Russia on a Thousand Rubles a Day

“We don’t even have a good translation for the term ‘backpacker.’”

Valery Shanin, founder of the Moscow Hitchhiking School (The Moscow Times)

Budget travel is still enough of a novelty in Russia for newspapers to regularly run articles about Russians who somehow manage to go around the world on ridiculously small sums of money – in Valery Shanin’s case (quote, above), just $300.

But while Russia is not a country that most Westerners would pick as an obvious choice for a budget break, it is possible, with a bit of tenacity, to make a little money go a long way.

The Twin Towers:

Moscow & St. Petersburg

“I wanted to save the best for last,” is how Darren Whitehead described his reason for coming to Russia. Whitehead, a 36-year-old travel agent from London, was on a Christmas tour on the Beetroot Bus, one of the very few organizations in Russia that cater to backpackers and other tourists on a budget.

The 10-day Beetroot Bus tour runs from Moscow to St. Petersburg – or vice versa – stopping in Veliky Novgorod, Kostroma and other places on its way to the other capital. Its goal is to give passengers a taste of traditional Russian culture, including a banya, a shashlyk-grilling session, mushroom picking in fall, and more.

The bus was the brainchild of Neil McGowan, an Englishman who works in Moscow as managing director of Russia Experience, which has been taking tourists to Siberia and Mongolia since 1994. McGowan started the Beetroot Bus in 1999.

Another Beetroot passenger on the Christmas tour, Suzanne Cooper, a 27-year-old New Zealander who lives in London, said she was attracted to Russia because “it seems like something different.” The night before going to the Hermitage with the group, she and her four traveling companions went to a bar and “danced to some band with really bad mullets.” Apparently it is quite difficult to do this in London.

Whatever their reasons for coming to Russia, the Beetroot Bus’ main clients, according to McGowan, are professionals between 20 and 30 years old, without children, but with disposable income. A large percentage come from Australia and New Zealand, and women considerably outnumber men.

This year, the Beetroot Bus is changing its name to Beetroot Backpackers, to reflect its broadened portfolio of trips. In addition to the basic Moscow-St. Petersburg route, the company will now be taking tourists to the Golden Ring of towns around Moscow and to the Russian North (Petrozavodsk, Kizhi and Solovki).

There are also two more esoteric trips: Bolshevik Beetroot, taking an alternately serious and humorous look at 20th century history; and Beetroot Blades, where all sightseeing is done on rollerblades, led by Beetroot staffer Katya Voronicheva (who also happens to be the 2003 European Rollerblading Slalom Champion).

In Moscow, Patriarshy Dom Tours services some 20,000 independent tourists each year. Owner Alexandra Lanskaya said that excursion services are fine for individual tourists, but, if you are on a budget, joining a tour group makes more sense. “For those who want to do things privately, it’s not cheap; for a group, it’s cheaper.”

Lanskaya cites the Kremlin as an example: Last year, individual tourists paid an entrance fee [includes churches and the Armoury] of about $30; tour-group members each paid $20. “Companies have contracts with the Kremlin, which suggests rates for them.” (These prices are, of course, for foreigners: Russians pay about $10.) Rates have been raised again this year for agencies, and Lanskaya said that “Kremlin policy is not to attract individuals: It doesn’t have the facilities for them. The Armory is too small, there is no air conditioning, and so on.” Tour groups have another big advantage: “Nine months of the year, the Kremlin is closed to individuals, because groups pre-book it.”

Patriarshy Dom owns 75 percent of Capital Tours, which runs two excursions in Moscow: a three-hour city tour for $20, and a Kremlin tour for $34, including entrance fee.

Despite the fact that individual and budget tourism is on the rise in the capital, Moscow can frustrate expectations. “When people come here,” Lanskaya said, “they expect it to be like in any European or American city: They expect to come to a central meeting point, jump on a bus, and that’s it. In London, there will be five or seven different routes around the city: We don’t have that many in Moscow.”

Patriarshy Dom, Lanskaya said, “can suggest special interest tours, but that will only be once a week or every two weeks, because we can’t afford to do it more often.”

One thing that is getting better in Moscow, Lanskaya said, is that there are now many more good places to eat than there used to be, and there are more places where it is possible to eat cheaply and well. “There are places like Café Pushkin and Yolki-Palki where you can eat a meal of all you need for a day for about $10.”

According to Steve Caron, co-owner of the St. Petersburg International Hostel and president of the student travel company Sindbad Travel, the northern capital has also improved in the last couple of years, making itself more attractive and accessible for visitors on a budget. “[St. Petersburg] could totally be a Prague,” he said. “There’s not as much price discrimination as there was in the early 1990s. There’s an abundance of clubs and coffeehouses. The theater is wonderful. … The youth are very attractive: stylish, interesting, well-read.”

A jovial native of California, Caron (with two Russian partners) set up the St. Petersburg International Hostel in 1992, while studying in St. Petersburg. It was the first youth hostel in Russia, and Caron is still working with his original Russian partners. The hostel was one of the first institutions in Russia to offer visa-support services for individual travelers, and now, Caron reckons, it receives up to 6,000 guests per year.

St. Petersburg has plenty of options for budget tourists, Caron said. “It’s getting much better. It used to be just us and family homestays, but now there are bed and breakfast places and mini-hotels. There are still not a lot of good three-star hotels, though.”

As for seeing the city, Caron recommended Peter’s Walking Tours, run by Russian backpacking fanatic Peter Kozyrev, who knows the city better than just about anyone else. “They do great tours, with a lot of options, he said.”

Having an ISIC (International Student Identity Card) also helps: Holders get a 50 percent discount on the foreigners’ price at the Hermitage, for example. Caron said that Sindbad Travel, which administers the cards in St. Petersburg, is trying to turn it into a “lifestyle card” for the city. Three years ago, he said, Sinbad sold about 5,000 cards; this year, he expects the figure to be around 50,000.

But, after all is said and done, Russia’s two main cities, which account for about 10 percent of the country’s population, cover just a tiny fraction of the country’s area. So what about the rest of the country?

The Silence of Siberia

“It’s depressing,” McGowan said, “but only about five percent of people who come to Russia go anywhere outside Moscow and St. Petersburg. They’re both magnificent cities, but neither will show you the real Russia.”

McGowan has been going to Siberia for years – his favorite region is the obscure, mountain-enclosed Republic of Tuva – and he is positively evangelical about it.

“You can’t even say ‘Siberia’ without evoking a hundred clichés, yet the scorching summers, wide-open pony trails, and the confluence of Europe and Asia – where native Buddhist monasteries cohabit with onion-dome churches – seem to have escaped visitors’ notice until now,” he said.

Vast Siberia – the US’ lower 48 states could be fitted into it without touching the edge at any point, and still have room for Europe left over – is slowly opening up, and not just because of its enormous natural resources. Books such as Colin Thubron’s In Siberia and Anna Reid’s The Shaman’s Coat reflect Siberia’s re-emergence in Western consciousness.

American photographer Eric Bruns spent most of last summer there. Over the course of three months, he managed to visit towns from Yekaterinburg to Vladivostok, take in attractions such as Lake Baikal, get to some more esoteric destinations such as Kyzyl (capital of Tuva) and Norilsk (mainly known for its nickel mining and home to the world’s most northerly mosque) – and still have time left over to hit Kiev and Mongolia.

While hitchhiking is possible in Siberia, it’s much more dangerous for foreigners than Russians. So most tourists rely on the train, which is still a cost-effective way to get around, if a little slow. “I once passed a road sign marking 224 kilometers [140 miles] to our destination. I immediately looked at our schedule and found we would arrive a full six hours later,” Bruns said.

For the first part of his trip, Bruns traveled third class, which “is just half the price of coupé [second class] and really not as horrible as some people describe. It’s mostly full of family folk traveling on a budget, and I only had a couple rare occasions of the relentless drunken youth.”

Language is also not a problem, provided that people are willing to make an effort to communicate. “It was apparent I was a foreigner,” Bruns said, “and that gave me the advantage of easily dictating how much interaction or talking I wanted to do (they automatically assumed I don’t speak any Russian and were consistently surprised when I could). The carriage attendants, although far from gracious, seemed able to understand even the most basic grunts and hand gestures for bedding.”

Highlights of Bruns’ trip were Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, Kyzyl – “a great place to learn about native peoples, throat singing, shamanism, and to arrange to live in a yurt [traditional tent] in the countryside” – and the Altai Mountains. If you have the time, he said, going to Mongolia or China “is another popular idea that can’t be emphasized enough.”

In Mongolia, Bruns said, “it’s absolutely mandatory to get out of Ulaan Baatar into the countryside. It’s quite basic living, but there are agencies everywhere in the city that arrange whatever sort of trip you’d be interested in.” Bruns lived with a family in a gur (a Mongolian yurt), camped in the Gobi Desert, and went trekking on horseback.

Meanwhile, in the Golden Ring towns around Moscow, Patriarshy Dom’s Lanskaya said, “it’s becoming easier and easier to travel, even for individuals.” These towns, Lanskaya said, which include Suzdal, Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Kostroma, Ivanovo, Rostov Veliky and Pereslavl, are seeing “more and more positive changes. They’re becoming more attractive, because for them it’s the only source of survival. They’re rather businesslike there.”

Of the Golden Ring towns, she said “Suzdal ranks first. They have more of everything there: hotels, places to eat, and so on. These places make it more possible to travel.”

The Final Frontier

“We’ve got fantastic heliskiing in Kamchatka. You get out of the helicopter, look down into the volcano and think, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’ And there’s no way but down,” said Ingo Skulason, one of the managers of the Petropavlosk-Kamchatsky-based company Lena and Friends, which organizes trips into the fabled wilderness of Russia’s Far East.

Skulason, a genial Icelander, first came to Kamchatka in 1993, while working for a Western company on a joint venture. He has lived there ever since. He met his wife – the Lena for whom the company is named – while skiing, and now “I take care of organizing new trips, quality control, helping out with anything that needs helping out with. I try to bring a new viewpoint.”

Nature is Kamchatka’s really big attraction. “You can smell the nature in summer,” Skulason said. “When you see rivers full of fish, you can almost walk across without touching the bottom and catch fish with your hands. It’s absolutely fantastic. There are so many places that are interesting: on the coast, central Kamchatka for the ethnic things, like the archaeology.”

Lena and Friends offers a variety of trips covering all sorts of activities – rafting down the Kamchatka River, bear-watching, hiking, and of course heliskiing. A typical trip costs $80-120 per day – much less than you would spend on just a hotel room in Moscow or St. Petersburg – inclusive of transport, accommodation, equipment, guide, food, and anything else necessary. Flights to Petropavlovsk are not included, but, Skulason said, “With Aeroflot you can get quite good rates now, it’s a good airline, and there are flights every day from Moscow.”

While some Lena and Friends trips are “just straight budget tourism,” Skulason said, “you can’t reduce the service. You can’t go out there without having the support structure. You have to go with guides who know what they are doing.”

The company’s trips attract 300-500 travelers each year. Roughly speaking, Skulason said, European visitors are more typical adventure tourists, while Japanese and American tourists are older – aged 50-70 – and do more helicopter flights, day trips, and so on. The Americans, he said, also tend to be family groups “crossing Kamchatka off of their list of places to go.”

So, What’s the Problem?

“Tourism in Russia isn’t really going anywhere,” Skulason said. “I think the country is losing a big opportunity by not advertising it more, and by not simplifying regulations. In other countries, it tends to be localized: You have a lot of private accommodation and so on. But in some areas [in Russia], you can’t really travel without a permit.”

For McGowan, two words sum up most of what puts people off coming to Russia for budget breaks: visas and flights. Getting visas is a hassle and flights are too expensive.

“A large percentage of potential tourists are driven away [by the visa situation],” McGowan said. “They still have to go through the pretense of having a tour package booked.”

“The visa and registration system is absolutely ridiculous,” Lanskaya said. “You lose time, lose money. It does not attract people. For me, it seems like a way to make people unhappy. It’s just a way for someone to make money, and not just companies: they pay bureaucrats to register people, even if they don’t need to be registered.”

“Nobody should need registration,” she said. “[The authorities] have to realize that those who want to come will come anyway.”

Skulason said that, although visas are a problem, preparation is the key to a problem-free trip. “The visa thing is, of course, quite bureaucratic. But we do it for groups in advance, so that takes most of the pain out of it. It’s a bit cumbersome, but if you’re at the last minute, then you just pay more.”

No European budget airline – such as EasyJet and Ryanair – currently operates flights to Russia. McGowan, for one, does not think this will change soon. “It’s more likely that a Russian carrier will open up,” he said. Rumors have long circulated that a Moscow firm was going to start offering cheap flights to London, but nothing has yet materialized.

“The idea is desperately needed,” McGowan said. “Practically the whole of Europe has a peanut airline except the CIS countries. Even Poland has one.”

From London’s Stansted Airport, budget airline Ryanair flies to Tampere in the west of Finland. This option is fine for getting to St. Petersburg and the Northwest, but pretty much useless for anywhere else in the country. Alternatively, you could fly to Warsaw from London for about $110 with Polonia (www.airpolonia.com), and then spend 21 hours on a train to Moscow (about $85), which would also require a transit visa through Belarus (at least $30).

Getting to Russia is an expensive business – a return ticket from Moscow to New York on Aeroflot costs around $500, or over $600 if you are going to be staying for more than one month – and, when you get there, Lanskaya said, Moscow’s two Sheremetyevo airports are “not the most welcoming places in the world.”

However, Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, St. Petersburg International Youth Hostel’s Caron pointed out, is improving its image. Although still mainly a domestic airport, the facility also handles flights from other CIS countries, Germany, Tel Aviv and London, and has an express train link to Paveletsky Station. Caron put the improvements down to competition, which, he said, is something St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo airport desperately needs.

“It’s a monopoly situation, and in many monopolies there is no desire for change,” Caron said. At Pulkovo, for example, it is unclear that it is possible to get a marshrutka (minibus-taxi) into the city center, and “[the taxi mafia at the airport] don’t want it to be clear.”

Lanskaya concurred that the hotel situation is getting worse for budget travelers to Moscow. Since the demolition of the Intourist and Moskva hotels, there is now only one reasonably-priced hotel – the Rossiya – in the center of the city. And whereas St. Petersburg has a number of bed-and-breakfast establishments in the center, in Moscow they are mostly located an hour out of the city center, in less salubrious districts.

Then there are Russia’s notorious police. “I don’t think the police in this country are controllable,” McGowan said. Lanskaya offered, with knowing understatement, that the police “are not very nice for individual visitors. There are a few things that will never attract visitors, such as the way that officials and police act, especially if you don’t look like a Russian.”

The police’s power to check documents to make sure that people are registered with OVIR (Otdel Viz I Registratsii, the Interior Ministry’s visa department) has been the cause of almost innumerable horror stories. Getting a registration stamp is easy in theory: any hotel can register a tourist visa (although some refuse, or ask for ridiculous amounts of money), as can some tourist firms, for a fee (usually around $25). But if you do not have the right stamp in your passport, or the police don’t like the looks of you, you could end up spending hours in the precinct and possibly paying large sums of money to get out. Often, this is all it is about – the police looking for a bribe to supplement their meager salaries. But there is also a nastier side, as anyone with a dark complexion is likely to get stopped on a regular basis.

In Kamchatka, Skulason said, the main problems are that the region is so remote and that there is so much red tape involved in bringing people there. “There’s more work involved in the bureaucracy than there is in the actual trips,” he said.

According to Skulason, Lena and Friends has to get eight different permits – “from the FSB, OVIR, and so on” – for each group of tourists. All groups are accompanied by a guide who knows the region and makes sure the tourists don’t breach any of the myriad regulations that come with Kamchatka’s status as a semi-closed region. “But people don’t really see that. We try to keep it away from them,” he said.

Another problem in Kamchatka and other remote areas is the lack of infrastructure. For their part, Skulason said, Lena and Friends is building “wilderness lodges, similar to what you have in Scotland and other places. We’re building one in central Kamchatka, so the tourists can just walk and enjoy nature. We’d like to do more of that; it makes it slightly more civilized than a tent.”

The Road Ahead

The writer Anton Chekhov once famously traveled all the way from Moscow to Sakhalin by horse, cart and sledge. Doing this today is probably out of the question, but Russia may be gradually opening up to budget tourism. Certainly the enthusiasm of those who have come here on budget tours would seem to promise much. “It’s just wonderful,” Beetroot Busser Whitehead said. “[St. Petersburg] is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve been to.”

Much work remains to make Russia into the next Southeast Asia, the international backpackers’ destination of choice during the past decade. And change, McGowan said, has to be fundamental: “If they want to make money from tourists, it’s going to take a change of attitude.”  RL