One day, while I was there, I decided to take a photo of a thermometer high up in the Telecommunications Building. It was already three in the afternoon and I needed to get back to my hotel. In the night the temperature would fall to below minus fifty centigrade! I had finished a visit to a fort built in 1632 near the River Lena by the Russian explorer, Simeon Deshnev, to the Cathedral, to the tower that remained from the old wooden fortifications, which had largely burned down and to some museums, including those of mammoths and of diamonds; in Yakutia you can buy little figurines made from Mammoth bones.

I was wearing a \'shuba\' or anorak, given to me by the son-in-law of my Russian friend\'s Godfather\'s eldest daughter, two pairs of trousers, leather boots, several sweaters and a sort of Russian peaked cap called shapka. Even so I had to pop in to a jeweller\'s every five minutes to warm up. My eyes would freeze and [I have to tell it as it was - more\'s the pity!] some other delicate masculine parts of my body were freezing up as well!

Well, I took off my right glove for less than ten seconds, just time to get my hands steady and take the photo of the thermometer now registering minus thirty-nine degrees centigrade. \'Click\' - it was done and I reached out to put back my glove but - Heaven help us! - It seemed as though the fingers of my hand were in the process of falling off! I shot into a cinema and in its cafeteria I pleaded for a glass of hot water, tea or coffee - of whatever would be the first available - then I was holding my hand and trying to plunge it into the glass. The two attendants, a sexy and forward pair, one smoking and the other painting her nails, told me without any interest that there were having a ?pererib? or temporary pause for a quarter of an hour. I rushed into the toilet and turned on the hot tap. It took a full ten minutes with my hand held under before I recovered feeling!

One cold day in December I flew back to Moscow and immediately changed onto a plane to my beloved birthplace, Barcelona. My stay in Russia had already become like a lovely Russian fairy-tale and, like all my trips, I could appreciate it much better on arriving home. I spread out my map of the world and marked in where I had travelled; near the Arctic Ocean; in the easternmost part of Asia, in two of the \'forbidden\' islands of the Kuriles, in the \'Proliv Laperuza\' to sail to Korsakov in the island of Sajalin, and in the peninsula of Kamchatka. I felt hugely emotional. Although I was left with scarce a Euro in my pocket and that night I had to eat a horrible mortadella sandwich, because I didn\'t feel like going for more to the Pakistani shop that was still open in the late hours of the night. I shouted joyfully, \'My God, how very lucky I am. I have been to stupendous places and seen amazing sights that not too many human eyes have seen.