Start Point: Hotel, Moscow Airport, 335m

End Point: Hotel (5th floor), Pyatigorsk, 595m

Today was a long day. It’s just gone 11pm and we were up at 4.30am to catch our flight from Moscow. Nobody was particularly sad to leave the hotel rooms with no windows, or the grumpy waiter.

Checking in at Moscow airport with a bag full of sharp metal was less trouble than expected. But two of the lads had extra bags that needed to be paid for, letting them experience first hand a trick for achieving full employment: split the simplest tasks into multiple jobs for multiple people. One person checked us in. If you’re bag was large, you brought it to another person to scan and then handed it to a person standing beside them to put it on a trolley. If you had an extra bag, it must be taken to a separate desk to be paid for, and then returned to the first person for re-check in, delivertly to the scanner person for scanning and finally handed to the trolley pusher to ensure said extra bag was pushed on a trolley. Maximum efficiency.

In Mineralnye Vody airport, we made a show of ourselves posing for photos with our impressive stack of multicoloured North Face duffel bags. A few feet away, a group of German climbers posed with their bags and on the other side of the conveyor belt, a group of climbers from the Lebanon posed with theirs. The Lebanese crew had all their bags wrapped in cellophane. Show-offs.

We met our local guide, Ivan, at the airport. He’s from St Petersburg which is only 2,500km away, so totally local. He had opted to splash out on a flight to come down to meet us rather than take the train. The train takes 36 hours.

Between Mineralnye Vody and Pyatigorsk, we wondered at the abundance of ladas, told lada jokes we’d last heard in the 80s (‘what do you call a lada with a sunroof?’ ‘A skip’), and passed by a lada dealership. 

We stopped by a mountaineering shop on the way for anyone who needed to rent gear. I had all my own stuff so sat on a step outside until a cleaning lady happened along and started to shoo me away. I stood up to go but she took my hand, led me over to a little wall and lay down a piece of cardboard for me to sit on rather than the cold step. But as each of the trekkers came out with their rental boots and axes, they all took up spots on the same cold steps and the cleaning lady had apparently run out of cardboard.

In Pyatigorsk, we had lunch, and wandered around town killing time before dinner. Ivan led the way. He brought us to a look out spot and explained the origins of the town as a mineral baths and health resort of the Czars. He then brought us to a little tourist office where we could sample the famous mineral water straight out of the ground. I was expecting something like Volvic or Vittel, even a Ballygowan would have been acceptable. What we actually drank tasted like farts – like someone had infused water with burnt matches, boiled eggs and a poor state of intestinal health.

We returned to the hotel to sample what Ivan promised would be a surprisingly palatable Russian wine. However the lady in the bar laughed at us and told us they only sold the best wines imported from France and Bulgaria. She recruited a local English professor to further explain that the closest they could offer was the Russian Champagne at 320 Rubles a pop. That’s about 5 Euro a glass we thought, until she corrected us and told us it was 5 Euro a bottle. Immediately the cries went up: “give us two bottles!”, “give us a bottle each!”. When we tasted it, we understood both the price and the scarcity of Russian Champagne on Irish shelves. It tasted like someone had taken the fart water, mixed it with apple juice and a pound of sugar and passed it through a sodastream. Not nice.
At least dinner was good: barbequed dill with a side salad of dill and a dill sauce topped with a garnish of dill. While we ate we were serenaded by one of the staff on a karaoke machine except when her phone rang and she ran around the back of the restaurant so we wouldn’t hear her fighting with her boyfriend*.

At least when we returned to the hotel for bed, we were greeted with rooms that both looked and smelled like they were from the 1970s: musty and creaky with  an aroma which took me back to the cluttered unaired cupboards of various grand-uncles and grand-aunts.

Tomorrow we take a four hour busride for a one hour hike but finally arrive at base camp and get to see the mountain from the North!

*completely unjustified speculation