The Perils of Travel

Weather--Bright sun, light breeze, shirtsleeve weather
Temp--26.7F
Wind 3-5 mph

Travel in Russia can be a little confusing, especially when you have to go through Moscow, but we only do that on visa renewal trips or travel to and from the US. The routine travel between our mission cities is usually uneventful, but can occasionally be interesting. Like the time that one of our senior couples had to travel from Barnaul to Novosibirsk, about 295 km by bus in the summer. That was a 5 hour ride in a crowded bus without a bathroom stop, air conditioning, or open windows and an on-board toilet that had not been pumped that week.

Or the time Sister Cindy and I rode the train the 2080 km to Ulan-Ude last spring with the Humanitarian couple, Gil and Heidi Bowden. It took 36 hours and a lot of sitting, but we had a "coupe", or compartment, to sleep in and two bathrooms in our "wagon" or car. That's the way to see the countryside. It was often a time machine, rolling past villages in Siberia that were not far removed from the 19th century.

Travel from Ulan-Ude to Irkutsk has two options that each have its own character. Pyotr describes them as 40 minutes of horror (on an old prop-driven plane) or 7 hours on the train. We usually opt for the train for the missionaries.

Here are some distance number that might interest you.
Omsk (on the west) to Ulan-Ude (on the east) is 2838 km
Novosibirsk to the closest 4 cities averages about 300 km
Novosibirsk to Omsk on the east and Krasnoyarsk on the west is about 750-786 km

The thing that makes traveling even more interesting is the schedules and methods of purchase. The buses and trains are pretty predictable. Although the train schedule is always announced as Moscow time, they are usually on time and rarely delayed. The buses are scheduled on local time and often late or even canceled. When we buy train tickets we must have the missionary's passport numbers and the ticket can be electronically sent to missionaries like airline tickets; very nice. Bus tickets don't require passport numbers, but you can be asked for your passport for identification at any time.

Local transportation involves tramvys (streetcars), buses (both diesel and electric), mini-buses, marshutkas (vans), taxis, the Metro, and shanks mare (on foot). People here walk a great deal and do not consider a 10 kilometer walk unreasonable. Olga (from the office) walks almost that far if you total her walk to the bus and from the bus to the office. It is quite amazing that the women can walk through the snow and ice with confidence in 5 inch high heals during the winter.

In the 60's we used to see how many students we could stuff into a Volkswagen. Here is the Novosibirsk version of that, How many shoppers can you stuff in a bus to the Ikea shopping center.

The final trip for returning missionaries can be very eventful, particularly in winter, considering the weather, the number of connections, the equipment, clearing customs, changing airports, the world-wide economic crisis, and the ambient attitude toward customer service in Russia. To help them to have contact with us or the Moscow office, we opened a prepaid phone account and gave them the instructions and PIN to use the service. Two cases in point . . .

Case #1 Elder Hinkson's trip home ended abruptly in Moscow when Delta canceled their flight 31 to JFK. Since the missionaries have no phone and there are almost no public phones, it is difficult at best for them to contact us and tell us when they have a problem. In this case, he had to borrow someone's cell phone and call us. Delta had to put him up in a hotel for the night and we had to notify his family of the delay.

Case #2
The Senior Couple from Krasnoyarsk, the Royers, left a couple of weeks ago in the company of Elder Couturier. Their first mishap occurred in Novosibirsk where they spent 3-plus hours in the plane waiting for the fog to clear. That made them miss their flight to JFK and so they tried to use the prepaid phone account. Unfortunately, they couldn't locate a public phone to use and six kiosks refused to sell them a phone card. Elder Couturier borrowed a phone several times and the Delta desk let them use their phone a couple of times and we stayed in touch that way. After Sister Cindy and Church Missionary Travel tried all morning to get them on another flight, they finally had to stay overnight and take the last three seats on the same JFK flight the next day.

They wrote,
"Hello Sister Simmons,

Yea! We made it! We got to Boise just before midnight Thursday night. We only lost one bag--one of Elder Royer's went to Chicago via United. The whole thing is a mystery to us! But, most importantly, we got here with no problems past the glitch caused by the fog in Novosibirsk.

When we saw all the people lined up at passport control at JFK, we were afraid we were in trouble. We should have known better--we were in the USA and everything went quickly and smoothly. The New Yorkers seemed so nice and friendly! The guy at customs just passed us all through lickety-split; everything was great!

I'm glad you will have many missionaries with you as you leave. Elder Couturier was a lifesaver! I hope the Elder and Sister Holmes have no problems when their turn comes!

Again, thank you, thank you, thank you for your help this week! It made a bad situation bearable to know that you were taking care of us. I'm glad we had someone with your experience working on our problem; you knew just what to do!

With love and best wishes,

Elder and Sister Royer"

And that is exactly correct. If you have a problem, Sister Cindy is your best bet. She has the contacts, the Chutzpah (pronounced /ˈhʊtspə/), and the will to do whatever needs to be done.

Nothing is simple here, but you have to keep rule one and four in mind, "It doesn't have to make sense"and "None of it really matters"

What a country.

DS