Thursday 13 July 2006
Highlights: Moscow Metro System

Setting off from Novgorod we briefly stopped at the small town of Volga which highlighted how the majority of people live outside of St Petersburg and Moscow.   The roads are not very good, it takes a lot longer to travel distances in Russia for example one 200 km stage of the day took 3.2 hours.   It much cost their economy a fortune as trucks can’t go the speed limit, I think the country would get a great efficiency dividend by fixing the main roads.   It was many hours of being bumped all over the place. We are staying at a upper class hotel, “Sovietsky” which like most hotel’s doesn’t have air conditioning but otherwise is probably the best one I’ve stayed at.

Tonight we went on a tour of the Metro system.   The communist certainly know how to build grand projects when they wanted to.   At times you would think you are in a museum.   The photos I took don’t do it justice.   The trains themselves are cheap (about 6 roubles or 25 cents AUD) and they go very fast (about 100 km/h between stations). At the end of the tour we briefly saw the outside of the Kremlin and Red Square however they were closed due to a concert just finishing.   Heaps of troops obviously helped with the crowd.