IAs the plane touched down at St Petersburg, a curtain of snow rushed past the window. I’d been to Russia before and imagined winter would just add a dusting of magical white to the place. But in the blizzard that greeted me I could sense it might confound my expectations. The hotel was pure spy story. Shady characters appeared out of the gloom in reception. They kept my passport in return for my room key. My bed groaned as I dumped my bag on it and I showered in a bathtub surrounded by mismatched tiles. But the water was hot and plentiful. This was a theme I recognised. Nothing looks like it could ever work in Russia, yet somehow it does. As I drifted towards uneasy sleep the phone rang. Two wrong numbers in quick succession.

The Beetroot Bus is a backpacker tour that runs between St Petersburg and Moscow, taking in several typical regional towns en route. There’s no five-star insulation from real Russia. You stay in functional, Soviet-era hotels in ill-lit suburbs; you get around on local transport; you share cabins on overnight trains. It’s cheap, cheerful and disarmingly authentic. A local guide provides walking tours at each stop, but there’s plenty of time to explore on your own. The winter version of the trip is scaled down, because the weather is so harsh, only stopping off at the fortress town of Novgorod and making use of the train part of the way.

My imagination was fired by the curious and the extreme next day in icy St Petes. The Zoological museum’s huge collection of preserved animals is a taxidermist’s paradise: Komodo dragons, crabs the size of motorbikes, swordfish and Siberian tigers stare out from dusty glass cabinets. The mammoths are stars of the show. One mammoth skeleton leg was the breadth of my chest, one tusk as wide as my head. You can even see the hair on the back of a 40,000-year-old baby mammoth found preserved in Siberian permafrost in 1900. An hour or so later I was face-to-faces with a two-headed calf. Peter the Great was obsessed with freaks. His collection is displayed at the Kunstkammer museum nearby. Some of the specimens were originally preserved in vodka. It’s rumoured an impoverished official would drain it from the preservation jars to sell to unsuspecting locals.

Vodka isn’t just a preservative. In the depths of Russian winter it’s an insulator for most of the population. At the group meeting that evening, Neil, our guide, demonstrated. Coke and tonic are not part of the equation. You pour a large shot, breath in slightly, down it and exhale through the mouth, following it up with zakuski - slices of pickled cucumber, salami or cheese. The first shot burned on the way down, but soon my whole body was surrounded by a warm force-field of joy. By the end of the evening, we had all become life-long friends. Neil explained that my phantom phone calls were not the KGB. They were local prostitutes who are tipped off by reception whenever a single male checks in. Fired with vodka, I dragged some of the group out to a local, cheesy nightclub. Here we met a couple of off-duty policemen and communicated via more vodka, karaoke and my phrasebook. A word of warning: wearing thermals to a hot nightclub is definitely to be avoided.

Read the full interview in the current issue of RedHanded.

A TALE OF VODKA AND DARKNESS

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Jeremy Head gets caught up by the strangeness of a Russian winter