ON THE COUCH
TALES OF COUCHSURFING A CONTINENT
FLEUR BRITTEN

To Miroslav the Impaler

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

CHAPTER 1 - LONDON: A REVOLUTION TO RIOE

CHAPTER 2 - MOSCOW: UNDER OBSERVATION

CHAPTER 3 - YEKATERTNBURG: THERE’S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN

CHAPTER 4 - NOVOSIBIRSK: LOSING A LIMB

CHAPTER 5 - ULAN-UDE: TO HEALTH! TO LOVE! TO VODKA!

CHAPTER 6 - MON90LIA: NOMADIC WANDERIN9S

CHAPTER 7 - VLADIVOSTOK: THE AMBASSADOR’S RECEPTION

CHAPTER 8 - BEIJING: CARRY IN COUCHSURFING

CHAPTER 9 - XI’AN: MY GOD, THEY REALLY CAN DRINK!

CHAPTER 10 - URUMQI: UNACCUSTOMED AS I AM

CHAPTER 11 - ALMATY: FORCE 10 FIGHTS AND COLD COMFORTS

CHAPTER 12 - SHYMKENT: NO ONE EVER CHOOSES TO COME HERE

CHAPTER 13 - ASTANA: OFF-PISTE COUCHSURFING

CHAPTER 14 - KARAGANDA: A DAY IN THE LIFE IF A PAGAN METAL-LOVING IT GEEK

CHAPTER 15 - CHENGDU: ALL A-BORE TO THE K-HILE

CHAPTER 16 - KUNMING: THE TRAVELLERS’ TEASE

CHAPTER 17 - GUILIN: TROUBLE IN PARADISE

CHAPTER 18 - XINGPING: SO VILLAGE

CHAPTER 19 - YANGSHUO: THE SCHOOL OF LIFE

CHAPTER 20 - SHANGHAI: CHRISTIAN CRIMES

CHAPTER 21 - LONDON: THE DEBT COLLECTOR

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1 LONDON: A REVOLUTION TO RIOE
AUGUST 2008 LONDON

‘I have an idea.’ I was on the phone to my great friend, Ollie. ‘It’s a little extreme, but I think you’ll like it.’

Ollie and I had been friends for so long that neither of us could quite remember when or where we met. Suffice to say it would have been drunken, at university, about fifteen years ago. We had a shared appreciation of the night, of the world and of the new; especially new chocolate products. Well, today, I had something new for us to try and it wasn’t edible.

‘Let’s go couchsurfing.’

Couchsurfing was not, as might reasonably be assumed, synonymous with bed-hopping, or being a couch potato, but was the name for a one-million-member strong, international ‘hospitality exchange’ website, connecting people who wanted to stay in other people’s homes around the world with people happy to host them; it was like one big notice board. When I’d been abroad before, I had always longed to have tea with a local, or be invited to a party. I’d done some home stays and had once gatecrashed a house party in Berlin after seeing it spilling out of a high window, but when it came to talking to the natives I suddenly felt stuck. Couchsurfing seemed like the ideal mediator.

If Ollie agreed, couchsurfing would become the theme of a ten-week trip to Russia, China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan (Kazakhstan alone boasted an impressive 124 couches). We were both drawn by an irresistible call to the East, intrigued by societies in varying degrees of ‘post-communism’, and for two years had been discussing planting our flags on what was over one-fifth of the globe’s landmass. We wanted to unpick the world’s largest country (Russia) and most populated nation (China) from the media myths they’d been reduced to—couchsurfing promised the inside track.

No more homogenous hotels for us, no more formulaic checklists and guidebook dependence deadening the whole experience. Couchsurfing presented a timely switch from passive observation to participation—we’d be hearing the truth, whether settled around the kitchen table, lounging naked in the Russian banya, or relaxed and disarmed on the sofa. And what an apt metaphor the couch was for a warm welcome. Wasn’t couchsurfing what holidays were waiting for?

Couchsurfing was founded in 2004 when an American, Casey Fenton, spammed about 1,500 Icelandic students asking them to let him stay. He was inundated with replies, and the idea became a phenomenon. There were devotees who’d sold up everything they owned to couchsurf the world, and couchsurfers offering ‘couches’ in virtually every country across all continents, from Antarctica to Zimbabwe, where a ‘couch’ could be a bedroom, a garden, a corner of the floor; or even just a couch. And all for free: how timely during these locust years.

With the average age of a couchsurfer standing at twentyseven, couchsurfing was something of a Generation Y game, but it was by no means exclusively so. There were over two hundred surfers between the ages of eighty and eighty-nine—free spirits didn’t become less free with age, if they could help it.

‘Sleeping in strangers’ houses? Couldn’t think of anything worse.’ That was the general reaction to my plan, but Ollie was up for it.

‘Cooool!’ he said boyishly. ‘It’ll be like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur travelled through time and space on his irrational sofa.’

But Ollie was no Arthur, no stranger to exploration: worldly, courageous and blessed with a preternaturally sunny spirit, there wasn’t a better travelling companion to be had.

Ollie had established himself an enviable modus vivendi. A freelance ad exec, he earned a handsome wedge for six to nine months of the year, and then travelled on a shoestring for the remainder, photographing his experiences. What he really wanted to do was find more, bigger, better Kodak moments and snap them all—couchsurfing was surely going to throw up some intriguing material for him. I, meanwhile, was a wage slave, a features writer for the Sunday Times, and in return for three years’ ‘good service’ I’d been granted a career break. I was desperate to escape the feeling that Planet London—and the Daily Planet—was closing in around me. For too long stifled by institution and constantly stressed by killer deadlines, I yearned to recover a sense of self. For a bit.

Ollie and I had had a few adventures together before: regular alpine appointments for pleasure-seeking skiing; Goan New Year raves with the heroin-addled old-timers; and the cosy thrill of living together (though not like that—‘that’ had fortunately never been relevant to us). Ollie—something of a kamikaze skier—had skied off a mountain early in the year, shattering his tibia and fibula so badly he’d had a Terminator-style titanium plate and six screws fitted. By September, he still needed a crutch, walked with a grievous limp, and was more familiar with the physio than with his own mother.

‘Are you really sure your leg isn’t going to drop off in Outer Mongolia or something?‘ I asked.

Despite his protestations to the contrary, I was sure I saw flashes of electric white pain behind the brave face. But Ollie got himself thoroughly vetted, and his consultant promised he’d be fine.

‘Perhaps we could have a sub-theme of communist swimming pools,’ Ollie suggested—it was critical that he kept up his physio.

I, too, was damaged—in the cardiac department. One day, eighteen months ago, I met The Emperor. Right then and there he impaled my heart and the rest of the world fell away. We were so high on each other, we’d stay up all night like one long waking dream, reluctant to miss a single second. But then a terrible and destructive war of the wills broke out. The Emperor was Serb—that came with insuperable Slavic pride; he had an artistic temperament—that came with extreme emotions.

Of course, I also had my complications. I was neurotic, sensitive, highly-strung and, like so many girls, prone to overthinking. Plus, I was possessed of a will that wouldn’t be broken. So, instead, it was us that broke up. Then, after not very long, we involuntarily gravitated back to each other; he still had my heart, while part of his soul, he said, had been left with me. And so began one very bipolar relationship, as we lurched across the emotionally exhausting canvas of love. He moved in, he moved out, he moved in…

‘Cut your losses,’ friends advised. ‘It’s too dramatic.’

At thirty-four I was getting to an age where I couldn’t afford to be trapped in this cycle. Ten weeks’ absence, I reflected, would have to decide it one way or the other.

So Ollie and I had a revolution to ride. ‘Participate in Creating a Better World, One Couch At A Time’ was couchsurfing’s endearingly cheesy motto. Couchsurfing wasn’t only about free accommodation; it had A Philosophy. Through conversation and understanding, it wanted to bridge cultures. What’s more, it was an invitation to step out of the monetary economy and into the gift economy, where things were just given, with no expectation of quid pro quo: what timing. Couchsurfing’s founding principle was Pay it Forward, a virtuous cycle of ‘give and ye might eventually receive’. But reciprocal altruism wouldn’t work without a community, and couchsurfing was all about enabling one big, happy community. The ultimate antidote to the West’s atomised society, its founders even called it a ’love-ocracy’. This was globalisation at its most benevolent.

Hold it!We were about to stay with weirdos that lurked online in a time when ‘trusting’ was a byword for stupid. How could we be sure it would be safe? Well, plenty of safety measures had been implemented, such as an eBay-style, meritocratic reference system where guests and hosts would write reports on their experiences, marking them positive, negative or neutral. Requesting a couch with lots of negative references would be very ‘trusting’ indeed…

But most of all there was faith. ‘Trust your instincts’ was the website’s advice. This was especially useful in the absence of choice: in Micronesia, with its one registered couch, there wasn’t much else to rely on. And yes, apparently there were those hosts who’d upgrade their guests from the couch to the bed. That couchsurfing was full of young, free travellers, and that the reproof ‘Couchsurfing is not a dating site’ was stamped all over its pages, made it obvious that plenty were at it. It sounded like one big party.

So who was waiting for us out there? Were couchsurfers enlightened new-age ideologues, Freecycling, foraging and living in perfect political correctness? Were they party hardies, hoping to corral all strays on their radar? Or were they, like Ollie and me, keen to reach into new frontiers? What would ‘make yourself at home’ really mean? Was this really pure altruism, or did they expect something—like sex, for example, in return? The lack of personal space concerned me. How did marathon couchsurfers nourish the complex requirements of the soul?

In addition, we’d be going cold turkey on choice, a luxury we had grown so used to in the Western world. How would we tolerate having to eat that Kazakh camel-cheek stew? What about varying attitudes to hygiene, to punctuality, to alcohol (Russian and Kazakh hospitality were notoriously spirited). And surely it was only a matter of time before we’d be embroiled in an excruciating domestic, faced with a malfunctioning toilet, or with intimate body bits we shouldn’t see.

And what about our Britishness? Hopeless at instant familiarity, we were the islanders who shook hands at arm’s length to avoid the Continent’s kiss. And now we thought it would be a good idea to sleep in strangers’ homes? What’s more, I had an overactive sense of British social protocol—I was obsessed with doing the right thing. We’d be constantly on the spot, always having to guess at other cultures’ codes of conduct. There was also a moral niggle—as wealthy Brits, we’d be freeloading off our less affluent hosts.

I felt an epiphany coming on—being so out of our comfort zones was going to be an adventure in self-development. We were all going to be on the metaphorical couch.

SEPTEMBER 2008

And so began that cringeworthy business of compiling our profile. As a travel networking site, couchsurfing worked along the same lines as Facebook or Myspace, requiring droll personal declarations, illusory photography and pretentious lists of recherché books, films and musical preferences. It asked for a personal description, a personal philosophy and our ‘mission’. I had a selfconscious bash:

Fleur and Ollie

Mission:

12,000 overland miles from Moscow to Mongolia to China to Kazakhstan to China again and then back to London in time for Christmas.

Personal Description:

Open-minded, easy-going and always up for new experiences, we’d like to think that we’re the kind of people you can take anywhere. Never say never is our mantra. Except to nuclear bombs, maybe. Left to our own devices, you might find us watching films, reading, gazing at art, walking in the wilderness, debating the issues of the world (in a polite British way, of course), and dancing and singing wildly to comedy pop (very Brits abroad). OH! And we are not boyfriend and girlfriend, but just great, old friends (much better that way, non?).

I uploaded a couple of ‘sweet’ photos of us and sent it into the ether. At least we didn’t have an empty profile any more—the mark of the much-loathed amateur.

1ST OCTOBER

Now we were ready for a little Russian roulette: Ollie and I must set up a series of these random acts of kindness across our Trans—Siberian route. We would meet during our lunch breaks and look at couches together—but Moscow’s 1,890 listed couchsurfers mysteriously scuttled into the darkness in the glare of our searchlight. Were they dormant? Dead? Or were we asking for too much?

We had some exacting parameters: they had to be native, we wanted full security verification, our own room, no language barrier (we didn’t speak Russian) and no children of early-morning screaming age. The Russians had their own conditions: one redoubtable Muscovite had written a full constitution on her profile: ‘In Russia water is cheap (sorry dear environmentalists) and I do expect you to look clean and smell nice when you come out of my flat. Please try to be invisible in all ways. In Russia we do not call it sexual harassment when a guy opens a door, helps a girl to put on a coat, helps a girl to carry a shopping bag. This is called GOOD MANNERS. Don’t be afraid to show how polite you are.’

She wasn’t alone: another supplied a terrifying list of dos and don’ts: ‘DON’T bother applying if you’re one of those free accommodation hunters who just read about CS in a newspaper. DON’T feel obliged to bring a present. A bottle of crappy wine from a store around the corner is only a waste of money. DO have your own agenda. We are not gonna sit down and smile at you for the spirit of couchsurfing…’

A culture of kindness? Not necessarily. But then we found the thirty-year-old musician, Olga, who lived in a spacious and central flat, and who ‘LOVED’ showing people around. And, she’d written, ‘every night you can hear horses walking across the yard, so if you are a sound-of-hooves fan, this is definitely the place.’

A match! Well, at least, she matched our requirements, but, with no references and no ‘friends’, did we match hers? We were ashamed of our virgin profile; but shame, we concluded, didn’t seem like a useful emotion—so we overstated the case.

Dear Olga,

I hope this finds you well. We are Fleur and Ollie from London and you are the very first door that we have knocked upon in our first foray into couchsurfing.

So why you?! Well, wouldn’t we be mad to overlook someone described as ‘the nicest/kindest person I have ever met’?! We are also fully charmed by the idea of horse hooves. You seem fully conversant in the couchsurfing spirit—that it’s more than free beds and instant company, but a will to bridge cultures and dispel stereotypes.

Why us? Well, we may be absolute beginners, but we come fully house-trained and domestically skilled and would be thrilled to regale you with tales from London and life.

Well, do let us know if we might have made it through the first round!

Fleur and Ollie

Factually slippery (‘domestically skilled’?) and shamelessly jolly, it reminded me of my first job application. But we’d been warned—even by Olga on her profile: ‘Unfortunately I still receive many “hi there”-style requests from people with empty profiles saying that they are “cool, open-minded and easy-going…”’

We’d already fallen into couchsurfing cliché; and I wasn’t even easy-going. I quickly deleted the offending article from our profile. Just as with an overly ambitious job-hunt, it all went quiet. We spread our bets.

Hello Maxim!

I hope this finds you well. We are Fleur and Ollie from London and you are the very first door that we have knocked upon in our first foray into couchsurfing…”

Precisely 23 hours, 13 minutes after Overture Number One, our Inbox had a visitor. I experienced a momentary episode of abnormal heart activity—it felt a little like receiving love-mail.

Hi Fleur and Ollie,

thank you for your very kind request. i will be very happy to host you at my place, and show you a bit around the city. you will find my phone number, address and a link to a google map at the bottom of this message. could you just confirm that you’re coming, 2-3 days before. since you’re coming on Saturday, I can pick you up outside the metro station. also, if you need some tips or some information about moscow don’t hesitate to ask.

see you soon,

Olga

Meanwhile Maxim also wrote back.

Welcome to Moscow!

I like your letter very much!!!! Usually it’s OK to be hosted in my flat, in case I’m not hosting or travelling at this moment.

So you can count on me!

Regards. Max

P.S. We have CS meetings on Tuesdays & Thursdays.

Well, we weren’t expecting a double-hit, but maybe coming from London boosted our appeal. We decided to stay three days with Olga, two with Max. From reading others’ profiles, it appeared that much more at any one place was too much.

We wrote back with more blandishments, and both hosts and guests were suspended in a happy communion of sweet, innocent friend-making. Perhaps they would like something from London, I offered—I didn’t believe that they could possibly be happy to just give, give, give and wait for the universe to give back. Paying it back instantly was surely obligado.

Just time to complete one prior experiment before departure: The Emperor and I had agreed to spend three days together— yes, just three small days—and if we got on, we were go, if not, that would be it—the end of us. War descended within hours. We made up, pretended it hadn’t happened and continued, only to fall out again. It was no use. By the end, we had to agree that we had failed.

CHAPTER 2 MOSCOW: UNDER OBSERVATION
11TH OCTOBER

1900 hours, Pushkin Square, Moscow. Night had fallen. In front of us was a confusion of old Soviet apparatus competing with new capitalist trappings: shadowy communist towers illuminated by the neon glow of monuments to money-making; a Vegas-style casino; an American coffee house; fast-food joints. Around the square, glossy European 4x4s beeped at dirty little Ladas. Ollie and I fell silent. Excited yet anxious, it felt like first date territory.

‘I’ll be waiting for you by the benches near the Pushkin statue.’

The romantic poet would surely have approved of Olga’s instructions. And indeed, this was to be a blind-date of sorts, for Olga’s profile picture was, enigmatically, of dense foliage.

We scanned the horizon and shrugged. A crowd of disconnected individuals lurked around the benches in dark, heavy clothing. We had no idea what we were looking for—we were the conspicuous ones, be-rucksacked and bewildered. Like exposed rabbits on an empty hill, we could only wait and be hunted.

Suddenly our view was filled with Olga. A slim girl wrapped in a fitted, navy, three-quarter-length corduroy coat, her pale, colourless face luminesced in the darkness, and was framed by a sandy coloured Jim Davidson hairdo, token blond highlights and all.

‘Olga! Hello!’

Olga’s smile was shy and short-lived. The Slavic hug I’d rehearsed hid behind British prudishness—instead, my left arm shot out to touch hers in odd, lumbering affection. Ollie held out his hand like a man. She took it, and then came to my hand, but it was full of rucksack. The critical moment, fudged. She pointed to the far corner of the square: ‘Let’s go this way.’

We probably talked about the journey or something, but the sensory overload made me forget everything. Now she was visible in three dimensions, I stared unblinkingly at Olga. Couchsurfing’s internet profiles had not prepared me for the storm force of human life: suddenly, couchsurfing seemed to be about choosing a house on the merits of its front door.

Sensitive and birdlike, Olga’s chin trembled and her head bobbed when she spoke. She seemed surprisingly nervous; yet, with twenty previous guests, wasn’t she the experienced one? When it was my turn to speak, a voice usually reserved for other people’s parents came out—I was being so ‘good’, answering pleasantly about our Russian visas and asking about her work. Was I about to be ’good’ for ten weeks?

We turned into a dark cohort of daunting Soviet blocks, whose seemingly lowly status was belied by an assortment of prestigious cars; already I felt the thrill of access. Hotels weren’t built in Soviet blocks, after all. We entered a simply tiled, beige stairwell, went into the functional, matchbox lift and out towards a dusty, pleather-padded door, which Olga unlocked before neatly removing her shoes in the hall. We neatly copied her. She handed Ollie a pair of brown leather, open-toed sandals of dubious sexuality, and me some pink towelling slippers. Hit by the smell of a second-hand bookshop, we looked up from our feet. Bearing down on us was an object lesson in cold Soviet life: peeling ochre wallpaper covered with old theatre posters, dusty cabinets and shelves piled with books, old photos and dead flowers. We were in a 1950s time warp.

‘Wowwww,’ Ollie and I emitted in unison.

‘Well,’ explained Olga, without uttering the vowel. ‘It was my grandparents’ place. My mother was born here, my parents used to live here—it hasn’t really changed since then.’ Her eyes darted around. An only child, she now lived alone. I wondered, was couchsurfing supposed to bring the company she craved?

It was hard to ignore the blood-boiling heat.

‘Russia has a centralised heating system,’ Olga said, fidgeting with her hands like they didn’t belong to her. ‘The heating is turned on at the same time every year by the government. Residents have no control. If we go on holiday for two weeks, it is still on.’

Her windows were wide open.

‘What about the environment?’ I spluttered.

‘Mother Russia doesn’t worry about natural resources,’ she said, her eyes scouring the floor.

I’d read that Russia had the world’s largest natural gas reserves and second-largest coal reserves, and was the world’s third-largest energy consumer. I opened my mouth, then let it go—best not to insult the host country.

A sinewy silence slipped out. My arms were crossed and clinging on to each other tight, while Ollie was pretend-laughing at thin air. Olga was biting her cheeks tensely. Frozen in this psychological drama, we were all hyperaware of ourselves. I, for one, couldn’t quite get those bossy Muscovites’ constitutions that I’d read in London out of my head. What would real couchsurfers be doing now, I wondered?

‘Shall we make our beds?’ I offered helpfully. Knowing where I’d be sleeping would be one comfort. Olga directed us straight ahead with an outstretched arm: ‘I have bedding if you need.’ Ollie and I entered the living room (though any evidence of life here had long since departed) and Olga discreetly left us to it. Yet we continued to behave as if she were still in the room; no conspiratorial whispering—we were still being ‘good’.

There, in the darkest corner of a long, low-lit room (most bulbs had blown) was my couch—an actual couch. Apparently from the 1980s (though it looked 1970s—maybe that was the Russian delay), it was a coffin-sized rectangle of foam upholstered in a brown and beige, zigzag-patterned, coach-seat fabric. Ollie said he’d prefer the retro, canvas camp bed, which didn’t look comfortable but, he insisted gallantly, its wonky elevation would be good for his leg. The fact that Ollie and I would be sharing a room—a first in our long history—was vaguely unsettling, but it was the least of our new experiences. What was more overwhelming was suddenly finding myself in the slipstream of someone else’s life. I was wearing Olga’s slippers, breathing her air and shadowing her life. It all felt extraordinarily random.

We regrouped with Olga in the hallway, and handed over our gift. In response to our invitation, she’d politely suggested a book of our choice, and we’d picked a photographic compilation, London Through a Lens. She unwrapped it, peered at it, flicked through it, but it was impossible to decipher her half-nod, halfsmile and restless hands. Maybe we’d embarrassed her.

‘Would you like a drink?’ Olga offered.

We repaired to her modest kitchen, which looked unchanged since the 1950s—rose-print kitchen units, an electric oven and a quaint, rounded, ceramic sink—and sat at a humble breakfast table.

‘I’d love a drink of water,’ I supplicated.

‘Oh. That could be a bit difficult.’ She looked mildly ashamed. ‘You can’t drink the tap water here.’

She poured the tepid remains of water from the kettle into a teacup for me. Ollie and I were starving.

‘Do you do much cooking?’ Ollie asked.

‘I don’t cook for couchsurfers,’ she said with surprising frankness. ‘I just cook for myself. It’s not so tasty; it’s very basic things. But you can help yourself.’

She opened a monastic-looking fridge to reveal eggs, bread and cheese. A sticker on the door read WHERE ON EARTH IS PERTH?

‘From a couchsurfer,’ she said.

Now that our first living-and-breathing couchsurfer was firmly in our clutches, we cross-examined her with our entry-level questions. Forget Putin and polonium—what we really wanted to know was: how was it with other couchsurfers? Was it strange the first time she hosted?

‘It was something unusual,’ she said, smiling quietly, ‘so I didn’t know what to do.’

That was at least reassuring. Telling us how she’d hosted a male English teacher for six days, I wondered how this shy sparrow had coped, and then I thought, maybe it was our gaucheness polluting the atmosphere. I was looking forward to when this all felt more normal.

‘Did you ever give any bad references?’ I asked, trying to feel for the edges of this experiment.

‘Most people don’t leave negative references unless it’s really bad,’ Olga replied. ‘I had a couple of fairly bad guests, though they never broke or stole anything. ‘I did hear that one host found their guest shooting up.’

Olga’s ‘worst ever guest’ treated her like his servant, asking her for tea, coffee, to buy his train ticket, ‘Can I have my breakfast now?’

‘He asked for many, many things like this, and he didn’t bring anything,’ she said, softly indignant.

Our problem was the opposite: British reserve and a keen concern for etiquette. Perhaps ten weeks of couchsurfing would knock it out of us. Still, at least first-time guests were still grateful. There was obviously some delicate balance to strike, somewhere in between excessive courtesy and taking liberties.

As for sexual harassment, she’d received messages, from mostly Turkish and northern African men, saying, ‘You look nice—let’s be friends.’ Impossible, given that Olga’s profile picture was of foliage. I’d noticed girls who seemed naked in their profiles, I said.

‘Yes, probably,’ she laughed timidly. ‘And they never look as good as their picture.’

The 1950s standard wasn’t so welcome in the bathroom: there was no lock (the door didn’t even shut), the single-ply toilet paper was the colour of Jiffy bag stuffing, and above the sink was an old-fashioned shaving brush, some wooden combs and antique mildew.

Back in the kitchen, the wine came out. ‘It’s only cheap and sweet,’ Olga apologised, adding, ‘It’s how I like it. Would you like some?’

‘Oh—only if you’re having some.’

‘No, no, please have if you like.’ She poured from an open bottle labelled ‘La Jeunesse’. Nibbling on past-it black and white grapes, Ollie and I smiled away our hunger. There was a couchsurfing house party that night, Olga said, the leaving party of an Irish couchsurfer called Donna. Result. We’d just inherited her social life—it felt liberating to have to go with it.

En route to the party, Olga pointed out one of the Kremlin’s potent red stars atop its spiky towers. A volt of joy fizzed through my body: we had a house party, a hand-holder and a local guide through Europe’s largest city. We passed a street kiosk and refuelled on public-transport-grade potato-filled pirojki pies, too flabby and tepid to be savoured.

Inside another anonymous Soviet apartment block, past a fourfoot—high mound of coats, twenty-five-odd twenty-somethings were mingling amongst the scatter cushions and up-lighters. The first four guests we encountered had been made redundant. ‘Actually, it freed me,’ said a Russian in a blazer. ‘There’s no point for career now. So I just go travelling.’

Donna turned out to be Donagh, a young male architect with warm freckles and black, curly hair, and also an open future—like us, he was heading east on the Trans-Siberian. We ricocheted around the party as the only itinerants; everyone else lived in Moscow. Wasn’t that strange?

‘We are networking,’ admitted a Siberian lawyer.

Tom, a British accountant, said it was an ex-pat thing.

‘Yes,’ added the Siberian, crisply, ‘Russian girls go to couchsurfing parties to meet foreign men.’

I nudged Ollie.

‘Let me tell you about Moscow women,’ said Tom. Ollie and I leant in. ‘There are more women than men, so while they’re better-looking than the men, they have to work a lot harder. It’s why you see feisty, dressy Russian women alone in bars—they’re competing for limited resources.’ But there wasn’t a novi Russki in sight: the demographic here was one of middleclass, bright young things, computer literate and emancipated. And English-speaking. Finding a Cossack while couchsurfing was going to be unlikely.

‘Oh, you’re in really capable hands with Olga,’ said Sarah, a bubbly Irish girl with bubbly, coiled hair. ‘She’s probably the most professional host here. She knows exactly how to be, without being obvious about it. If she doesn’t like you, she’ll diplomatically let you do your thing.’

With impeccable timing, Olga announced she was going home, adding, ‘Who is the most responsible person here?’

She elected Tom to get us home, drew us a map and gave us some keys. Tom took us to a snug indie club where we learned about the Russian mafia non-scene.

‘Oh, there is no more Mafia—they just became corrupt businessmen or politicians where there’s more power.’

And about the ‘blacks’: labour migrants from the ‘Stans—Tajikistan, Dagestan, Uzbekistan.

‘The Russians treat them worse than animals.’

But eventually the public displays of Russian passion around us became insufferable, so he sorted us a ‘gypsy cab’, a Tajik worker with his own Lada, and we returned to Pushkin Square to make an ill-advised friendship with a burger shack—toxic coiled sausageskis in white sliced bread that could have been moulded from foam. Still, slathered in mustard, ketchup and mayo, it became a meal. We’d be back.

12TH OCTOBER

8am. Ollie’s alarm was screaming—he’d forgotten to turn it off from the day before. He slept on, but after just four hours’ sleep, I couldn’t. Grey daylight seeped in and the rain bore down. I peered out of the window. Amongst all the cloned, beige-brick residential blocks, I saw in one corner ‘1956’ picked out in red bricks. In the apartment’s oppressive silence, I didn’t know what else to do but return to my couch. Only now, sober, did I realise it smelt faintly of unwashed bodies and that under the thin foam was a rigid wooden board—it was like sleeping on a door. In the heat I was too uncomfortable to sleep. I thought about tea and food, and sent texts to The Emperor. We’d become so twinned I was finding it hard to cut off.

Some hours later I finally tiptoed out and stop-started my way towards the kitchen, hesitating outside Olga’s bedroom for an argument with myself: say good morning; no, don’t bother her. Well, you can’t just march into her kitchen. I’m hungover, I’m not in the mood. Well, that’s not good manners…

In London, I either lived alone or with The Emperor—I wasn’t used to dealing with people not on my terms.

Knock, knock.

‘Good morning,’ I croaked.

Olga was communing with her laptop at a wooden desk, in a study half the size of our room with a sofa like mine and no other sleeping apparatus—the sofa was her bed.

‘Hello,’ she replied.

She got up and formally introduced me to the kitchen. A waft of cooked eggs lingered.

We chatted briefly, then she returned to her room. Too inhibited to whip up a full breakfast, I poured myself a water from the kettle. This, I realised, was the point of Pay it Forward. If I’d hosted first, I’d feel more right to hospitality.

After a time, she returned.

‘Have you had breakfast?’ she asked.

‘Actually, I’d love a cup of tea.’ What I really wanted was a cappuccino.

‘Bfff, of course!’ From a tiny pot crammed with loose black tea, she poured a strong, cold shot into a mug and topped it up with boiling water—chai, Russian style, no milk. ‘Try some kefir as well—it’s good for hangovers.’

‘Sure!’ I pursed my lips to test the buttermilk. It was sour and unfriendly. ‘Maybe it needs sugar,’ I said, trying to sound optimistic.

The digital age might have brought instant connections, but that didn’t mean instant friendship. A force-field of unfamiliarity separated us. Olga hung around, so I had to sing for my breakfast. I didn’t feel like small talk, but I was couchsurfing: I had no choice. Eventually, Olga left to see her parents, and in her place, Ollie arose, boldly putting his foot up on the sideboard in the kitchen. He pulled up his trouser-leg to reveal a swelling the size of a computer mouse.

‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ he said.

It looked hot and angry. I wasn’t convinced.

‘Chai?’ I offered. ‘Black, one sugar, coming up.’ I ferreted through her cupboards, looking for sugar. It felt strange to sense some kind of ownership over someone else’s apartment.

‘Arghhhh!’ Ollie had found a problem with the tea.

‘Did you burn yourself?’

‘No—you put salt in my tea. If Olga had made it, I probably would have politely drank it: ‘Hmm, this curious Russian speciality!’’

We made it into Moscow as the sun was setting. We ran dull errands, refuelled, and then met Olga at the beautiful 1930s Komsomolskaya metro station under the mosaics honouring its workforce, the Komsomol (or Communist Youth League). Olga was going to help us buy our Trans-Siberian rail tickets. ‘Always remember that the host is doing the surfer a favour,’ the website had chided. I couldn’t forget. She assumed the mothering role and we became the children: we’d left our passports and cash behind, turning a fifteen-minute task into one and a half hours.

‘I must have taken seven or eight of my guests to get their train tickets,’ Olga said.

I was confused: I felt guilty, and yet, it seemed, this was standard. The kindness of strangers—it really existed.

We felt an urge to take Olga to dinner. She chose an art-café-cum-bookshop, Bilingua, and, as we chatted, she told us how she had a ‘very special criterion’ when couchsearching. She’d search for ‘Godard’ or ‘Truffaut’ to locate fellow French cinema fans. She told us about Russia’s Country Ambassador, something of a celebrity in Moscow: a Philippino diplomat who often had four or five surfers staying at one time; he’d had over a hundred guests this year.

‘I don’t like it when homes are like hostels,’ Olga frowned.

There was even a couchsurfing monastery, she said, just outside Moscow: one shared room for couchsurfers, a curfew, and a task, such as painting the walls. Like opening a matrioshka, those sets of Russian nesting dolls, Olga’s twitchy, nervous shell had fallen away, and she seemed at last relaxed. Finally, the act of welcoming us into her home didn’t appear so masochistic.

We headed back and, unbidden, Olga looked up our train times and wrote out a role-playing station script for next time. And as we ate into her bedtime, my couchsurfing guilt reappeared. Christ, was this going to be like catholic guilt? I went to the kitchen to make tea, and found myself washing up, thinking about the selfish rewards of altruism: had Olga, too, gone to bed feeling good? Outside I heard the ghostly clatter of horses’ hooves—Olga had told us earlier that they belonged to gypsy girls who used them to beg. It was my reward.

13TH OCTOBER

Moscow Sights Seen So Far:

 The metro system;

 The railway station;

 A Russki hair salon (I had amused myself with a Moscow makeover, hairspray finish and everything).

Not exactly Top Ten. Couchsurfing, with all its social and organisational demands, was eating into our tourists’ needs, but then,we’d seen a very different kind of tourism—intimate tourism.

But we were just getting to know our host and our little party was over: we had to leave Olga’s at 7am the next day to meet Max, our second Moscow host (‘Please arrive at 8am—I have a very hard day.’). Couchsurfing Rule Numero Uno: guests defer to hosts. Olga assured us she’d get up early to say goodbye. She really was the sweetest thing, I said to myself, mentally composing my very first positive reference.

14TH OCTOBER

‘When you come out of the metro, you’ll see a supermarket, then we are house 36.’ A riddle wrapped in a Soviet apartment block.

Metro—check. Supermarket—check. Time check: 8.10—a little late. But house 36? House even? Encircled by row upon row of dirty white, high-rise blocks, we were stumped. We sent out a Mayday to Max, but by 8.50 (a lot late), there was still no word. We called him (wasn’t that the sound of a man freshly woken?), and received our instructions for the final stage.

The smell came first—the fetid smell of fermenting men. At the foot of the twenty-storey Block 36, four red-faced, leering drunks swayed in the wind; a fifth was retching over clutched knees. We picked our way past the broken bottles, suspect puddles and a dark-skinned, obese woman slumped in the janitor’s cabin, and into a lift. One hour late, we got our hands on the prize.

Max, rangy in jeans and a Cambodia T-shirt and with the flat, fringed haircut of a young geography teacher going on fifty, bounced out to greet us with a laughing, long-armed hug. Sleep creases marked his smooth Pinocchio cheekbones. ‘Lock the door behind you!’ he said merrily, as we followed him through two solid steel doors and straight into a glittering coral-pink hall resembling a camp Santa’s grotto. We were equipped with slippers (leather for the boys, flowery pink towelling for the girls), and led off the hall into a small room containing a brown velour ‘super deluxe’ sofa.

‘Yesterday,’ clucked Max in a singsong voice, ‘ve vent to ze couchsurfing film night, on ze Irish independence!’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Ve vatched ze Bloody Sunday, khuh khuh!’

We courtiously laughed back, and Max took to his computer. I slumped dysfunctionally on my new bed; I’d had on average four hours’ sleep a night at Olga’s.

‘Zere’s anozzer couchsurfer vere you sleep. Yvonne from London!’

I was confused, but too strung-out to pursue. Max fiddled with his computer, putting disks in, taking disks out, taking work calls (aged thirty-five, he worked in logistics, he told us), then, with a grin the size of his face, he presented us with a commemorative Moscow photo disk.

‘So, Max, have your other couchsurfers struggled to find your place?’ I bleated. ‘All the blocks look the same!’

‘Khuh khuh! Ve khave a film zat is set around New Year’s Ev, ze main kholiday in Russia. So, it’s usual to go to ze banya to clean your body and mind at zis time. When you go to ze banya, you take wodka. So, in zis film, four men khad drunk so much…’

To shear back a long and tangled shaggy-dog story, Max was recounting a much-loved Russian film by the director Eldar Ryazanov, which was shown on Russian TV every New Year.

‘It’s called The Joke of Your Life,’ he explained.

The plot followed a drunk Muscovite who mistook a Soviet apartment in St Petersburg for his own, as the addresses coincided, the appearances coincided, the interiors coincided; even the key worked.

‘It’s based on Soviet style of life,’ explained Max. ‘For foreign person, it’s difficult to understand.’

We understood.

Yvonne, a wan, thin girl with straggly, long hair, emerged from the kitchen. So that’s where we’d be sleeping; I hadn’t done that since drunken student days.

Max hooted, ‘Breakfast Included!’

The opposite of Olga, extroverted, jokey and unselfconscious, he made me feel instantly cosy. In the kitchen, against a pumpkin-coloured backdrop, rested a pumpkin-coloured sofa bed. Claustrophobically small, it was in fact rather like being inside an actual pumpkin. What space remained was serried with panpipes, fridge magnets and ethnic masks—Max’s apartment was a shrine to travel. If travel was Max’s religion, couchsurfers were its disciples—for Russians, visas were difficult to obtain, Max told us, and air travel was expensive: in times of need, couchsurfers brought the world to him.

’s phone rang again, so we acquainted ourselves with our compatriot. Couchsurfing was an obvious starting point (and current obsession).

‘It would be quite lonely without couchsurfin’,’ Yvonne explained in her London accent. ‘I’m twenny-one, I’ve got £1,000 to travel indefinitely. I’m going to Mongolia, China, India, Tibet, Nepal, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam…I can teach but I’d rarver not.’

Yvonne’s conversational coffers seemed infinite—and so she went on. She’d been staying at Max’s for a week, but she’d evidently earned her moral right because she’d hosted a lot in London. She recounted how two guests had paid for her National Express ticket so she could show them Stonehenge, and how one girl had asked for the vacuum cleaner (‘My house isn’t completely spotless, right’) and left after an hour.

Max returned and busied himself with breakfast: tea in glasses and a large bowl of chocolates and wafers.

‘Zere’s not so much sugar so I khave some khow-do-you-say…blackberry.’

I gamely put some jam in my tea and took a chocolate for breakfast, but the wrapper wouldn’t budge so I aborted. Max spooned soupy chocolate spread straight from a bowl into his mouth. I went to refill the kettle from the tap, but Max leapt up, saying ‘No, no!’ and ladled a cup of water from a large pan. The point of couchsurfing was being played out—we were experiencing a new ‘normality’. A random bloke sloped in, helped himself to tea, offered legal-minimum pleasantries, and sloped out.

‘Khe’s out-of-verk computer programme,’ explained Max. ‘Khe’s my permanent couchsurfer. Khuh khuh.’

’s was evidently a hospitality that didn’t say no.

With a stomach-turning collection of corpse-long and broken fingernails, Yvonne clawed a number into her mobile.

‘So can I crash your language class today?’ she drawled into the mouthpiece. ‘Cuz you said the ovva day I could sit in on your Russian class?’ Yvonne was looking for a pen.

‘Ruchka!’ enthused Max. ‘Tsat’s ‘pen’ in Russian. ‘Arm’ in Russian is ruka, so pen is little arm!’

Yvonne scratched down the new word in her exercise book. It seemed they had a good tutor-student relationship going on.

Max had to drive out of Moscow, so we gathered ourselves to leave with him; there were no spare keys and we’d have to stay out all day.

‘Zere’s a couchsurfing party tonight. Someone is presentation khis trip to China.’

He furnished us with the address, and the three Londoners disentangled themselves from this force of positive energy and returned to the real world.

Passing thunder-faced, potato-bodied babushkas selling kittens in cardboard boxes, we advanced in the drizzle to Red Square. In my sleep-deficient state, Yvonne’s motormouth was bringing out my misanthropy. Gone was my rictus smile—compulsory companionship had gone unquestioned when there was a motive but now I dropped back while Ollie and Yvonne swapped India stories. Yvonne expressed an interest in going to the State History Museum so I expressed an interest in the Kremlin. Bye-bye Yvonne: she’d be moving to a different host later.

Rocking up at a Russian house party felt a little peculiar without Max, and with no introduction other than the fact that We Too Were Couchsurfers. But, we reminded ourselves, couchsurfing was an open community, plus we’d come well stocked with ingratiating party provisions. Inside, we couldn’t get past the human log-jam in the hall; the bilingual slideshow on China was taking place in an impenetrable bedroom. Conversation was unavoidable. Finding myself in front of two Californian sisters tucking into bowls of borscht, we got talking. They didn’t know anyone either, and were staying at a hostel. Not wanting to be with all the tourists, they had checked out Moscow’s couchsurfing group, and this party was posted on it.

A Kazakh girl invited me into a ‘secret’; she’d met her boyfriend when couchsurfing with him in Paris.

‘We were reading my English-Russian manual together,’ she whispered. ‘I was very tired so I leant my head on his shoulder…’ Why the whispering?

‘To stop others thinking that they’ll find love on the couchsurfing site and messaging random girls.’

I told her we were on our way to Kazakhstan.

‘I sympathise,’ she quipped. ‘In Moscow, nobody ever looks at you in the street. In Kazakhstan, they do. They’re checking your nose hasn’t turned white with frostbite—it can be—40°C in the winter.’

Beyond the capacity of my imagination, it just sounded exciting. Naivety was remarkably motivating.

‘Everyone leave now!’ shouted the flushed Russian host. ‘We’re all going to a café down the road!’

Nobody budged. Nobody could.

Eventually, the host got his way, so we returned to Max’s and convened in the kitchen. As we snacked on bread and bananas from our own supplies, Max quizzed us on all matters travel.

‘Show me rucksack! Vot about sleeping bag? Khow much you pay?’

We presented him with our gift, a Lonely Planet guide on Thailand (he’d dropped a hint in an email while we were in London) and he yelped with joy.

‘Natalie!’

His tiny, mouse-like girlfriend scurried in wearing mintgreen loungewear with SWEET GLAMOUR twinkling in green crystals.

‘Try ze rucksack!’ said Max, excitedly.

My rucksack practically toppled her, but she beamed. Their delight infected us all. Natalie didn’t speak English so Max seamlessly ran two conversations without ever revealing the strain.

By 1am, we could delay the inevitability of kitchen camping no more. We pushed the kitchen table right to the wall and unfolded the sofa-bed—the kitchen disappeared. I filled my empty water bottle from the just-boiled kettle—the only drinking water I could find—and the plastic warped. I wasn’t used to having to think about where I’d get my water. I sandwiched myself between Ollie and the wall and we killed the lights, but the glow from the appliances’ LEDs held their steely gaze on us. I couldn’t sleep: the fridge was whirring, I was boiling, I had a dead arm from the wooden ‘mattress’, and there was a foreign body in my bed snoring. Meanwhile, my mind was imploding from the day’s events. Was it really only this morning that we were lost in transit? It felt like we’d lived a week in one day.

15TH OCTOBER

‘I vont to khave breakfast!’ Max, in football shorts and his Cambodia T-shirt, entered the kitchen—it was rather like joining us in bed. All evidence of the night was efficiently tidied away, and Max set about producing a Heidi-style brunch: watery cabbage soup in need of salt, with trace elements of onion and carrots; smetana; chewy, sour black bread; and spineless ‘Russian standard’ cheese. Random Bloke joined in, and he and Max chatted in Russian. I was grateful not to have to join in, since I couldn’t think of anything to say. I just wanted coffee. Which wasn’t included.

Mystified by the ease with which Max played host, I asked, was the concept of couchsurfing intrinsic to the Russian psyche?

‘Yes!’ he said, practically bursting. ‘I met man in Kiev at ze station and khe invited me to stay khis khouse. Russians are wery khospy-table.’

I, too, could accommodate people on my kitchen floor, but it would take a Blitz for that to happen.

‘Okay, you do the voshing-up!’ Max left the kitchen and it struck me that the couchsurfing dynamic was all about sub/dom. Max was instinctively dominant and we happily submitted. Maybe it could also work as a dom/dom dynamic, and even dom/sub, with a guest dominating a submissive host. But when both were submissive, as it had been with Olga, it left the relationship needing a kick.

‘Perhaps that’s what I should do,’ Ollie piped up. ‘I’ll get couchsurfers into my house, and say to them, ‘You can stay in my house, but you do the washing-up.’

Max returned with his Moscow guide book: ‘You could go here, you could go here…’

Actually, we said, we were interested in the All-Russia Exhibition Centre (a Monaco-sized tribute to Soviet glory). Max seemed unconvinced, but went to print out notes. Now a troika, Max, Ollie and I left the apartment. Feeling shattered, I wished we were a deux. We passed the obese woman in the janitor’s cabin and Max explained that yes, she did live in that one tiny room.

‘Rent is wery expensive in Russia. She’s probably from Uzbekistan. Zey take zose jobs.’

Ollie couldn’t have told me that, I thought to myself.

Outside, Max hucked and spat on the roadside. I sneezed. Ollie blessed me. ‘Yes,’ said Max, ‘Cheers!’

First we visited Moscow’s space park, where a one-hundred metre tall, titanium totem to The Conquerors of Space pointed vertiginously skywards. As we walked down the Avenue of Cosmonauts, Ollie struggled to keep up with Max’s long strides; despite our polite requests, the pace never slowed. Ollie wisely sat out the Monaco-sized glory park. Max guided me indefatigably round the eighty-two Stalinist pavilions, Gagarin’s Vostok rocket and an Aeroflot Yak-42 (smirking not permitted). Without Ollie to share in deciphering Max’s accent, I struggled to understand him, and when I could, I felt too socially retarded to converse, relying simply on a repertoire of, ‘Oh yes, wow, how interesting, I see, umm, gosh’. It became increasingly apparent that Max had taken the day off to hang out with us, despite not really rating our choice. The consummate host never let on.

Max peered into a souvenir stand with hungry eyes: ‘Now I know vare to send my couchsurfers,’ he clucked.

‘Do couchsurfers usually bring presents for you?’ I asked.

‘Sometimes zey offer to buy food, but mostly I say no, pliz. Many zink of it as a place for staying so zere is no obligation to leave presents. But it is a custom of Russia to bring a gift because you don’t pay the bill.’

I resolved to keep on giving.

We scooped up a smiley Ollie, and took the scenic monorail (which Max had researched for us earlier) to Moo-Moo, a chain restaurant decked out like a Friesian cow, serving up Russian classics: borscht, cabbage-stuffed bread, kvas (fermented rye bread water), and, of course, vodka. Two men on the neighbouring table asked to join us. ‘Sure!’ said Max. For the rest of our meal, Max tirelessly translated the glassy-eyed Igor and Sergey’s rants on the war in Georgia (and the Western media’s blindness to Saakashvili’s evil), eulogies to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (‘most important Russian book!’) and pushy vodka toasts to ‘united nations’. But Max remained the jolly messenger, never getting political. I’d tried to discuss politics with him earlier, but he’d laughed it off; it didn’t seem relevant to him. Natalie appeared halfway through, to nibble on an eggcup-sized portion of vegetarian gratin and saucer of salad, after which our hosts skipped off to their Latino dance class.

Couchsurfing was a hungry beast, so Ollie and I busied ourselves in an internet café. There was a constant need to plan ahead, arrange back-up and confirm arrivals. Each acceptance felt like a minor victory. Perversely, however, we found ourselves, like naive kittens, seeking just a little more danger. Our next stop was Yekaterinburg (some 1,814 kilometres east of Moscow), where our host, a journalism student called Polly, would be on holiday in a ’rather fashionable’ hotel in Turkey when we arrived, leaving us in the curious company of her pet rat. Danger indeed.

16TH OCTOBER

Max was expecting a Spanish couple—our replacements—to arrive at 8am from St Petersburg. Ollie had suggested we wake at 7am to prepare for them, but given our own delayed arrival, I overruled it. At 8.30, the doorbell rang.

‘Hola! Buenos dias!’ they trilled.

Max, the expert logistician, deftly organised us like human elements in a sliding-tile game, and then began the breakfast ritual. The girl immediately offered to do the washing-up. I was so slow on this sharing and helping thing.

‘Do you always like to have surfers, Max?’ I asked, when the amantes weren’t listening. I was shocked by his turnover.

‘I need a rest,’ he replied. ‘Sometimes Natalie don’t like zem.’

‘Are there ever surfers that you don’t like?’

‘No, no!’ he heehawed like a donkey, before adding, ‘Zere vos a Sviss couple cycling viz all zare kit.’

That was as rude as he could bring himself to be about them.

It was checkout time for us—we had a train to catch aboard the world’s longest railway. While packing up, it occurred to me thatMax must now have something of a collection of objets oubliés.

‘Ah yes!’ he said, convulsing with laughter. ‘It’s like a muzeum khere. I khave towels, I khave trousers, I khave tooz-brushes…’

‘Actually,’ I added, ‘I can’t find my top.’

‘Too late! It’s in the muzeum, khuh khuh khuh!’

CHAPTER 3 YEKATERTNBURG: THERE’S A RAT IN THE KITCHEN

‘Well, that was odd.’

Ollie and I were rumbling towards Asia on board the Trans-Siberian Express, and I was grappling with why Max could possibly choose to live in that chaos. We had thirty hours to work it out before it all began again in Yekaterinburg.

‘Max is having the time of his life,’ Ollie mused, as he stretched out on his sailor-sized bunk. ‘He’s meeting experienced travellers from all over the world, showing them his city, dodging his shitty job and working from his phone. He’s got it all worked out.’

Still, he must have possessed a spare brain lobe to accommodate the madness. Perhaps it was a reaction against Russia’s isolationist stance. Whatever, it would be hard to look at a Soviet block and still think ‘prison with windows’—we knew now that within their walls could be warm and colourful homes.

Ollie, meanwhile, was getting familiar with my dinner of Russian biscuits.

‘I couldn’t be my normal cheeky self,’ he said, his mouth full.

We were both caught up in manners: this was a shame—cheekiness had its role in social lubrication.

‘And you can’t be selfish as a couchsurfer,’ he added. ‘I was really having to push my leg because I felt rude telling Max to keep slowing down.’

He inspected the growth on his knee. It was bulging hard and taut. Ollie strapped a chilled bottle of water to the lump (he’d left his gel pack at Max’s) and added, ‘It would be really churlish to call a host boring—but Olga wasn’t so exciting.’

He was right. That was blasphemy.

As we pulled away from the relatively westernised Moscow, we pressed our noses against the window. Nothing to see but nothing: the Siberian birch, it seemed, had a monopoly over Russia’s hinterland. Staring out of the window began to feel like sticking one’s head into grey cloud: ready-made emptiness, waiting for our minds’ overspill.

But at least, I realised, one part of my mind was filled with peace: The Emperor Department. Usually so fraught with the minutiae of our last five arguments, now it was quiet. There was surely something out there for both of us that was more stable, that was better for us. We should be using this time to heal. I’d been sending trip updates to The Emperor, but now I sent this emotional update, and I felt it strongly. Maybe thousands of miles and all these weeks was the only way to save ourselves from ourselves.

17TH OCTOBER

Our need to get our heads around couchsurfing had left us without much grasp of Moscow: we’d spent much of it in a Petri dish of domesticity. Couchsurfing was meant to be the vehicle, but in Moscow, it had done the driving. I was looking forward to being in Polly’s apartment without Polly for a day. She’d despatched her friend Sasha to meet us off the train. All we knew was that her English wasn’t very good, and she wasn’t a couchsurfer.

As the train slowed down into Yekaterinburg—founded in 1721 by Catherine the Great and where, in 1918, the last Tsar and his family were murdered by the Bolsheviks—my heart sped up. Like looking at a jack-in-the-box, I was expecting the shock, but I knew I’d still jump.

Scanning the busy Friday evening platform for a young Russian woman was like watching an identity parade without witnessing the crime. But this was a redundant task—immediately outside our carriage were three coloured balloons attached to the hands of a smiling sylph with long ballerina hair and a peaches-and-cream, babydoll face.

Sasha’s uncontainable excitement proved a handy tool for cutting through any social tensions. We fell into a spontaneous group hug, giggling in idiotic communion, holding our respective balloons. After a physical tussle between us over her insistence on helping with our bags, we headed to the tram stop, engaging in much sign language, and confused yet eager communication: ‘I very dream talk of London!’

We managed to gather that she was twenty and, like Polly, halfway through a six-year journalism course. Plus, she explained, by putting an imaginary microphone up to her mouth and adding a few key words, she presented for a local news channel—we were in the company of young ambition. She had a brother and a sister, which was a lot of siblings by Russian standards: ‘My father is hero!’ she joked. She loved British and American music, but not Russian—hip-hop, lounge, Alicia Keys, Bon Jovi.

‘Cool,’ we smiled.

We feigned cheery obliviousness to the freezing, thirtyminute wait at the tram stop. Yekaterinburg had a Siberian sense of space. Large, low-rise Soviet blocks inhabited the wide, quiet streets, which were veiled in an icy, dusty mist that whispered hostility. Its cars were thick with the spit of slushy streets. But Yekaterinburg seemed less desperate than Moscow. There were fewer drunks and street folk scratching around for bread money, and a little more laughter and conversation. A small child overheard us talking, and said to us, ‘How are you? How are you?’ We were more of a novelty here, not least to Sasha.

As night drew its inky curtain across the overcast day, Sasha gave up on the tram, and held out an elegant gloved hand to hail a taxi. Three private cars pulled up in quick succession, and then drove off.

‘This is how is be Russian woman,’ she sighed. ‘They say, ‘Oh, you beautiful woman and then…’’ She finished her sentence by motioning a brush-off.

Eventually, we were delivered, via a muddy, rutted track, to an uninvitingly dark and vast residential estate in Central Yekaterinburg, filled with sad, skeletal trees—the perfect horrormovie set.

That is, until we passed through the grim, dingy stairwell. Inside, it was as if we’d booked into a boutique hotel: all darkwood, floor-to-ceiling wardrobes, blonde-wood floorboards and plum organza curtains. It exuded the distinctive smell of newness.

‘It’s all Ikea,’ Sasha said, proudly.

The bed was pleasingly huge, a king-size surrounded by a dinky white wooden fence and cornflower-blue flocked wallpaper, straight out of Elle Deco. Or Ikea.

Returning my stare, and motionless on its hind legs was a rat, dull brown and threadbare, right in the middle of the floor. Behind bars, thankfully. We approached with caution, eyeing it suspiciously. Sasha, meanwhile, skipped into the kitchen and grabbed a thick red dictionary (or ‘diary’, as she called it). ‘Please make what home!’ she grinned, reading from its pages. Then she skipped to the cage and fished out the rat. ‘Hello DouDou!’ She thrust it towards me. ‘Hello Fleur!’ I reluctantly fingered its coarse, matt coat, but soon stopped. Then she walked over to the bed, and lowered DouDou on to it. It scampered to the edge. I traced its path without blinking, yet it disappeared. I stared hard at the bedcovers. Eventually, they rippled: it had burrowed underneath.

Pinned to the fridge on squared paper was a note from Polly:

Hi guys! You are Welcome! Well, now you’ve reached the destination and I hope you’ll feel yourself like home.

I don’t know in what my flat is because I’m still in Turkey. I hope Sasha keeped it well. There are two most things you need now!

the bed I hope you see it :-)

and the supermarket (about 3 minutes by on foot…)

[she’d drawn a map.]

So, I will arrive in the morning of 19th and I won’t explain you anything else because I hope to see you soon.

Enjoy your first night in Yekaterinburg.

Polly

Sasha hopped into hostess action. Taking leaves from a chic, artisan-looking brown paper bag, she brewed a fragrant floral tea, then interleaved some slices of tomato and bland Russian cheese on top of slices of black rye bread. She neatly sliced an orange, an apple, a pear and a banana and fanned them out on a white Ikea plate (our first taste of fruit this trip).

‘Heat, heat!’ she urged, adding, ‘I can’t heat’

‘Why not?’

‘I used to be model but too fat,’ she cried.

I checked her out there and then. Her skinny-cut Hilfiger jeans—no more than a size ten—were cutely crammed, but fat? No. Who had she been modelling for? Amongst others, the Yekaterinburg Journal. She could afford an apple slice.

Sasha certainly had a lot of energy stored somewhere. She broke into song (it sounded neither British nor American) and danced as if stirring a giant saucepan with both hands. Ollie and I were rather more sedate (or shy), watching the show. We needed a Wi-Fi zone, so she suggested we went to Rosy Jane, an ‘English’ pub where she used to work on ‘Face Kontrol’. Face Kontrol was Russia’s ‘survival of the fittest’ entry-selection process in its clubs and bars, where ‘fit’ could be measured in cosmetics consumption. Sasha rose to the occasion with a thick mask of make-up over her perfect complexion and pulled on Polly’s black patent-leather knee-high boots. From what we’d seen in Moscow, you weren’t a real Russian girl without them.

The door-bitch deemed Ollie and me too sportif but Sasha managed to sway her.

Inside the wood-panelled, pub-themed bar, she lit up a Parliament Light.

‘Polly no drink no drugs. I am smoking and drinking,’ she said gleefully.

She told us about a local music festival: ‘Three boys very ill,’ she said, pointing skywards. ‘Cocaine. Girls eat drugs but they control situation.’

We ordered drinks, chatted for a polite length of time, and then tried to log on, but our own private cabaret refused to stop performing.

‘Are your friends coming down?’ I asked, thinking that perhaps they could entertain her.

‘Russians work, work, work maximum—they don’t control time,’ she frowned, adding, ‘Is a Russian tradition to work when drinking.’

Or drink when working. Behind us, two office girls were dancing shamelessly on an empty dance floor.

Our Wi-Fi needs were eventually abandoned, while Sasha bounded on: ‘I will shocked that Polly hosting. Russian tradition to have Russians, but tourist never. We think you’re going to steal it.’

Ollie and I laughed in shock. But it was certainly either very amazing or very naive of Polly to agree to us being there without her when we had no references (not that she did, either).

‘My parents were worried too,’ Ollie said, understandingly, and told us how he’d had to show them our hosts’ profiles.

‘My mother looked at my father with eyes on stalks,’ he explained, ‘But my dad said, ‘These look like nice people, Jeni. Remember when we were eighteen. Hitchhiking is the same.’’

Except that couchsurfing, with its reference system and verification, was way safer.

The English pub succeeded in recreating the essence of an English Friday Night, complete with binge-drinking, elbows at the bar and insufferable disco beats, so we retreated homeward. Sasha threatened to stay the night—not, I think, to check up on us, but because she just wanted more. To my relief, she ordered a taxi and went home.

Now unobserved, Ollie and I made ourselves at home, making tea, casing the fridge (empty but for Clipper organic ground coffee) and cold-reading her white, fitted bookshelves: five Lomo cameras protectively stored in their boxes, a Super 8 and a few books (Kafka, 1984 and some Russian chick-lit). Being able to adjust to an alien environment without the added pressure of having to get along famously with our host, was a welcome reprieve. Ollie and I were now having fun.

Ollie swore that he really would rather sleep on the floor to elevate his alarmingly large leg. Meanwhile, the rat seemed to sense the presence of danger, gnawing away at the bars of his cage.

‘It’s a controversial pet,’ Ollie pointed out, ‘considering all the rat infestations in the Gulags.’

Controversial—there was a clue about our host.

Spread like a starfish across Polly’s bed and now finally alone, I read again the response from The Emperor. ‘We both know,’ he’d written. ‘I’ve been thinking the same. It makes me so sad…My soul is aching.’

This was supposedly the right response, yet it broke my heart. I indulged in that silent land of tears. By day, as couchsurfers, we were forced to live publicly and so I was forced into coping. That was actually quite useful.

18TH OCTOBER

During a spot of couchsurfing in an internet café, the person sitting next to us happened to be a fellow couchsurfer. A middleaged Australian kidult who talked too much, he was off to Krakow for a big party. He was ‘surfing’ with his Russian girlfriend after a messy divorce. It suddenly felt like we’d joined a secret society. But we had work to do, leaving gushing references for Olga and Max. Displaying true amateurishness, we closed with a kiss.

Sasha had asked us to be part of Polly’s surprise welcome home committee for six o’clock. Except that we lost half an hour to trying to locate Polly’s block from the scores of other identical beige-brick blocks, all unmarked save for their information boards by the door—all carrying identical flyers. A Ryazanov moment (as we’d had trying to locate Max’s apartment) was only spared by comparing an earlier photograph to all the doors until, finally, we had a match.

At Polly’s, Sasha and her friend Albina were creating a Post-It collage on the breakfast table in the shape of a giant, umm…

‘Da!’ shrieked Sasha, holding my hand in kittenish enthusiasm. My hand went Britishly limp. ‘It’s a ‘pennis’!’

‘Err, why?’

‘It’s our fantasy!’ she giggled.

I saw right through Ollie’s smile into his fear.

Around the apartment were orange balloons and oranges sliced into quarters (orange was Polly’s favourite colour). Who got such a homecoming after just a two-week holiday, I wondered. Was this normal in Russia, or was Polly abnormally lovely?

Eventually, out of the kitchen window, I noticed a glossy black Range Rover with blacked-out windows. It seemed to match this luxurious, modern apartment. My eyes locked on to it. Sure enough, out popped an impish, tanned girl with a confident crop and over-sized, tomato red spectacles. She looked up to her apartment and saw me. I waved at her. She waved back.

‘She’s here!’ I hissed.

The girls collapsed into a hysterical fit, started up Voyage by Milky Lasers on the laptop, and assumed the ‘surprise!’ position.

And so two hysterical girls became three, screaming, jumping, hugging. Ollie and I hesitantly joined in. Tomboyish in twisted jeans and a white T-shirt, the 20-year-old Polly burnt bright, flashing her strong, milky teeth and warm, nutty eyes. She babbled spiritedly and quickly launched into a gift ceremony. For Albina: ‘The best coffee in Turkey!’ For Sasha: Turkish Delight. She turned to us: ‘Guys, you both eat meat?’ Oh yes, we said, as if being offered the keys to paradise. Wow—a Turkish spice gift set. We in turn gave her a bottle of Agent Provocateur perfume, the last of our gift stash from London.

The rat was duly positioned on Polly’s shoulder. DouDou, Polly told us, was named after Madame DouDou from the cartoon Max & Co.

‘You haven’t seen Max & Co? Really?’ she said, haughtily.

She fed the rat some Turkish Delight direct from her own mouth, and the Polly Show began. Like small children introduced to TV for the very first time, Ollie and I were mesmerised. Polly was like a Studio Ghibli character—a super-cute, quirky heroine and an army of one.

‘I’m not a racist, but Turkey is such a stupid country,’ she said, unpacking her suitcase. ‘Turkish people are so lazy and stubborn. You only get progress in cold countries, where you have to work and think. They don’t have to think because food grows all around them.’

‘What about the Greek and Roman philosophers?’ I gently challenged her.’

‘They were the last ones to do anything intelligent,’ she sniffed.

Couchsurfing warfare was surely internecine so we laughed it off, but it soon became obvious that it didn’t matter what we said, it was still going to come. English was clearly the lingua franca here, so eventually Albina and Sasha drifted off, leaving Polly to continue uninterrupted.

Eclipsed by her energy, Ollie and I grew increasingly passive, sitting at her new dark-wood breakfast table while she danced around us, regaling us with her riotous political incorrectness. She was outrageous and opinionated; this was entertainment. We were her first couchsurfers, she explained, and she was ‘crazy’ about speaking English.

Had she received any other couchsurfing requests?

‘One Turkish guy, but I didn’t respond because Turkish men think Russian girls are prostitutes. Saying yes would be saying yes to sex.’

We howled with laughter.

‘I hate Italian men because they stare at Russian women like we’re prostitutes. And they are so impulsive; their feelings are too much.’ She pulled a comedy face. ‘I think I’m talking too much.’

But it didn’t stop—the dynamic had been set. After jumping from topic to topic, Polly sat us down in front of her laptop for a comprehensive presentation on her Lomo photography, and then suggested sushi: ‘I’m crazy about sushi.’ Sure, we said, by now adjusted to going with the flow—it was 10pm. We grabbed a taxi into town.

‘If you had a car,’ I asked, ‘would you give strangers a ride?’

‘Only foreigners,’ she said briskly. ‘It’s dangerous to pick up locals, even when it’s a couple—there could be sex violence.’

Declaring herself fat-, junk-, alcohol—and meat-averse (although she really missed cow’s tongue, she said), Polly liked sushi because it was about the only fun thing left. As we took our seats at Wasabi, Ollie pointed out that this would be only our third meal of the trip. Industrial foodstuffs, sweets and sufferance had been our staples. ‘It’s very bad for your bodies to live like this,’ Polly lectured crossly. She made some bossy suggestions, but quickly returned to her favourite subject: herself. It was such a problem, she told us, because so many guys wanted to be with her and she didn’t want to be with them. Admiration for our host soon distorted into a sense of asphyxiation. I sank into my wine—at least just listening, and not having to talk, offered some kind of respite.

Wakey, wakey: party time. We were off to Apartment, a nightclub at the top of a cinema complex, which Polly’s olderman lover owned. Arriving at Face Kontrol, she dialled her lover’s number and pushed her phone at the door police. They spoke to the phone and waved us through. To the tune of European hip-hop and old-skool funk, Ollie and I threw back vodka shots with her art student friends in amongst the garconchic guys and vintage-clad ladies. Polly threw some expert shapes for a while and then became entwined in a lover’s knot. Ollie and I made do with her friends—we had an instant gang.

‘I am an architecture,’ said a blonde, goateed Russian with yellow-lensed spectacles. ‘But the Russians who have money have no taste, so we are not being asked to build nice buildings.’

Crutches made good dance floor props—Ollie danced unrestrainedly for what looked like way too long. Should I have said something? Nothing he didn’t already know.

At 4am, we walked home to a soliloquy on how Polly had spent two years playing the Long Game to win over her lover. Unfortunately, she had to put up with me as a bedfellow that night for some top-to-tail action. My breather from Polly was sleeping with Polly.

19TH OCTOBER

‘So guys, how do you feel after all that alcohol?’

‘Fine!’ we replied, in grinning defiance.

I bounded out of bed to put the kettle on.

‘Actually, we don’t drink from the tap.’

‘But it’s okay boiled, no?’

‘The government says yes but I say no.’

Faced with this planet-sized ego, my British diplomacy could hold its banks no more. I started experiencing inappropriate compulsions to take her on; the self-doubt that had bothered me in Moscow had summarily been pushed aside.

Breakfast was porridge and politics. What did Polly think of Medvedev? Did Russia regard him as Putin’s puppet?

‘I met a DJ from Munich who said the same thing, but the election was shown as democratic—maybe it was the truth that lots of people voted for him.’

‘Yes’, we said, ‘but there are ways of pushing the electorate.’

‘My generation is tired of politics,’ she said with a brush of the hand. ‘We don’t have a newspaper culture here. The most common news in Russia is rumour. It goes back to Soviet times when the only information was rumour. People would meet in the kitchen, where you’d be sure that no one would go to the government. It still exists now: people don’t want their brain to be—what’s the word—pressed?’

Did she feel Asian? Apparently not, despite Yekaterinburg sitting within Russia’s Asian border. It seemed all Russians wanted to be seen as European. She explained that in Yekaterinburg there were many Tajiks, Dagestanis and Chechens, selling vegetables in the market.

‘I’mnot a racist,’ she said, arching an eyebrow, ‘but I don’t like them. They’re Muslims—they have absolutely different minds. They are used to war so they can’t think any other way. They don’t trust people.And I don’t like theway they treatRussianwomen.We are nothing to them. They make a lot of sex violence in the night.’

She flicked on the TV to check the outside temperature: 8°C. Polly was going to take us on a guided tour. She’d done a couple of days’ training as a guide—that definitely boosted her couchsurfing worth.

‘Polly, do you mind if we take a taxi to wherever you’re taking us?’ asked Ollie. ‘It’s hard to walk any distance.’

‘But it won’t work with taxis—we’re going to lots of places and they’re all close.’

It was even harder for Ollie to put his foot down.

So, in perfect, crisp sunshine, we were escorted to Yekaterinburg’s finest by our own private guide. We passed the Black Rose monument to soldiers lost in Russia’s Afghanistan War in the 1980s; a traditional, wooden Russian house, home to a fringe theatre; the early 19th-century Ascension Church that survived the communists; a lemon-yellow stucco merchant’s mansion handed over to the Young Pioneers; and across to the Church of the Blood. Built in 2003, on the site where the last Tsar and his family were murdered, there were plenty of hip young Russians inside, praying solemnly in rather unhip headscarves and skirts. Religion was very fashionable here, Polly explained.

‘I think it’s stupid so much money was put into this building. This is a place that makes you look to God, not talk to him.’

At the Metenkov Photography Museum we found an exhibition from a recent local competition.

‘Did you enter?’ I asked, one eye on a photo of an overweight, topless construction worker.

‘Yes, but I didn’t like the judges—they were so conservative. They didn’t even say anything about my entry.’

I rolled my eyes rebelliously. We took a tram to Lenin Prospekt, location of the City Hall where her mother worked. Just outside, a beat-up old car drove into the back of another. Both drivers laughed and sped off. Polly pointed out her mother’s office—as the city’s culture minister, she had her own driver, she told us, and a new black Volga.

‘The beautiful thing about couchsurfing,’ I said, ‘is that you form emotional attachments with cities.’

‘But you didn’t hear about the secret Russian soul?’ she said, as if I hadn’t heard of Russia. ’You really didn’t hear that we have so great literature, that we are so open-hearted?’

‘No,’ I retaliated—that wasn’t the point. My point was that our memories wouldn’t be of architecture and facts, but of personalities and homes. Couchsurfing gave a place the human touch—that could happen anywhere, and it certainly didn’t take a legacy of literature to enable it. Polly’s phone rang.

‘Christ,’ I muttered darkly to Ollie, ‘I can’t handle any more arrogance, nationalism or bigotry. Oh the irony of the Russians thinking they’re the best.’

My British pride was boiling. Ollie defused me with the appropriate pacifiers, while I consoled myself with the fact that at least when hosts could be tolerated no more, it would soon enough be time to leave.

I determined to behave and suspend my ego for our last supper—Polly took us to a traditional Urals canteen to carb-load before our 25-hour train journey that night to Novosibirsk. She explained all the strange, muddy offerings, helping us to choose rich, oily Uzbek plov (lamb pilau with carrots, cumin and paprika), pelmeni (meat dumplings), shredded pork in aspic, and sweet pancake filled with horridly sour, granulated milk. Good behaviour was productive—I was sweet to her, she was sweet back; it gained its own momentum. I nearly lost the plov when she asked, ‘So Fleur, what do you do for a living?’ After all this time.

One classic Polly one-liner came as an unexpected afterdinner treat when we popped into the supermarket: to my offer to carry her five-litre vat of water, she replied, ‘I’m not a feminist—men should carry heavy things for women. It’s not good for women before they are pregnant.’

Priceless. Polly was a raging feminist.

CHAPTER 4 NOVOSIBIRSK: LOSING A LIMB

‘Hello Ravil! Just to say that we’re on board our train to Novosibirsk and are looking forward to meeting you tomorrow at midnight…could you just confirm that you’ve received this?’

This was the third unanswered text message that we’d sent our prospective couch. We were hoping Ravil would be our fourth host, but we’d had precisely no replies. The probability of something going wrong—given that the premise of couchsurfing was suspended on the very delicate bridge of altruism between strangers; and that Ravil was holding a Kalashnikov in his profile picture—was soaring. As novices, this seemed like an impending catastrophe. But first we had to exorcise the electrifying effects of Polly. Now at a safe distance, she amused me—surely better provocative and caffeinated than thumb-twiddlingly bland. The problem was that couchsurfing’s doses were either overdoses or none at all. Besides, she’d put us up, and in luxury—as our host, she was the sacred cow.

Ollie elevated his leg in a tea-towel sling—the compulsory walking tour hadn’t helped; it was obvious that he was hiding the pain.

‘You should seriously get your leg checked out, Ollie,’ I said. ‘You might be doing it permanent damage. Maybe we can ask Ravil to help.’ After all, Ravil was a 23-year-old medical student who worked nights at an ‘emergency station’ in a town renowned for science. Akademgorodok, meaning ’academy town’, was Novosibirsk’s ‘utopian science city’, purpose-built in 1957 and considered to be Siberia’s educational and scientific centre. Ravil lived, sometimes with his mother, in a one-room apartment. It was staggering that people were happy to share such a small space. It was also an indication of Novosibirsk’s limited couchsurfing choices.

20TH OCTOBER

We awoke in Siberia. Were the rest of Russia to disappear, it would still be, at thirteen-million kilometres squared, the largest country on earth. There was a text from Ravil: ‘ok’. Just okay? It was both a relief and a jolt—no catastrophe, but not exactly much love. All his communication had sounded alluringly bastard-like: our gun man was handsome, intelligent and dangerous. The tension mounted.

We hurtled over Stalin’s mass graves, the iron ore and the permafrost, and spent the day staring out at the monotony of miles and miles of nothing: barren, prehistoric steppe and great tracts of spruce and birch taiga, occasionally interrupted by hopeless, broken railside settlements and the odd, sky-choking industrial plant. I zoned out into the waiting abyss in preparation for the next onslaught. Because we’d be arriving at midnight, Ravil had promised (or threatened) ‘a bit sleepless night’.

‘Fleur! Ollie!’

Standing statuesquely outside our carriage on the stroke of midnight was Ravil, tall and lean in jeans and a beige puffa jacket. Black flashing eyes looked out from beneath a moose-grey beanie. He smiled briefly. I inexplicably squeezed his arm, while the boys shook hands. Ravil led us through Novosibirsk’s imposing Stalinist station and out into an empty car park encrusted with a sparkling frost. Russia’s answer to the Fiat Panda—an ocean-blue and very muddy Oka—awaited.

‘It’s the last Soviet car,’ explained Ravil in a soft, Americanised accent. ‘I bought it for $1,250—hardly any works and there’s probably twenty kilograms of dirt on it.’

‘Fuck.’ Ravil’s engine stalled in front of a police patrol car, right in the middle of a monster junction resembling the confluence of four motorways. After a brief Kubrick moment (specifically, Wendy trying to flee Overlook Hotel in The Shining), the car started…and stalled…and started, as it did for the rest of the journey. Similarly, with much prompting, Ravil gave us his potted history. I focused on him furtively in the rear-view mirror while he told us he was a Tatar, a Turkic people originally from the Gobi Desert. It sounded awfully romantic. He was born and raised in south Kazakhstan, and came to Novosibirsk, Russia’s third largest city, to study, ignoring his family’s wish for him to study in Kazakhstan. It was a child’s right to ignore his parents, he said powerfully. Besides, he was ‘very clever’ and won prizes for biology. His father had passed away a few years ago, and after his death, Ravil’s mother, a seamstress, joined him in Novosibirsk.

So could he explain the Kalashnikov?

‘It’s a filter,’ he said brusquely.

Against what?

‘There are two types of couchsurfers. Those who judge on first impressions, and those who think about things. There are too many couchsurfers who say how crazy they are. Psychologists will tell you that they’re compensating for being pale.’

Right-o, we said, with pointed blandness. And, err, where was the gun now?

‘It’s from a little training I did in Russian army. I only had to do it for three weeks because I’m doctor. I don’t know how to use it—I’m pacifist.’

Somehow though, the presence of the gun never quite left him.

We arrived at his ‘open-air garage’ at the hospital where he worked. ‘I parked so right by the wall,’ he chuckled, ‘because my fuel lid is broke.’ Three belligerent guard dogs ran for us but Ravil said something to them and they loped off. Ollie asked if we could take a taxi to his, but Ravil said no, firmly: ‘By the time we find the taxi, we’ll be at home.’ He set off into the darkness, walking fast and with purpose, like a lone knight. Ollie was instantly left behind, but it was in my interests to make Ravil wait for Ollie—it was much easier to chat with back-up.

Walking down a dark, potholed dirt track, we passed rows of battered tin-can garages.

‘Any Homer Simpson activity down here?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ Ravil replied airily, like I shouldn’t need to ask. ‘It’s well-known fact that Russians drink in their garages to escape their wives.’

He then told us about his $500-a-month job (the best paid at his level, apparently) screening A&E patients: ‘I must decide what do the people need—maybe they’re too drunk, too drugged, maybe they just need go home.’

Novosibirsk’s health sounded pretty wretched, but, he reassured us, ‘because we have such large country, disease doesn’t spread like it does in Britain.’

Perhaps that went for social disease too.

I swooned when he told us he was building a house in a village seventy kilometres away. Was that usual? To build your own house in Siberia?

‘My father was engineer,’ Ravil said, proudly. ‘I built one house with my father in Kazakhstan. I don’t see any difference between making a computer, a car or a house.’

Ravil had borrowed his friend’s couchsurfers to dig there at the weekend: ‘There will always be space for surfers there.’ Factoring couchsurfing into his house’s blueprint—was it naivety or vision? Ravil was nothing if not resourceful.

‘Is that a door you’re sleeping on?’ I asked, when we arrived at his bedsit in an unloved Soviet tenement building on a seemingly infinite estate.

‘Two half-doors,’ he said, with relish. ‘It’s hard—I like it.’

The doors rested on two mismatched chairs at each end of his ‘bed’. In fact, all the furniture was similar to what you might find in a skip. Either Ollie or I would be sleeping on the floor, though these kinds of facts were made explicit on the couchsurfing site. I stuck my head round the oversized wardrobe in the middle of the room to find, hidden in the darkness, an old red sofa.

‘It’s Mama’s bunker,’ he smiled.

Even his mother slept on a sofa. Ravil’s entire apartment seemed to be a bunker.

Having totally overlooked buying anything in Yekaterinburg, Ollie and I had privately agreed to re-gift Polly’s spices—after all, we couldn’t travel round Asia with a spice set.

‘Thank you,’ Ravil said, scrutinising them before adding imperiously, ‘We have all these spices here.’

The spices languished by the front door for the duration of our stay.

‘You want Russian soup? It’s Mama’s gift.’

Ravil led us into his phonebox-sized kitchen, lined with smetana and yoghurt pots hatching herbs, lettuces and other edibles. With only room for two, Ollie wedged an armchair into the doorway. Ravil passed him a plank to use as a tray, and we broke plump, disc-shaped Uzbek bread together, dunking it in his mother’s wholesome chicken soup. I forgot to concentrate on taste, however, as my senses were distracted by the view: strong, hero’s cheekbones, fine olive skin, kitten-tail eyebrows. His hairline was maturely undulated for a 23-year-old, but it added extra gravitas to an already serious soul. The grey patches under his eyes reminded me of that sleepless night that might be waiting for us. I offered to make tea—this ritual at least was a small claiming of kitchen territory—and Ollie went for a smoke on the balcony.

‘Don’t hurt my bike!’ Ravil yelled, jokingly, but not.

I was caught up in my own jarring, one-way sexual tension. This one-room imprisonment, every nuance under scrutiny, didn’t help. But it was the diktat on Ravil’s profile that wouldn’t leave me: he only wanted travellers—not tourists (’even hardcore ones’). Could we stretch to being travellers? We’d needed a couch, so of course we’d say what he wanted to hear. But if comparing stories with travellers was Ravil’s motive for couchsurfing, we were going to disappoint. Couchsurfing was a host’s market—they could afford to stipulate conditions. Us guests had to be much more accepting.

It was time for the slideshow. Ravil opened up a photo on his computer of himself lying in the middle of an empty road—the classic hitchhiker pose—and began to conduct a sermon on Russian hitchhiking.

‘When you hitchhike, everyone is happy to see you,’ he said wistfully. ‘You don’t need money, you don’t need a bag. If you think you need something, it’s your problem.’

He took his Axe deodorant and sprayed a squirt on to a lit match, creating a jet of fire close to our ears. It would have been laughable were it not for Ravil’s silent command over us.

Russia had a hitchhiking guru, Ravil told us, Anton Krotov—a 32-year-old modern-day Kerouac (who looked like the last person you would give a ride to, owing to his abundant Jesus beard). Ravil had read many of his books and followed his website, The Russian Academy of Free Travel—hitchhiking, it seemed, was cool in Russia. It transpired that hitchhikers and couchsurfers existed happily in the same Venn diagram, for both financial and philosophical reasons: both ideologies enabled a life—for free—outside the material world.

At 3am, I decided to take cover in the bathroom, multi-tasking with time out, a shower and the chance to change my clothes with modesty. It was a man’s bathroom: contents included ten cheap soaps worn down to wafers, and tools for shaving, tooth-brushing and clothes-washing. Waiting minutes for the Siberian water to heat up, I went to brush my teeth—but there was no sink in the bathroom. The apartment’s only sink was in the kitchen with a violently wobbly tap. And Russians didn’t seem to believe in bathmats, or cleaning, so I was left not knowing where to put my clean feet.

At 4.20am came the surprise announcement, ‘Let’s sleep’. I silently rejoiced. I’d been dreading staying up all night on the back of ten days’ junk sleep, but Ollie and I had both settled into our submissive role in the couchsurfing dynamic. Lack of sleep was the worst thing about couchsurfing. I was supplied with a stained, tobacco-coloured, canvas camp bed (‘It’s called a raskladushka—‘little folding thing’’). Ollie took the sleeping mat for his leg, and Ravil—in the grey marl T-shirt he’d been wearing that day and a tiny pair of briefs—took to his two half-doors. Somehow, I hadn’t thought what sharing a one-bedroom apartment meant: enforced intimacy. Hiding my bare, white turkey drumsticks from view behind an armchair, I tried to persuade myself it was no different to being on the beach together. I then made a dive for my bed, which was so close to Ravil’s that we were practically spooning. Sleep would evade me that night.

A voice came from the darkness: ‘I have no problem being nude.’

‘Are you preparing us for breakfast in the buff?’ I joked.

A pause.

‘I try to swim nude when I can. My girlfriend and I like to swim nude in the lake.’ His words hung in the air as we fell silent. Finally, the darkness afforded us some privacy. So he had a girlfriend—in this cloying proximity, that was a massive relief. Ravil sent late-night texts while I developed an intense hatred for my bed. The head was too high so I slipped down like water, forming a pool of patheticness in the middle, while the metal frame boxed me in like a caged animal. Growl.

21ST OCTOBER

Breakfast was sweet bread and soup supplied by Ravil, and black Earl Grey supplied by us, slurped unselfconsciously noisily by him. We booked in to go to the hospital that evening for Ollie’s leg. Ollie rolled up his jeans and we all inspected the lump. Ravil took his history, assumed a grave face and said something about infection. I wasn’t worried—I just assumed they’d give him some drugs and he would get better.

By day, Ravil’s block was the colour of a Chernobyl sunset. It was built in the 1940s, apparently, quite possibly the last decade it had looked clean. The foot-wide drainpipes that ran straight on to the pavements now spilled shards of ice. We wanted the cold; seeking extremes, this pleased us. We took a tram to check out the city, through those motorway-wide streets, past the city’s oppressive Stalinist architecture and numerous industrial cranes. Novosibirsk was a functional, industrial Soviet city, with a population of 1.4 million, a plutonium plant, a civil aviation factory and lots of mining. Novosibirsk—or Rio De Novo, as Ravil so ironically called it—was twinned with Doncaster, no less. But couchsurfing opened up a new prism on unattractive towns: it gave them soul.

On board the tram were passengers of Mongol extraction. We were edging nearer to Russia’s autonomous Buryat Republic and, of course, Mongolia. And, yes, both places had couches for us. The Buryatian capital, Ulan-Ude, was our next stop—some 2,300 kilometres east of Novosibirsk. We’d eventually managed to persuade a young Buryatian girl that it didn’t matter that her English was bad and that she lived in the suburbs—we had a couch at least.

Back in Novosibirsk, a pattern was establishing itself in our communications:

Me: ‘So is…Russia/Siberia/Novosibirsk/couchsurfing…?’

Ravil: [an appropriate answer].

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

Me: ‘So is…Russia/Siberia/Novosibirsk/couchsurfing…?’

Otherwise it was: ‘Let’s stop and wait for Ollie.’

I spent half my time looking backwards at Ollie, as he lagged behind, beaten by Ravil’s turbo pace. Sleep-deprived, I would have preferred not to make conversation, but that was a privilege reserved for better friends. Plus, efforts seemed so unequal—like Polly, Ravil showed little curiosity for us.

‘So is there a Siberian flavour to Novosibirsk?’

‘All of Russia is the same—no one cares about architecture or art. They just want somewhere to live.’

‘So does Siberia want independence?’

‘Moscow won’t let it. There is a place in Siberia, Yakutia—it’s bigger than Kazakhstan—and it pays fifteen per cent ofMoscow’s taxes from gold, diamonds and brilliants.’

‘But does Siberia want independence?’

‘The people are too busy to think about it. If you have time, you think, ‘I want a car, I want a girl, I want financial independence.’’

‘So, umm, does everyone get the “clause” treatment?’ I said, referring to certain stipulations in his emails.

‘Of course,’ Ravil said, flatly.

He’d once had five Polish people staying, who’d come back with seven bottles of wine.

‘I said to them, did you not read that wine was forbidden?’ They had a pretty big dose. I don’t want unexpected troubles—it’s important to be safe in your house.’

I very quickly determined not to get on the wrong side of Ravil. The pressure to please this hard-to-please man who had such particular ideas was suffocating.

Ravil was no eager tour guide. We passed by an immense, icily sterile Lenin Square, home to Russia’s largest opera house (‘I hate opera’) and some dwarfingly large constructivist statues of Soviet workers, soldiers and, of course, Lenin. But it wasn’t until we returned home that I read in my book we’d crossed the very geographical centre of Russia, honoured by the golden domed Chapel of St Nicholas. Nor that the Arctic-bound Ob River, on the north bank of which we found a deserted skate park, was the world’s fourth longest. But I sensed that Ravil wasn’t a couchsurfer out of city pride, but for political reasons—he abhorred money. Perhaps he’d always choose to sleep on doors.

At the prescribed hour, 9pm, we went to A&E—not because Ravil assessed it as an emergency, but because this was the most efficient route. Ravil took Ollie behind closed doors, leaving me in a Soviet-era mint-green waiting room and a tableau vivant of rather un-vivant Russians. A jaundiced miner in leather boots and dungarees covered in a thin film of coal dust was holding a urine sample; another rocked drunkenly, hassling any medic that passed. An hour passed and the jaundiced miner was wheeled past in the recovery position. Ollie wasn’t waiting, he was being seen to, so what was taking so long? From beyond, I heard the sound of grown men screaming. What if one of the screams was Ollie?

Standing only in his pants, his hiking boots (covered with blue plastic bootees) and a seeping bandage where the lump had been, Ollie was back, his face waxy and drawn. Ravil was standing at his side, looking solemn. My heart started thudding.

‘We have to go home, Fleur. They found puss on my leg and it could spread to the bone. They collected thirteen millilitres of puss. That’s a lot.’

Suddenly it was an emergency. I bit back the tears. Ollie’s leg was in serious trouble, so was it wrong to feel sorry for myself? Instantly I was furious with Ollie’s London consultant; he should never have been declared fit. And ‘go home’? Did I really have to go home after eleven days? There was nothing wrong with me. Or was it because Ollie didn’t think it wise for me to travel solo through Russia and China? The marbles had been released on to my path, yet this was Ollie’s emergency—we had to sort him out. I was electrified with panic.

In fits and starts, we picked our way back to Ravil’s, whose pace, incredibly—or revealingly—still didn’t slow for Ollie. We stopped at an all-night pharmacy (it was now midnight) for antibiotics and water.

‘Why are you buying water?’ Ravil roared.

Ollie and I both cowered.

‘You can drink tap water. It’s just marketing myth that you can’t drink it.’

We found excuses to defend our purchases and hit a wall of silence for the rest of the walk home—no, Ollie couldn’t get a taxi. Ravil really had become Siberian, with his intolerance for spoilt, Western softness.

What to do? We were about to book flights home, so I had make a decision, fast. I hated travelling alone. I subscribed to the Noah’s Ark school of travel—it should be done in pairs. But I, supposedly, was the lucky one—quitting wasn’t permitted. I’d waited too long for this adventure. I rearranged my face into one of survival: ‘Ollie, I can’t come home with you.’

He understood: ‘I just thought you’d want to.’

In a way, I did.

At home, Ravil sat down at his computer, slipped on some enormous headphones, and said, ‘I’m off to crash cars.’

Ollie’s flight home was urgently arranged—there was one to Moscow at 7am. At 4.30am, Ollie and I left for Novosibirsk Airport: I was going to cling on to him for as long as I could. The boys exchanged a brotherly hug and I stuffed a packet of biscuits into my bag—Ollie and I were ravenous, and biscuits were easier than asking Ravil for food. But I still hadn’t adjusted to the news. I bolted from our farewell at the airport—an emotional downpour felt imminent.

In total silence, blinking like a pit pony, Ravil let me back in at 6.30am. Well now we were in a Pinter-esque tension, an unbearable ache of awkwardness in his too-close-for-comfort bedsit. The camp bed had been put away so, trying to be no trouble, I took to the floor—it couldn’t be any less comfortable.

I lay awake, rigid on my mat—even the most microscopic movement would create an abominable rustle. With the feeling that Ollie and I had taken way more than we could give, I resolved to get up early, whether I’d slept or not, and get out. I wanted out. My train to Ulan-Ude was the next night at 1am; I would deal with the day alone. I had to nurse my crumbling emotional landscape in private. Bereft, lonely, empty, I pined for The Emperor. Ollie’s friendship had so persuasively concealed the void within, but now they were both far away, I so craved what I couldn’t have. Wanting what was out of reach—it was so predictable.

22ND OCTOBER

A text from Ollie: ‘The air stewardess just had to rip a hidden can of beer out of the hands of the man on the plane seat in front of me because he’s drinking before take-off. He looks like Rumpelstiltskin and she looks like Sharon off Eastenders. Quite a tug of war. Niet. Da. Niet. Da…’

I sat up in bed, stiff like the floorboards responsible for my aches. Behind me, I could hear that Ravil was awake, scrolling through his mobile—it felt strange that he hadn’t acknowledged the new day and said good morning. I offered my salutations, and packed up in paranoid silence for a hasty exit. I now felt completely naked.

‘Are you hungry? I suppose you are,’ Ravil said kindly.

I supposed I was. Breakfast was Mama’s cold beef stew and boiled potato. Halfway through, Ravil put his in the microwave without inviting me to follow suit, so I went along with the cold version, as if it were just how I liked it. I found a hair in amongst the potatoes, covered it with another potato and announced myself full. Instead of eating, I mined him for travel tips on Kazakhstan.

‘Kazakhstan is extreme,’ he said, with finality.

I tried to look unfazed, like a real traveller.

‘It’s extremely hospitable but extremely poor. I only travel with what I need.’

I felt vulnerable.

My sister once locked our new puppy in a room with the old cat, so that they could get to know each other. Couchsurfing’s forced friendships reminded me of her experiment. Like cats and dogs, Ravil and I were similarly opposed. As he accompanied me to the station’s left luggage hall, he seemed happy in contemplation (or social retirement). I, however, needed to feign some kind of social order, so I babbled away about London life: politics, the underground, Russian oligarchs—wasn’t this couchsurfing’s cultural exchange? His standard response was an impregnable ‘mm-mm’. Sometimes I’d repeat myself, thinking he was saying ‘pardon’, only to get another ‘mm-mm’. But I blundered on, because wasn’t it worse to be both needy and mute?

Left luggage passed without incident, and he sent me off in the right direction for a day of organisation in Ravil’s preferred Wi-Fi zone, KFC.

‘I feel a bit stressed,’ I confessed, my voice cracking.

‘At least you are stressed,’ he replied, wisely.

I forcibly hugged him, squeezing out all of the human contact I could, and turned away quickly. It was time to leave, yet I wasn’t ready to be alone. While Ollie was returning to London to look after his limb, I felt like I’d lost one. Like an unfledged chick flung out of the nest, I suddenly felt all alone.

I had the number for Nick, another local couchsurfing host who was, according to his references, ‘the coolest dude in Novosibirsk’ (Ollie and I had requested his couch, but he wasn’t sure if he’d be in town for the ‘third decade of October’). I invited him to KFC for a junk-food hit. Meanwhile, I spent the day online, trying to feel connected. I broadcast the news of Ollie’s departure to all, and begged for reinstatement of communications with The Emperor. I felt too feeble to try and move on—I needed that lifeline. He wrote straight back, offering to come out, as a friend, as ‘whatever’. But couchsurfing wasn’t for everyone, and it wasn’t for him. He was way too uncompromising and dominant; he was, after all, The Emperor. Right in the middle of KFC, I wept great streams of longing. I wanted to go home, but defeat was inadmissible. It wasn’t as if I were the world’s first solo explorer. Perhaps couchsurfing would look after me, as I bounced across Asia on lily pads of hospitality, falling into the arms of kind hosts. At least that was the hypothesis.

Ollie, meanwhile, was sending live feeds from London. He’d gone directly to his consultant, who said things weren’t as bad as they’d seemed: the abscess would have eventually burst outwards, into the air, rather than inwards, poisoning his blood. Not so bad? That wouldn’t have been our response in the Mongolian wilderness. He’d have to have the titanium removed at a later stage, and, for the time being, have consultations every other day. His doctor had found seaweed stuffed into the holes the Russians had made in his leg, a pub gem best known after the event when all is well. Under strict instructions to rest up, Ollie was going to be surfing his own sofa for a while. We were both miserable.

Well, what do you know? Donagh, the Irish architect we’d met in Moscow, walked into KFC as the couchsurfing guest of Nick, a Shrinky-Dinked Russian graphic designer with long blond dreads, a goatee and earrings.

‘Ach, you’re no more vulnerable here than in real life,’ reassured Donagh, once I’d poured my story all over them in one breathless torrent.

I secretly leant on Donagh and Nick, vampirically milking their positivity and wisdom. Donagh had been surfing since Moscow: ‘So that people can take me to bars,’ he explained, cradling a pint of KFC beer. ‘I don’t want to stay in alone reading my book—Russia isn’t very friendly to outsiders but couchsurfers are leftist enough to open the door.’

Nick was one such specimen. ‘I’ve had thirty or forty people at my place since June,’ he said. ‘And I’d host someone for long time if they’re in a special situation, like trying to get a job.’

There were people who surfed for a whole year, they told me, and there was ‘over-couchsurfing’. Donagh recounted how one Russian girl in Moscow extended a two-week stay to a year because she didn’t want to pay the capital’s high rents. But her host—Russia’s legendary Country Ambassador—turned it to his advantage, essentially using her as his PA. This was the alternative economy.

For the first time I felt part of something bigger: the couchsurfing community. We were strangers, yet we had an instant bond: we all shared similar experiences and principles. What’s more, Donagh had met Yvonne in Yekaterinburg, and would be in Beijing at the same time as me. I was on a couchsurfing trail! That might devalue the concept for some, but for me, the discovery was a happy one—this was a mobile community. And I saw couchsurfing through other, more experienced, eyes: I realised that Ollie and I had been muddling along in the dark. Nick and Donagh gave me a frame of reference.

For two hours, my loneliness had been suspended. At 11.30pm, Nick and Donagh saw me off to the station. Blessed by serendipity and topped up with kindness, I felt emotionally nourished. My hypothesis was looking promising.

CHAPTER 5 ULAN-UDE: TO HEALTH! TO LOVE! TO VODKA!

A colossal, cabbagey babushka was cradling a potato sack like a baby. The potato sack shook to reveal the wiry, grey head of a small mutt. A defeated and dusty old man—in pitch-perfect Chekhovian tragedy—held his troubled brow in bloodied, swollen hands. A grubby street urchin shamelessly prodded the shoulders of every man, woman and child in his way, holding out his artful hands. I was at Novosibirsk station, waiting for my forty-hour train to Ulan-Ude. Without Ollie, I was en garde. Without Ollie, I realised, I was engaged—Russia had come alive. What I found reminded me to count my blessings.

In my cramped cabin, two Russian workers had already claimed the emotional space. Wrung out, I meekly clambered on to the top bunk and attempted to hibernate. My tears seemed to have given me a cold: I sneezed. ‘Bud zdorova [bless you],’ said one of the workers, gruffly. I looked down. He was wearing an unconvincing black nylon wig; the other had a heavy Scouser ’tache and kind eyes. ‘Chai?’ offered the ’tache. And so began a most unlikely friendship, conducted through my increasingly clammy dictionary and sign language. They were truck drivers from Dikson, deep within the Russian Arctic Circle. Was my mother not worried? Did I have a Kazakh dictionary? Have these wafers! No thanks. Have these wafers! Okay! Where was I staying? ‘I’m staying with a friend,’ I said. I repeated those words in my head: I had a friend—of sorts—waiting for me in a new city. That was a powerful feeling.

Clutching an in-case-of-emergency address in Dikson, I turned in at 3.30am, perplexed as to why my berth buddies were happy to share their night and supplies with me. We weren’t used to such hospitality in London’s individualistic, post-Thatcher society. As I looked at my rations-for-one, I wondered if it were me, unable to think beyond the self, that was uncivilised.

24TH OCTOBER

After a day of hyper-sleep, I was starting to come round from the shock. The Russians had left to drive trucks, and I was alone again. I thought of Ravil—he had given his time, his food, his place and his philosophy. Surely the insight into Russian life would long outlive memories of silly social anxiety.

I found it difficult to look out of the window; the Great Empty Steppe mirrored my sense of isolation. However, out there, edged by lonely firs covered in plump blankets of snow was the oceanic Lake Baikal, the ‘blue eye of Siberia’. As the deepest lake on earth, the largest freshwater lake by volume, and—thanks to its self-purifying properties—holder of one-fifth of the world’s drinking water, Lake Baikal was, to the Buryatian people, the Sacred Sea. The Buryatians—a traditionalist Mongol people numbering just a million, who practised both Buddhism and Shamanism (despite Soviet efforts)—respected nature like a religion.

I was very pleased with my couchsurfing find in Ulan-Ude, a 25-year-old eastern Buryatian girl called Zhenya. While western Buryats had been ‘Russified’, dumping nomadism for agriculture, eastern Buryats were more traditional and closer to the Mongols. But I didn’t know much about Zhenya—her profile was scant and new—except that her family had, at some stage, swapped nomadism for the suburbs. I was eager for an ersatz Ollie and some shanti love, that beneficent Buddhist practice of forbearance and forgiveness. But having forgotten to get a gift in the ‘excitement’, and about to arrive with a lot of needs (laundry, tickets to Mongolia and Vladivostok, internet access), it all felt a bit take, take, take. Again.

I was floundering on the platform, lost in a sea of strangers, when Zhenya pulled me to safety. I looked up at her. Tall and beautiful, with long, glossy sable hair, and narrow, Mongol eyes smouldering with kohl, she smiled graciously like a Buryatian goddess. She even had a retinue of three young European males.

‘Bernat, Albert, David,’ she introduced, in a honeyed Russian accent.

‘A-ha!’ I exclaimed. ‘You must be the Spanish firemen.’ News of their journey had preceded them—we were due to share the same Vladivostok host. I was right back on the trail.

We piled into Zhenya’s silver Toyota Camry Lumiere. I eyed the Buddhist charm hanging from the rear-view mirror as we tore home, skidding on black ice and dodging pot-holes by veering on to the wrong side of the road. Conversation fell to the three musketeers and me. Actually—as they were quick to point out—they were Catalan, not Spanish, from Barcelona.

‘I never wanted a Russian flag,’ said Bernat, the selfappointed spokesperson, owing to his superior English. ‘But I would like a Buryatian one. We have sympathy for Buryatia under Moscow’s centralised control.’

We were so immersed in conversation that both the view and Zhenya’s silence were overlooked. Chastened, I tried to chat with her, but after repeating myself and even trying out some Russian (to which she pulled a face of mortal horror), she finally confessed, ‘I find your accent difficult.’ Zhenya spoke American-English. English-English was niche, it seemed. She dropped her head: ‘I need to practise.’

‘We can help with that,’ I grinned.

‘That’s why you’re here!’ she said.

‘The suburbs’ were the Beverly Hills of Ulan-Ude (well, relatively speaking), at the end of an unprepossessing, three-mile dirt track. We pulled up at a large, detached house. This was my first couch not in a Soviet block. The senses were slapped hard. With the distinct aroma of pickled cabbage and charcoal smoke under my nose, I was introduced to her father, a small man of a sensei’s build with a beatific smile, and her younger brother, Sasha, who was going mountaineering with his university friends that weekend. In amongst the rush of the family running around, grabbing at ropes and high-tech outdoor equipment, Zhenya showed me my room—my own room! We’d all be going out again in twenty minutes, she told us (it was Friday night), and left to grab at ropes.

My Own Room was large and bare, with a single bed, a computer and, on the walls, two posters of models in bikinis pressed against shiny red Mercedes—the fascinating habitat of a Russian youth. As a matter of emergency, I washed my hair and changed my top (there was no washing or changing on the Trans-Siberian), and chatted to the Catalans who were sleeping in Zhenya’s vacated room next door. Worn out, they were all lying on their mattresses. This, too, was their first couchsurfing trip, and we traded tales. Some of their hosts had even met them with name placards, and one of their hosts’ boyfriends split for three days because he didn’t like couchsurfers. I instantly liked them—but then, I needed them.

We didn’t get very far on our drive into town because we were stopped by the police.

‘One of you hide!’ Zhenya urged dramatically. ‘Four in the back is illegal.’ We all simultaneously ducked. Wearing a cute leather bomber, an asymmetric black miniskirt and foxy kneehighs, she stepped out of the vehicle.

‘She never passed her driving test,’ one of the musketeers whispered. ‘Apparently Sasha knows the right people.’

Sliding back behind the wheel unscathed, Zhenya purred, ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be a woman.’ The police had been looking for drink-drivers. But the action didn’t stop there. After dropping Sasha off, there was then a near miss with a tram, which she avoided by reversing into oncoming traffic. And when trying to parallel park (a group effort), she ripped her tyre on a metal spike.

How many Spanish firefighters does it take to change a wheel? More than three evidently. ‘Don’t worry!’ they rallied. ‘We can fix this!’ They were quickly pushed aside by a local and we celebrated with a meal in a nearby Chinese café, where Zhenya’s Buryatian friends—a cousin, an ad exec, and a well-known opera singer—were waiting. There were no Russians inside—Ulan-Ude was quite the ethnic departure. Its population of 360,000 included Mongolians, Chinese labour migrants (Buryatia was close to the Chinese border), and twenty-one per cent Buryatians.

While waiting for our food, I decided to tell a perfectly relevant joke:

Me: Did you hear about the three Spanish firefighters?

Them: No.

Me: They were called Hose A, Hose B and Hose C.

Them: Oh.

Me: You know—like José! No?

Lost in translation. I distracted the table by switching focus on to Zhenya. The name ‘Zhenya’ was—like her peers’—a Russian name because they’d been born into the Soviet Union. Despite her strong Buryatian identity, Zhenya couldn’t speak Buryatian; her mother, also Buryatian, was a Russian literature and language teacher. But Zhenya knew enough to give me my Buryatian name, cecek—‘flower’. I felt like I almost belonged. Zhenya had recently returned to Ulan-Ude to look after her ill father, having been working in Moscow for three years at a Russian high-street fashion chain. ‘I miss Moscow,’ she said, her perfectly groomed brows knotting. Finding work in Ulan-Ude in the current climate was proving tough, and Ulan-Ude was not cosmopolitan, but, it seemed, the Buryatian sense of family duty took priority. I exhaled—I felt safe, and also excited. I could suspend my guard. That, as I would realise later, would prove dangerous.

‘NO!’ gasped Zhenya to the musketeers. ‘It’s not good luck to stick your fork in the bread.’

Sharing-plates of glass noodles, deep-fried pork and chubby knots of steamed bread had arrived. With food to negotiate, conversation fell to the path of least resistance: the Europeans with the Europeans, the Buryatians with the Buryatians. It felt wrong, like I preferred to talk to the firefighters. This was the ex-pat conflict. I wanted to explore new frontiers, but it was hard work. I’d instinctively slipped back into my comfort zone.

Over tea so milky it looked like just milk, the musketeers grumbled about not being able to find a decent coffee. But that was one of couchsurfing’s blessings, wasn’t it? That it broke the spell of bad habits. I was off the double-shot cappuccinos with caramel drizzle because it just wasn’t an option. I was probably kicking all sorts of habits, emotional and physical. That, unfortunately, included sleeping and washing—sometimes they weren’t available either.

‘Fasten your seatbelts!’ the firefighters insisted. We’d ditched Zhenya’s car and were in her ad-exec friend Rinchin’s gleaming Nissan Presage for a spot of ego-tourism, as he sped, tail-gated and devoured Ulan-Ude’s urban sprawl as if driving a tank. The firefighters and I volleyed fearful expletives, but they only seemed to provide the encouragement that Rinchin craved. And the emergency? We needed milk vodka, a Buryatian speciality, to toast new arrivals. Despite losing an hour, plus days off my life, to this perilous and ultimately fruitless quest, it was for the best—we were spared a night on fermented, curdled mare’s milk. Couchsurfers couldn’t say no—after all, wasn’t that why we were here, for the access to traditional delicacies?

Reprieve was short-lived. Russian vodka and balsam (a herbal vodka) would have to do. Rinchin stormed Skin Mountain, a hill studded with Buddhist prayer stones overlooking the city, for the welcome we’d been dreading: the SUV’s leather seats were then swivelled around into a cosy circle. ‘No, no, I can’t drink tonight,’ groaned Bernat. Why not? Because exactly the same thing had happened the night before. I could only wait to find out what.

‘The first toast is for respect,’ said Zhenya, pouring out six shots. Respect—that made it impossible to say no. Despite our full bellies, we were instructed to chase with huge buuzies (doughnut-sized, Buryatian dumplings). The boys gritted their teeth and ate their words. Rinchin didn’t seem remotely bothered by the drink-driving crackdown. ‘What’s the penalty?’, I asked, in undisguised disapproval. ‘A two-year ban, and if you have an accident, nine months in prison,’ he said, unmoved. I buttoned my judgment—it felt disrespectful. The toasts kept coming. To health! To love! To friends! To…The fog of forgetfulness soon descended. Suitably tanked up, Rinchin dropped us off at Metro, apparently Ulan-Ude’s best club.

I hadn’t anticipated a club because I wasn’t quite at one with the couchsurfers’ motto: Be Prepared for Anything. Despite Face Kontrol not adoring my walking boots, our association to Zhenya—a girl about town with her Moscow credentials—saw us swiftly ushered into the velvet banquettes of the VIP area. Much more vodka was bought, and we were introduced to Zhenya’s friends. They’d heard some girls outside trying to remember some Spanish words. News that three macho Spanish guys were in town was out.

It was at about this point that amnesia drew its black curtain. I remembered saying thank you to Zhenya a lot, and clinging to my new ally, David (okay, I was flirting with the unattached one; I didn’t want him, I was just feeding my emotional hunger). There were strippers, there were bottle-blonde Buryatian women, there was shameless dancing, there were good times. Apparently.

25TH OCTOBER

Still dressed, still drunk and my mouth desert-dry, I woke up in Sasha’s bed, numb from a night on its wooden base—all Russians seemed to like it hard, evidently. But how did I get here? Where was my BlackBerry? Whose was that chapka—the Russian fur hat? That camera? And—oh God—did I kiss David or was it a dream? I scrambled to check the photographic evidence: tight embraces, topless boys, boys kissing boys, power punches…worrying. Then I thought about Ollie, and The Emperor, and I realised I hadn’t worried about anything since I’d arrived. Getting out of my head had, quite literally, helped me get out of my head.

I could hear that the boys had just woken up and were laughing about the night. I froze, realising that to get out of my room, I had to go through theirs. I drew a deep breath.

‘So, boys, I seem to have lost my phone and my memory and gained a camera and a hat…’

I searched David’s eyes, but I couldn’t find the answer there. I quickly scurried out—I was going to have to ask Zhenya.

‘Hungry?’ chirped Zhenya, orchestrating the domestics in the kitchen.

‘Starving!’

‘Sheep soup,’ she explained, handing me a large bowl.

Would it be insulting not to eat the solid cubes of fat, the layers of alimentary canal and the tendons swimming like eels? I was the only one eating, so I had no one to copy. Plus, as a couchsurfer, I was learning that you ate what and when you could—the fridge wasn’t mine to raid.

‘So what do you grow in your kitchen garden?’

With tomatoes, onions, cabbages, cucumbers, apples and potatoes, it was the picture of Siberian self-sufficiency.

Having pointed her attention outside the window, I threw the unspeakables away. And that possible indiscretion? Cowardice struck—I could hear the boys coming. I’d wait to ask Zhenya after they left for Vladistock later that day. Losing one’s memory had its hazards, but it was also a face-saver.

Losing my BlackBerry was rather more straightforward—it was lost. Of course, there was the possibility that something more sinister than good times had taken it, but the idea was unthinkable. Hosts had far more to lose.

The day’s next excitement was the hypermarket, for the boys to stock up for their three-day train journey. In the car my gaze was conveniently averted outside, to catch, in amongst a constructivist majority, Ulan-Ude’s bronze monuments to heroic, mounted Buryatian warriors, and Buddhist buildings with flying eaves. At the supermarket, Zhenya picked up a couple of value tins of horsemeat.

‘You need meat,’ she said maternally.

‘Why?’ responded Bernat, with some disdain.

‘For the train.’

‘No.’

It was useful to see how others—non-Brits—were with their hosts. Bernat wasn’t rude, he just didn’t want tinned horsemeat. His candour was inspiring.

We hugged the boys goodbye at the station. With them safely out of earshot, I could finally ask Zhenya for the missing details.

‘You were in the back of my car wearing his chapka,’ she said, her voice tripping into a laugh. ‘And David asked, “Can I kiss you?” You said yes. And then he asked, “Can you kiss me?” and you just started singing.’

(Was it ‘Can I kick it?/Yes you can,’ I wondered). But did I kiss him?

‘Then we got home and you went to bed. When I asked where David was, I found him in your room but you were asleep, and I shouted, “David, go back to bed!” The boys were laughing for thirty minutes.’

As did we. Too bad alcohol took as much as it gave.

My next stop, in two days’ time, would be just outside Mongolia’s capital Ulan Bator, where I’d be staying in a ger—a traditional felted tent. My host, a German woman married to a local, had three negative references—quite a count for couchsurfing. She’d been ‘moody’, and had pushed her guests into doing her ‘maximum price’ tours. She responded negatively to one reference, saying the guest had set fire to her house and stolen her phone. It sounded like a cartoon. But she also had plenty of positive references. I was intrigued; it sounded authentic. Maybe Marco from Italy summed it up: ‘At Sabina’s I had the craziest couchsurfing adventures, she is unique, in both really good and really bad ways, but once you understand Mongolia, you understand Sabina, or vice versa.’ It promised some safe danger. I was excited.

‘I have to visit my aunt with a broken rib,’ Zhenya announced after helping me buy my tickets to Mongolia. ‘I’ll be back at 10pm [it was now 5pm]—maybe you can go for a walk.’

The apron strings were suddenly severed. I was going to have to be independent again. Placing all emotional needs on my host was an ask too much, I realised, and foolish. So I decided to go and place them on the internet instead.

News from Ollie: he was ‘lying very still’, under self-imposed house arrest, ‘maybe for a whole month’, but now that the knife had been at his leg, it was ‘nice and flat’. Ollie was such a stoic. I was going to miss his calm crisis management.

10pm suddenly became 7pm—Zhenya was going to come back early. She was waiting outside in her car, with her mother and another cousin, Nastia (short for Anastasia). They screamed when I tried to get in. This was, of course, because I’d got into the wrong car of Buryatian girls. I guess Zhenya saw all of this because I then heard a car horn, presumably to aid my sonar location. But once reunited, no one mentioned it—least of all me in my deep shame. I missed having someone to laugh with.

We dropped Zhenya’s divorced mother at home, taking the silent and shy 20-year-old Nastia, a ‘customs’ student, back with us. Was I hungry? ‘A little bit peckish,’ I said warily, thinking about sheep entrails. Plus, I’d just eaten half a packet of strawberry sandwich biscuits. Too bad—pancakes, tomato chutney, smetana and Siberian apple jam were promptly laid out on the kitchen table. Nastia and Zhenya folded their pancakes into neat little parcels, so I did too, filling mine with round after round of the most delicious apple jam—crunchy and fresh cherry-sized apples in a tart but sweet sunset-pink apple soup. Zhenya had made it herself; her grandmother did the blackcurrant jam, which they’d mix with cold water for a drink. But that was nothing, her father had built the whole house.

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