Tomsk

 Although Kate travelled overland from London, (going via Turkey and other places), and her book starts an account of her travels in Moscow, we had a month in which to complete our journey. Kate took 11 months to get from Moscow to Vilyuyisk and back. We therefore decided that our energies would be better spent focusing on the Siberian leg of her trip only. Tomsk is one of Siberia's oldest cities. Founded in 1604 by the Cossacks and it was to here that we flew in from Moscow after a night in the airport on our sleeping bags, curled up on our sleeping mats, to begin our trip.

Her book, Kate talks about Tomsk in all of one paragraph, but from this paragraph we know she visited the hospital and prison in Tomsk. In the prison she reports to have given out over 2000 testaments to over 2000 prisoners.We also know, from alternative documents, that she visited the female monastery in Tomsk.

We have much more to say about our stay at Tomsk than Kate chose to mention. This was largely due to the people we met there. Before we left London we had managed to contact with the head of the department of Culture and Tourism in Tomsk. They were very excited for our arrival and promised to meet us at the airport and promised that they would have 'surprises' in store for us and we were very curious to learn what this would be.......

When we arrived it became clear that done a lot research on us, as well as Kate Marsden before our arrival. Paulo, one of Julia's consultants, had enthusiastically prepared an itinerary for us to cover the next couple of days, to cover the history and sites of the city, and parallel Russian stories that involved similar sentiments to the goals, aims and achievements of Kate Marsden.

Unbeknown to us, there had been a press release on us the day before. Consequently journalists from three different television stations had requested to interview us, and working with Julia they had arranged to meet us at different points of interest that were spring upon us at various intervals throughout the next couple of days, and so we were very glad to have been given time to freshen up at the hotel before we began our tour of the city began - by the time we arrived we'd had a good couple of days without showering (we had spent the night in Moscow airport on our sleeping mats and curled in sleeping bags) and another night on a plane, so we'd had a good couple of days without showering by this time.

Our first visit was the Epiphany Cathedral. Built in 1784, it is important as many Russia churches and religious artifacts were destroyed during the revolution. After the tour, we were invited to go up the bell tower. This was where we were surprised with the first team of journalists, who had been waiting up there patiently for our arrival. We were invited to ring the Cathedral bells. It felt really naughty to be ringing the bells at a random hour with an ad-hock tune which the entire city could have heard.