The road from Volgograd to Saratov passes through rolling steppe land. From the top of the hills you can see for dozens of miles and the light was bright (rather like Tibet) which turned all the colours into pastel shades. Very pretty but a bit boring after several hours of it.
As usual we got lost in Saratov and visited several estates of high-rise flats before I found the OBI department store on Mapsme and deduced that we were at the wrong end of the town, about 20 miles from the hotel. Like Volgograd, Saratov is a long thin city built along the western bank of the Volga, with a somewhat smaller city, Engels, built on the eastern bank.
Mapsme told us that our hotel was a building at No.8 Moskovskaya Street. We parked outside this huge floodlit building, impressed by what you could get for less than £20, went inside and told some bemused security guards that we had come to stay for a night. They told us that it was the HQ of the Volga Region Railway Administration, and we wouldnt like to stay there. They had never heard of the hotel and eventually about 10 of them were furiously prodding away at their phones trying to find it. Eventually, an utterly charming lady said she would help us find it and spent the next 45 minutes leading us through the back streets of Saratov, asking numerous people the way. I mentioned we had come from Volgograd and she said her uncle had fought there in the 62nd Army and subsequently helped to break the Siege of Leningrad. She eventually found the hotel on the second storey of a block of flats. We thanked her profusely; she had really put herself out for us.
The girl on the desk called the manager, a provocatively-dressed lady with a vertical pony tail and a bawdy tattoo on her arm. She claimed that the hotel was “full” because a “guest” had “extended” his stay in the room we had reserved. They would send us to another hotel for the same price. As we left, a middle-aged man with a massive beer gut came out of a room fiddling with his flies. The receptionist took us to another hotel where the middle-aged lady at the desk glared at her with undisguised contempt. When she realised that we were foreign tourists and not punters, she became very friendly and helpful. We even got breakfast in bed!
There was snow on the ground when we left Saratov but the roads were clear. We went the wrong way across the Volga bridge, the only bridge in central Saratov where the Volga is 1.5 miles wide, and eventually found the road to Voronezh which I reckoned was the best way to get to Tambov. There is a slightly shorter more direct road but the skies were threatening with snow clouds and I thought the road could be snowbound.
The Voronezh road took us through Balashov and Borisoglebsk. This part of Voronezh Province is in the Central-Chernozem zone which I used to wax lyrical about in lectures at Leeds Univ. Chernozem is an internationally-recognised type of soil, and it means “black earth” in Russian. We drove through Starokhopersk where the first collective farm was set up in 1926. You can still see the cottages to where the peasants moved from their scattered izby (wooden huts). The road was lined by the most gorgeous silver birch trees planted when the road was built to act as a barrier to snow drifts.
Borisoglebsk was founded in 1646 and named after Boris and Gleb, two early saints. Its most famous citizen was Mitrofan Nedelin who developed the R-16 ICBM rocket. He died when it exploded on the launchpad at Baikonur in October 1960. The road from Borisoglebsk ran due north to Tambov and, after overshooting the turn-off to the city by several miles and then falling foul of the one-way system, we eventually found the Slavyanka hotel. The room is very comfortable and cheap, and we had an excellent meal of baked salmon in the hotel’s small restaurant for £4.
