Like Something Out of A Bond Film

Imagine - your on a bus, it's the middle of the night, you've finally gotten to sleep and you wake up in some bizarre border town lit by neon casino lights with Stalinist looking apartment blocks standing sentry everywhere.

You then pull up at a border station, some guy with a gun gets on and takes everybody's passports. Then a woman with a dog gets on and walks the aisles. Then the man with the gun comes back and hands everybody back their passports.

The bus starts up again, crosses a bridge and then pulls off the highway and into what looks like a dilapidated petrol station. Everybody gathers up all their belongings and gets off the bus. It's night, it's freezing.

You go into petrol station ype building and queue for a while. Give the lady your passport and then she starts yelling at you, in Russian, before calling another lady over and then dragging you to a table. Turns out she only wants to help you fill out the form.

So while it passed without incident, our 2 AM Russian border crossing was extremely intimidating.

And then we arrived in St. Petersburg. Bleary eyed, half awake, we stood in the middle of a bustling carpark where I felt like everybody was sizing me up trying to decide who could rob us first.

We got to the train station, we got some roubles (we had NOTHING on us), worked out which train station we were at and then sussed out a way to get to our Metro station and then eventually, in the pitch black 7AM, to our hostel.