we had time to catch our breath. We'd made it through a system thankfully too preoccupied with holding together to ask where we were going, and we knew this was where we wanted to be. The huge ice peak of Belucha reared above the dark birch and spruce forests.