I’ve just come back from a trip to Buryatia. I took the train out there, and the plane back. Funnily enough, even though the train took four days and the flight a mere six hours, the train was by far the easier leg of the journey.

The reason for this is two words – Kras Air.

On the train, I asked my coupe companion, a likeable officer called Illya, why he went through the ordeal of taking the train back and forth from Khabarovsk to Moscow, rather than simply taking the plane. I was doing it as a tourist, for the adventure of it, but why was he? He said he didn’t think it was safe to fly regional planes – this from a soldier – and that he’d had bad experiences when he flew.

Two companies did flights from Khabarovsk, he said – Domodedovo and Kras Air. Kras Air had better planes, but was a worse company (in fact, they’re now part of the same alliance). He told me how Kras Air had kept him and the other passengers waiting around 6 hours on the plane, and then another 13 hours in the airport. He said: “There was one passenger, a mother with a very young baby, and they wouldn’t even let her go to the maternity room in the airport. That’s the kind of country we live in”.

I decided to fly back from Ulan Ude to Moscow none the less, because I needed to be back in Moscow faster than in four days. I booked a ticket for a 9.30am flight, set my alarm for 7am, and tried to get some sleep in my little room in the Hotel Buryatia.

I was woken up at 5am by some Chinese hookers. There were about four of them in the room next to mine, they’d just got back from work, and were chatting away loudly. I got up and walked down the corridor to the floor assistant, and asked her to get them to quieten down. “They’re always like this”, she said. “They work here…sort of. They don’t speak Russian”. Nonetheless, she went down to their room and asked them to be quiet. “Pochemy?” one of them asked.

I decided I might as well stay awake until 7am, and get some kip on the plane. At 7, I got my stuff together and walked out of the hotel. It was a cold morning, still dark, and snow was lying on the ground for the first time. I knocked on the door of a taxi where the driver was having a nap. He opened the door and shook himself to wake up. We agreed a price and set off for the airport, he still rubbing his eyes and having a cigarette for breakfast.

He drove at a snail pace. We were being overtaken by Zhiguli. “Any chance of going a bit faster, mate?” I asked. “Sure, we could. But it’s not safe”, he muttered. “There’s safe, and there’s going ridiculously slowly. I could run faster than this”, I said.

We carried on, crawling through the dark. Up ahead, we saw a car sticking out horizontally into the road. A van was at a right angle to it. As we came closer, we saw the bonnet of the car was folded in two, and the van had a dent in it like a punching bag that’s just been punched. We saw a man being carried on a stretcher from the van into an ambulance. “You see?” muttered the driver. I saw.

He let me off at the little airport. 7.30. I was in good time. Some people were already queuing up for registration, but it was for another flight. I went to get some breakfast. The little store sold crisps and rows of instant noodle soup, the kind you have to add hot water to. I ate that soup for every single meal on the trans-Siberian train. “Do you have any hot water to add to the soup?” I asked. “No”, said the lady. “I’ll have some crisps”.

I bought a coffee from a vending machine, and sat down to eat my crisps and wait for registration to begin. An Alsatian police dog ran past me, tail wagging, its leash dragging on the floor. About ten minutes later, a big fat policeman with a red, jolly face walked after it, looking embarrassed. Then registration began.

Checking in at regional airports is always a crazy business. There’s no queue or anything. People hurl their tickets at a desk, where about two people are sitting and another three peering over their shoulders, and they go through the tickets and stick little stickers on a lay-out of the plane, then throw cards out, boarding cards the size of business cards, and you do your best to try and grab one. The head official had the customary tact. “Ticket!” she barked, snarling at the mob of passengers with contempt. These pathetic customers. How dare they bother her with their importuning. She was master of her domain.

I asked her if the flight was on time. “It will leave at 11.30”, she said. No reason given for the two hour delay. I didn’t press the matter – two hours waiting around wasn’t so bad. I went into the little café in the departure lounge and had a Coke.

11.30 came and went, and there didn’t seem to be any activity towards getting us on the plane. I went and stood by the ticket counter to try and urge them into activity by my impatient presence. The head lady was wisely explaining how to do the job to a new girl. That made me laugh. I asked them what had happened to the flight. She said: “There’s a delay. It’s because of the weather. The plane has been diverted to Bratsk”. “When will we be able to leave? In an hour, a day, a week?”“We don’t know”.

Again, it struck me as amazing that they shouldn’t have felt inclined to give this information to the 50 or so passengers waiting around. They were just chatting happily among themselves, and seemed annoyed to be interrupted by a customer asking what was going on.

But more amazing was the fact not a single passenger was complaining. They were just sitting around, some men back from a hunting trip were getting drunk, others were just killing time, an Armenian guy was video-taping his wife with his swanky new Camcorder. I suppose they were more used to the Kras Air experience.

I decided to try and get some sleep. I found a bench on the first floor of the airport and lay down. It was cold in the airport, so I slept in my coat, hat and gloves. I still woke up feeling really cold and ill, there was some draft that seemed to get under your clothes.

A loudspeaker announced that the flight had been delayed to 1.30. One of the hunter guys, by now good and drunk, sang out ‘Ross-iiiii-ya’. I tried to get back to sleep but it was too cold. I needed to get a tea, I could feel myself getting ill again.

I went back to the café and bought a tea, and put my hands round it to try and get warm. Then I drank it and sat down outside. There was nothing to do. I didn’t even have a book to read. Just time to kill.

1.30 came and went. By now some of the other passengers were getting annoyed. One guy, a businessman, had found the local rep of Kras Air. He had on a rumpled suit, and a face full of warts. He was slightly drunk already, and swaying on his feet. He was disconcerted by these annoyed passengers asking him when they would be able to leave Ulan-Ude and get back to Moscow. He looked like a cornered rat. “It’s out of my hands”, he said, swaying. “The weather, you know. It’s in the Lord’s hands”. “Keep the Lord out of it”, snapped the businessman. “Besides, didn’t another flight just leave from here?”“Yes, but that was a smaller flight”. “Hey, man, where’s our plane?” shouted one of the drunk hunters. The man with the warts smiled – drunken customers he could handle, it was sober ones who expected a decent service that he couldn’t take.

I began to wonder how the hell I was ever going to leave Ulan-Ude. I’d already been at the airport for seven hours, and Illya had told me he’d been delayed for 19 hours. I couldn’t face another 12 hours there. But what other options did I have? I could get the train back, but that was four days. No, I had to wait and get the plane, whenever the hell it left. I went to the café and had a beer. The hunters were wise – the only way to handle travelling in Russia was to get drunk.

Time dragged on. 2pm. 3pm. At 4pm, they announced a bus was coming for us to take us to another terminal. What joy we felt! There were smiles, back-slapping, the eight hours of sitting around in the cold were forgotten. Then the bus drove and drove, for two hours, in fact, right across to the other side of the city, to a military runway outside of town. We saw our plane arrive just as we got there. It sat around for ages, as did we, and a voice came through on the walke-talkie of one of the Kras Air reps –“Hey Ivan, why doesn’t the hatch door open?” Eventually, they opened it, and the passengers came out. They’d been on an overnight flight from Moscow, and were themselves nine hours late. Still, they weren’t even met by a bus – they had to walk about half a kilometre to the road to get a bus there, in the wind and the cold. I laughed at them from the comfort of our bus.

Then we got out of the bus and finally got in the plane. By this point I had no strength left, and fully expected for the plane to be delayed another six hours or so on the runway. Or, of course, it could simply crash, like regional Russian planes constantly did. It looked a really beaten-up plane. The tail was scorched black, like it had been in a fire. We filed onto the plane, and I found a seat at the back with leg room. But then I noticed the over-powering smell of urine and chemicals coming from the toilet. It really made you feel sick. I walked up a few rows and sat down there, but it was still pretty strong. But I didn’t have any energy left to complain. Besides, we were leaving, it was a miracle, we were getting that bit closer to Moscow.

The next six hours passed, I am amazed to say, relatively problem-free. Then we landed, without crashing, and I was finally back in Moscow. “Thank you for flying Kras Air”, said the captain. “We hope you fly with us again”.

Julian Evans, a British freelance journalist based in Moscow.

October 31, 2006