I am very much enjoying having Bill Bryson as my travelling companion on the train. He talks about people emigrating to Australia from Britain in the 1950s and for most people it meant weeks at sea. It kind of has that feel on the train, that we are no longer in 2011, but some earlier time, when people expected international travel to take a long time and didn’t have the impatience of our privileged position towards travel today. From the window of the train is certainly doesn’t seem that the world is getting smaller, in fact is it so large that I have difficulty comprehending the sheer scale of it.

There seem to be less houses now and just naked silver birch and brown and yellow fields. There doesn’t seem to be as much snow, we are heading South.

The landscape and the people are slowly changing. We crossed a wetland for many hours this morning. The houses, some made of brick look less like garden sheds. Vast concrete silos, industrial buildings don’t look so abandoned any more. I had a nice time brushing my teeth and peeing with the bathroom window wide open, the wind and the world zooming past, and washing the porridge from my cup in the old steel sink. My cup is used for everything! There are less Russians on the train, the Turkish men left in the night at Omsk. The faces of the passengers are changing as we cross the vastness of Russia, leaving Europe behind and entering Asia.

The towns in this area look like someone has abandoned an old Lada in an allotment.

Time for some instant noodles, chicken or beef, I’ll have the beef please!

Another rush to the train and sweat is pouring down my back as I enter the hot, cramped carriage. Carriage three, they really do make you feel like third class right from the off; before you even get on you have to walk another fifteen carriages down the platform to reach your third class open sleeper.

The train stops and young men stand on the tracks smoking and spitting, their sweaters, jackets and jeans along with their short haircuts make them look Scottish. Babushkas with bags of cherries and people with huge amounts of different cuddly toys tied to them walk up and down the tracks next to the train. They walk around the smoking men, each one of the men seemingly taking in turn to talk on their mobile phone.

The blonde pregnant Russian girl, her husband and mother all changed out of their train clothes (generally for the Russians, tracksuits) into smart attire and left at the last station, a small town near Perm. I got off the train at Perm and almost immediately was seized upon by a tall toothless man who was selling food and drinks to passengers. He wore a dirty black woolly hat and equally dirty black coat, he spoke surprisingly good English, he told me about British history and that Britain is made up of sixty countries and islands. He was particularly interested in the Royal Wedding and had recently read ‘Ivanhoe’ by Walter Scott.

I am reading Bill Bryson’s book ‘Down Under’, it is very entertaining. He is travelling on the Indian Pacific railway in Australia, a railway I have taken myself, which runs straight across Australia from Sydney to Perth. He says:

“There is something wonderfully lulling about being stuck for a long spell on a train. It was like being give a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty year-olds appear to enjoy, staring vacantly out of the windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them – took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life!”

For twenty-four hours now the landscape has been unchanging, long spindly twigs of trees, snow in parts and frozen ponds, brown grass, brown earth, a brown land defrosting after a long deep freeze. Regularly obscured by monolithic soviet coal carriages or oil tanker carriages, old wooden shacks, the occasional empty concrete building with no glass in the windows, rusting containers, everything is downtrodden and old.

The middle aged Russian woman who was across from me got off, I helped her with her extraordinary amount of luggage. I tried my feeble Russian with her as she left, she spoke to me in Russian all day yesterday, me just smiling and nodding, even laughing when seemed appropriate, which was not often, she had a very serious way of talking. No sooner is she off than the Turkish men, barefooted, sit with their feet on the seat noisily slurping black tea from small plastic water cups. Putting your feet on train seats is a big faux pas on this train, and I expect the Provonista to scold them.

I pass villages with wooden houses with corrugated iron roofs, most brown and aged, but many colourfully painted in blues, yellow and greens,with painted patterns on the thick window frames, like poorly constructed Alpine lodges. Huge oil painted skies tower over the landscape, the background to an epic painting of a Napoleonic battle on these huge plains.

Still we pass wooden shed like buildings with thick grey smoke coming from their chimneys and cut logs staked up next to them.

I play cards and chat to the Turkish men, there are many more than I thought! I have warmed to their non-Russian ways, only one of them speaks English so everything I say is translated and in turn I am given the translation from any number of commentators. They are travelling to Omsk I think, I showed them a map of the Trans-Siberian route which they took great interest in, but I think some of them thought it was a map of the world so there was much confusion.

The Samovar is a great boon, tea, coffee, noodles, porridge, all of which I am eating from my old chipped enamel camping cup with a steel Chinese spoon I stole from the drawer in The Napoleon Hostel in Moscow. I could just imagine this back home, fifty-four people constantly carrying boiling cups of water thorough a rather wobbly railway carriage, health and safety nightmare!

The riverfront of St. Petersburg has a wind straight from a Siberian winter. The wide River Neva flows like a great choppy sea under grand bridges, past the Winter Palace and Russia’s imperial past. My ears burn from the cold. Wandering around, I realise where my awkward sense of familiarity comes from; the city reminds me of Amsterdam. Not necessarily in looks, but in the canals taking wide arcs through the city. I realise this because I am lost, or at least finding it difficult to get my bearings, and I found this in the first city I ever went backpacking to, Amsterdam. St. Petersburg really does have the air of a grand European city, of Paris or Rome; the dirt and the splendour and the ashtrays in cafés.

I make my way to the Zoom Café, finding it after some effort to circumvent the roadworks going on around me. This is roadworks Russian style, digging up the entire street, quite literally. There are no safety barriers and sand covers the narrow space between the buildings and the work site, full of large deep holes and huge concrete pipes. I watch a group of glamorous young ladies teetering across the street as the pointed heels of their high leather boots sink into the sand. The Zoom Café is a very pleasant place in a kind of cellar with vaulted ceilings full of fashionable young students, smoking as they eat.

The sun shines down on the land of the Moomins. Light blue skies and distant cotton wool clouds. Red wooden houses with white windows and mossy roofs sit amongst forests and flat green plains. The naked Silver Birch stands straight and tall beside the pine, which glows with life with warm toned trunks and deep green branches. Snow still lies in patches where the spring sun’s warmth has still not broken winter’s spell. We sail effortlessly through a Nordic landscape wriggling free from the clutches of winter. I am travelling on the new high-speed Allegro train, the first high-speed train between Russia and a European Union country. The train feels fresh and modern, I enjoy the calm grey of the interior and peer out through the clean windows. I sit at the only seat by itself, Seat 1. Bags and cases neatly line the luggage rack above my head. Suddenly I know I am in Russia. The landscape is wilder, the houses more ramshackle, the trees less uniform. I have gone from Legoland to the former USSR. A decrepit concrete hulk of a building confirms it. Russia. Even the air has changed, from the pure sweet air of Finland to the smell of chemicals and coal.

The sun comes up on the first day, it’s been a long time coming since I watched it go down last night. It is 6am and I am surrounded by retired Canadian women, forty-two in total I’m told, all on a tour here in Scotland. I have been up all night; dinner, wine, beer and a chocolate ice-cream from a vending machine have all been devoured here in the airport. It’s hot and stagnant, the sky is a blue-grey mist, yellow lights twinkle in the distance. I have lost track of days and time and I haven’t even left yet, but I already feel somewhere else.

To ease the knotted body I find myself inhabiting after awkwardly falling asleep in aeroplane seats for most of the previous day, I decide that an invigorating swim and sauna is what I need. More invigorating than I may have imagined. After finding Yrjönkadun Uimahalli, a historic public baths in Helsinki, I admire its Art Deco interior. A black and white photograph, taken of the pool when it first opened, reveals that it was built in 1928. In the photograph, the pool has no water in it. Instead, a large group of rather distinguished looking gentlemen with dark suits and large beards and moustaches sit in chairs on the tiled bottom.

A blonde attendant in a red boiler suit approaches me and very helpfully shows me to my own little cubicle with a mesh door, not offering much privacy. I have brought my swim shorts, but I needn’t have bothered. I look out to see a rotund bearded man strolling around the pool, not wearing the slightest hint of a bathing costume, and looking very pleased with himself. The pool is occupied by oddly shaped naked Finnish men swimming up and down, all watched over by the same blonde female attendant. After completing a surprisingly pleasant twenty lengths in the pool, I embark upon the sauna, which I find a rather uncomfortable experience, due to not being able to speak a word of Finnish and unable, therefore, to join in the debate which seems to be going on between its sweaty, bare-skinned occupants.

At first I thought my senses had been dulled by lack of sleep, but I have realised that Helsinki really is a pleasantly quiet city. Not quiet in the sense there is hardly anyone here, but literally quiet. People do not shout or talk loudly, even cars make a soothing hum on the city’s cobbled streets. The birdsong can be heard as clear as a crystal bell in the spring sunshine.