A Visa to Mordor

BAM! Outside of Europe regulations stop you in your tracks. BAM! They hit you in the face like a bureaucrats paper weight. BAM!

 VISAs and passports are no better then taxes. Actually they are worse then taxes.. The prevention and hindrance of humans to travel across invisible imaginary lines is an affront to our very first freedoms, the liberty to wander. The creation and enforcement of these ficittious boundaries is a great, great tragedy.

So it should come as no surprise that the dregs of the Warsaw pact are the worst. In the countries in which almost everything from food to happiness was imagined, its becomes a paradoxical certainty that their imaginary lines are the realist. The Visas are pricey and about as hard to come buy as free speech was before glasnost. A transit VISA through Belarus. £60, Mongolia £40, China £82.88 that's £188.88 of the bat. That doesn't include Russia either. Churchill said Russia was "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma" and he was best buddies with Stalin; I don't think its changed much from Churchill's time.

Its still damn difficult to understand Russia; and Putin's boys at the immigration Beauro fire shotgun barrels of flack at you as you try to get a Visa. Besides, the machinations of the Russian Visa process makes you think you're putting in an application for the the KGB itself.

And, If you do navigate your way through the process you still have to plan your trip as pedantically as a five year Pig Iron production schedule.  It took two hours to realize that to get a visa you need a tourist voucher and then two hours more to realize you only get a tourist voucher from a hotel. And then you then need a hotel booked for every night of your stay. Hassle. Unbelievable Russian hassle. It felt like I was queuing for bread.

My mistake was to start my investigations with the information provided by the Russian consulate. A surly difficult bunch of people from my deciphering of their web page. Its so difficult to use it takes a few moments to realize that it has actually been translated from Cyrillic to Englih.

In truth though, I forget myself. I do the Russians a disservice I am quite certain that if I had more money, or I was more adept at paper work a VISA would be far easier to obtain. Two solutions that I am also quite certain haven't changed much since Churchill's Russia either.

Since childhood, Ive always seen Russia in the same light as Mordor, always stirring up trouble at the edge of the map. I don't think its my fault either, The Kremlin comes across as so belligerent. Belligerent and bitter; I bet Putin is as sweet as lemon rind.

I read the Big Red train by Eric Newby. It was fantastic, it had that air of elegance and amateur adventure, that seemed to be the bread and butter of the early 20th century Englishman. Its one of the reason I want to ride the Trans Siberian. I want to visit Russia becasue of the words which have flown out of it.

Russia has had more than its share of great authors and great books. I read War and Peace, not just the blurb but all of it. From cover to cover, every word. Its was good, a real classic, it was so good, I read Anna Karenina afterwords. That tome was tremendous too. I had started in Spring and by the time I had finished one whole thaw and freeze had ripped by. Not only did it feel like I had already traveled to Russia, it looked like Russia outside.  The Trans-Siberian is such an evocative name; like the Orient express, it seems more romance than reality. Russia too, is such a curiosity, like Matryoshka dolls. To get stuck on something as mundane as a VISA really wouldn't do.