Friday, 28 August 2026

 

Start: Votkinsk (RU) 12:00

Arrival: Perm (RU) 16:30

 

Total: 225 km

 

 

 

Pathétique, Evgeny Onegin, Nut Cracker, Swan Lake... yes, we are walking in the footsteps of Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky. Yesterday evening, we watched the sun set over the pond where young Petya spent his childhood. Today, we visited the mansion where he lived with his parents, just two minutes on foot down the street from our hotel "Pearl". When we left the hotel after a good night's sleep (we had a huge room with a very comfortable bed and view over the pond), the sun was sparkling on the water.

 

 

As so often, we were the first visitors for the day at the museum. Beside the large mansion where the family lived, the grounds comprise stables, servants' quarters, gardens, a hothouse, a "blinina" and a concert hall. Several buildings showed scenes of what 19th-century life for a bourgeois family in a small Russian mining town might have been like. Here the servants' quarters.

 

The family home itself was a large mansion. The Tchaikovskys had seven children and in each room, panels in Russian and English explained a different aspect of the family life. One room showed the piano on which young Petya composed his first works, the nursery explained how Petya and his sister Alexandra loved to reenact scenes from books. The composer, then only 6 to 8 years old, already wrote short music pieces for these reenactments. Früh übt sich.

 

 

When Tchaikovsky was 8 years old, the family moved to Saint Petersburg, but the composer later said that he often thought with fondness back to his carefree childhood in Votkinsk.

 

All these tidbits about the great Russian composer made for hungry reading and we hadn't had breakfast yet. Luckily there was a blinina on the grounds, where we had some blini with chai.

 

 

Then a stroll through the garden and back to our hotel. At noon, we were on our way out of Votkinsk. About an hour outside of town, the roads became noticeably better. Large stretches of highway were newly built, others were still under construction. I'd devised a working stress-reducing strategy for myself: stay behind a fast moving truck. These behemoths still drove slightly above the stated limit, so we made good speed. At the same time, they served as a welcome buffer for oncoming traffic. If an overzealous driver thought he needed to pass into our lane, he'd crash into my pilot truck instead of into me. I didn't mind other cars passing me at 120 km/h, I happily cruised behind my truck at a leisurely 90 km/h. It also helped me notice the potholes well in advance and avoid them. Could have cruised like this for hours. Which is actually exactly what we did.

 

 

 

When we crossed into Permsky Krai, we set our clocks forward one hour. Two days in a row! In Luxembourg, it is 3 hours later than here.

 

At half past 4 local time, we crossed the bridge over the Kama River and into the city of Perm. I was very pleasantly surprised by its large shopping malls, wide boulevards and overall big-modern-city feeling. I had expected a slightly drab, grey, seen-better-days industrial town, but Perm seems more up-and-coming than down-and-out.

 

 

After checking into our hotel, we set out again with two missions: find a bank to exchange some more of our dollars into rubles, and visit the Museum of Natural History.

 

As you can see in this pic, the streets around our hotel have a certain San Franciscoesque vibe. Lots of up and down. The city lies at the foot of the central Ural Mountains, which, though not as high as the northern part, are still rather sizeable hills. We will drive through them tomorrow. Today, we have reached the northernmost point of our journey. From here on, it'll be south for quite a while.

 

 

We quickly found a Sberbank where the lady analysed our passport and money in great detail before she decided that both were trustworthy enough to be allow a currency change. With a few ten thousand more rubels in our pocket, we stepped out of the Sberbank, and straight into the pouring rain. We ran for cover. Shivering in the cold wind, we debated our next move: either we waited out the deluge in front of this shop, or we made a run for it to the museum five minutes up the street. Just then, a rainbow came out. What a beautiful sight! Must be a sign from heaven: hurry up and get going!

 

The Museum of Natural History was open until 7 pm, and the kassa was supposed to be open until 6:30. It was 6:09 when we arrived at the door. A member of staff was just locking the door from the inside. When he saw us, he grinned and turned a sign around: "zakryt". Standing there in the rain, I stared at him in horror. He grinned even wider, and pointed at the sign: Sorry folks, we're closed. The opening hours next to the door clearly stated that the box office was supposed to be open for another 20 minutes, but there was nothing to be done. He had evidently decided to make an early night.

 

 

That meant, that we would not be visiting the museum that housed fossils and skeletons from an era named after this city: the Permian. The era when the great rainforests of the Carboniferous turned into huge deserts and reptiles started to dominate the earth, the time just before the dinosaurs would reign supreme for 200 million years after the great mass extinction at the end of the Permian.

 

So instead we set out to explore more of the city. Sonia nudged me and wordlessly pointed across the street. There was a nightclub, named after a movie character that anyone who grew up in the 90s would recognize. Mama Stiflera! I'm not ashamed to admit, I screamed in childish delight when I saw it. We might not have seen it if we'd wasted our time in a stuffy museum populated by work-shy staff. By now it also had stopped raining, so taking in some fresh evening air was a good idea anyway.

 

 

We walked through a park with yet another statue of Lenin - the guy is as ubiquitous in Russia as knights on horses are in our lands - to the opera house. Giselle by Adolphe Adam was on tonight. Not really our cup of tea. I much prefer musicals to ballets.

 

We discovered a beautiful facade with sculptures on it and a statue of tsar Nicolas II's brother Grand Duke Michael on a promenade above the Kama. Nicolas had abdicated in favour of his brother, who refused the throne, but the Bolsheviks killed him nonetheless. Should tell you something. Maybe.

 

 

As we were slowly but surely getting hungry, we made our way back to the hotel. The hotel restaurant had promised "Perm cuisine", so I wanted to try something original. I ordered some spinach ravioli stuffed with fish in a broth, which they claimed was a local specialty, and a comparatively lame beef stroganoff. The ravioli were delicious, the only bémol was that they brought both dishes at the same time. Did they not know the concept of an appetizer? I wolfed down the ravioli, trying desperately to savour them, while worriedly eyeing my beef stroganoff that was turning cold. In the end, the portions were so small that I managed to eat both at a still palatable temperature.

 

 

Back in our room, I realized with delight that I was able to access my website. I had wrongly suspected my hosting provider, how could I! In fact, many other websites had also not been accessible yesterday, so it was probably the area our hotel was in that the Google search engine did not like. Though why they would object to the Tchaikovsky mansion is anyone's guess. Maybe Google is more a 12tone-music person.

 

 

To end the day, here a detail of the promenade above the Kama River. My forever perspicacious sister found this little gem and I named it "outsider". Odd-one-out would fit too. We don't know if it was created on purpose or by mistake, but it seems fitting for a town that lends its name to a geological age. Because isn't that how ages start? With one random little misfit, who quietly goes on its way and entirely changes the world?