Vladivostok

Hurray, we finally made it – after a very stressful last six months we are now on our way!

The first big step: Sending Melville off, Fremantle Port, June 18 2010

In the weeks to come we will gradually update our Blog but given the current run of things ( we are already on Mongolia but only start posting abour Russia now) it will be slooowww ;o) Pictures will appear soonish as well...

Thanks to Borut and Janina, we made it right in time to the airport and thanks to the ground staff’s patience and interest (‘Oooh, I’ve never checked anybody through to Vladivostok’) we were able to check in our massive luggage without any problems. We needed to collect the boarding passes for the connecting flights in Kuala Lumpur and again some very friendly staff (not without giggling a lot and throwing questioning stares) managed to get this organized in a minimum of time. In Seoul we detected that we were entering Russia on a plan taking many Russian holiday makers back and we heard already many Russian voices :o)

Entering Russia was again as smooth as you can imagine: we had to wait in the same line as all the others, the lady-officer looked at our immigration cards, the visa and our faces – and here we had our stamp! Collecting the luggage was our first adventure because the airport is an international one but only became so a few years ago, so the facilities are quite small and there were quite a few people and many more bags cramped in a very little space but everybody was very lighthearted and the atmosphere was quite merry. The customs officials simply waved us through and it was up to us to ‘hassle’ them a bit because we wanted to get a customs declaration for our troopy (or Melville as we have named him).

Getting to the city then was another, rather adventurous, episode: Let me say this, after a thorough scientific enquiry (result confirmed in 2 out of 2 cases) we can say for certain that taxi-drivers in Russia (as very likely everywhere in the world) are pirates when it comes to carrying non-native passengers. Instead of billowing sails they have broken windscreens but their driving technique can be easily described as ‘reckless’. Not to mention the rather outrages fares…. Anyway we made it to the hotel in one piece and 90 Dollars the poorer. Hotel Primorye was great and the staff was awesome and helped us heaps finding places and accommodated us when we had to stay longer than expected.

We spend a day and a half exploring VVO which is a great city. It is an extremely busy (you live quite dangerous as a pedestrian) port town and we were surrounded by sailors all the time (at time of our visit an American and what could have been a Korean or Taiwanese military boat were there for a maneuver). In the evening a central little harbor came alive with stalls, entertainment and fireworks. Everything was open till late and it took us some time to get used to have daylight right until 10 o’clock.

We sampled some food and the self-serve cantines and mobile food stalls where you can take things or simply point at things - handy. Quickly we learned the words for chicken, meat and fish. We had yummy and really cheap turnovers with various fillings and decided quickly that we like Russian food. Holger was especially pleased to find pickled cucumber in Russian cuisine go with nearly everything (even breakfast) :o)

Monday we started retrieving Melville, we went to the agent’s office where we met Irina our ‘case-officer’, she also turned out to be a really great guide and we spend a great time together. She did the paperwork and brought us in contact with our broker Vladimir who did the actual customs part. It took half a day to locate Melville’s container and then things started. Customs took one and a half days and involved numerous trips to the customs office, sitting around on corridors, being ushered into official’s office’s and signing many a document. It was all more costly than we had expected but then again our Australian agent had not been able to find out anything about the local importation costs beforehand. The customs office was a busy place, heaps of customs officers, dealers and people who were presumably privateers were running in and out all the time and there seemed to be a competition among the female customs officers as to who could wear the highest heels – and those were serious high heels! At 5.30 on Thursday we finally saw Troopy leaving the port’s gates – Hurray!

We spend the evening getting Troopy ready and did not go to bed before midnight & the next morning saw us starting quite early to get the last things organized including saying farewell to Irina who had helped us in so many ways.