Novosibirsk is a big city plonked pretty much in the middle of nowhere with around 1.5 million people living here in Western Siberia. Fortunately for us the Congress Hotel was just a few hundred metres walk from the railway station which is one of the largest in Russia so after a night on the train it was not too far to drag our bags.

When planning the journey across Russia it was always difficult trying to balance the amount of time spent travelling on the train against the departure time and arrival time at destination (not forgetting to take into account the Local/Moscow Time conundrum). I am not really a fan of arriving somewhere at 0225 and then trying to find a hotel - fortunately the arrival time in Novosibirsk worked very well (0713 Moscow Time or 1013 Local Time, but our planned departure, after a couple of nights in the hotel was at 0120 Local (2220 Moscow Time) so being handy for the station was a good option.

Looking back at the photographs we obviously wandered around the city taking in the many magnificent buildings and heroic statues (I do like eastern European style statues) and we also visited the zoo. We must have struggled to find things to see and do although if memory serves me correctly there was a decent coffee shop or two in the city and plenty of sushi bars too.

We also got some bonus mileage in by train travelling to the West Siberian Railway Museum close to Novosibirsk on our second day in the city. You can't get enough of railways when travelling on the Trans Siberian!

I think we spent the our final evening in the hotel bar awaiting our train at 0120. We were able to watch the Formula 1 qualifying from Canada as the time difference worked to our advantage, in fact the reason we made our next stop at Krasnoyarsk was because we expected to be able to watch the race itself!

That is what I call pretty good planning . . . . . . . and only an eight hour, 473 mile, journey by train too for us next.