Although ‘endure’ is probably not the right word, the trip from Tallinn to St. Petersburg was a long one.

The bus itself was not uncomfortable – far from it;

“This was not and ordinary bus. This was a homemade, farmhouse, free range Lux Express Bus covered in a rich, creamy balsamic glaze.”

We should definitely do Eurolines’ new advertising campaign.

Although commonly mistaken for a stealth fighter, as previously described, we Facebooked, Tweeted, Skyped and everything in-between until we reached the frontier of the Russian Federation with virtually not a wink of sleep (this would come back to haunt us later), fuelled only by various baked pastry-like goods we’d brought (smuggled?) from Tallinn.

We were both intrigued by the prospect of the impending border crossing, mostly due to the sheer volume of hassle and paperwork that had to be processed before even leaving Britain. The reality however, was rather less exhilarating: passports collected, passports scanned, passports returned.

“That was easy,” I said as a witticism to The Other One. How long have I been saying this? Surely I would know when to keep my mouth shut. Well, needless to say that wasn’t the last of our official border crossing duties: we had to unpack everything from the coach and wander through the ‘customs’ building – an odd experience as no one’s luggage was checked and one man seemed to get through border control simply by complaining about the toilets.

After this kerfuffle we reloaded the coach and we rumbled onwards to Russia. I found it rather untypically difficult to sleep, which didn’t help when we were told to get off the bus in the middle of St Petersburg’s version of nowhere and started a game of walking dot-to-dot between the sparse tourist information signs. Do not fear, worried readership, we did indeed find a metro station (opulently decorated in what appeared to be marble) and got ourselves to the nearest station to our hostel, saying a tearful (not really) goodbye to our new-found Irish companions at about 0715, who had accompanied us from the bus station to the depths of the deepest Metro line in the world.

Ringing the buzzer, climbing the stairs and perusing the smashed glass, worn stone and rotting walls, we were pleased to see that “Crazy Duck Hostel” was well-kept in this USSR-building relic.  This was where the fun really started. We couldn’t check in until 1300 – not a problem, we knew this already. However, there were also already people lying on the common room sofas that we had planned to use, so sightseeing it was.  We dumped our bags in the care of our not-so-knowledgable-and-equally-bleary-eyed-boy-receptionist and set off.

I could try and recite where we went in great detail, but it would be a waste of time for several reasons:

i) I’m not totally sure where we went. The entire thing is a bit of a blur. We were in delirium for most of it – hauling ourselves around St. Petersburg giggling like schoolchildren, taking frequent rest-breaks in parks as we discussed which birds would be the most hygienic and pleasant to lick.

ii) In true interthink style, St. Petersburg shuts down on Wednesdays,so the places we did visit like the Church of the Saviour on Spilled Blood was shut and the Hermitage/Winter Palace had a 3-5 hour queue. This necessitates anothier visit which in turn results in another visit on another day that will be recorded in another blog.

iii)  It was freezing, windy and wet.  We were incredibly uncomfortable for the large part of our ‘sightseeing’, so our trips were punctuated by Mr. Stylianou’s burkha-style re-arrangement of his scarf and various photo opportunities where we pretended to throw ourselves into the nearest river.

We eventually returned to the hostel at around 1400 (after a spot of lunch from a café) and caught up to an extent on our Zzzzs for in excess of three hours. Upon waking we met several of the characters at Crazy Duck hostel including Tamara. She’s an Austrian twenty-something who gave up PR to travel around for a few months. We went with her for dinner to Sbarro pizza in the local shopping centre (yes, the very same one that provides a staple nutritious diet to the bowlers of Guildford Spectrum) as well as getting some bottled water from the supermarket (the tap water has super-diarrhea-inducing parasites in it).

This leads me pretty nicely up to the present, where it’s nearly midnight (local time) and it’s still as light as late afternoon. Nick has discovered he still has the keys to his Tallinn locker – sorry Tallinn Backpackers (he’s cursing that he’s lost his 100EEK deposit) – and things are starting to quiet down in our homely dorm, with only the buzz off BBC World News next door to usher in tomorrow’s mega day of Soviet sightseeing.