#grosny

Another day. After an wonderful night I took another taxi up to the central bus station. You could just take the tram as well but ... I was too afraid to miss something.

Getting an ticket for this bus ride was not easy. In the end the page tutu.ru was able to do the job and accept western payment methods. I was not really sure if I had an valid ticket (25€). But lets find out!

The Station

The central Bus Station Nord is an old Soviet building with some makeover, plenty of shops inside and around of it, and an ugly security layer that got added in the last years. So if you want to go to the bus stations itself you need to do the whole Airport security thing. With this Russia tries to secure the inner regional borders.

I had no issues with that. In front of the Station many people will ask you to carry packages for them in a bus. Needless to say that I was not crazy enough to try that.

The bus then arrived 30 minutes early. The usual small Bus thing. This time an Volvo. The driving would later turn out as 'okay' since we never had any cliffs beside us and aaloot of free sign ahead.

An funny thing about the security was, that just 5 minutes after leaving the secured area, we just had a stop on the Mal behind the station to pick up some other people. Well....

(the scheduled stations: city, city, city, city, desert cafe, city)

Desert Journey

The whole journey was pleasant but long. After leaving the south Russian region you will see the Islamic focused side of Russia with many big buildings in the cities as well as various people here and there. I mean, I was never close to this big buildings. But my worldwide experience was that this prestige Buildings are empty most of the time. I wish I could had spend more time in Grosny.

But soon after Grosny the landscape goes down to desert alike states. And its getting ... kind of boring. At least internet works most of the time which is again amazing compared to german standards.

The Bus is scheduled to take 8,5h for the whole things. It turned out to be 11 hours. And I don't think that we lost some time on any point. Even the inner Russian border was smooth.

Arrival

We arrived at about 22 o'clock and the first thing then was that my Hotel, the Orion Hotel, denied to take me in. For some absurd reason that I understood as, that they never had an E-Visa ever before.

So. Where to get an hotel on 22:30? I decided to check into the next hotel that I saw, the Cosmos Hotel. I'm here right now. And its okay. Very expensive for Russian standards but a 4 Star place.

In the end, I spend 120€ (ticket + 2 nights) - The next Train to Atyrau will come by tomorrow.

Illustration: Benjamin Güdel

An einem Winterabend im Jahr 2013 stand Juan Carlos Gómez nackt vor dem Spiegel im Badezimmer seiner Wohnung in Hamburg und betrachtete seinen Körper. Er hatte eine Packung Twix gegessen und ein paar Gläser Havana Club getrunken. Nun schaute er sich an. Die Muskeln hingen schlaff an der Brust. Der Bauch wölbte sich, und die Haut wirkte stumpf. Gómez  hielt sich seine Fäuste vors Gesicht. Er war einmal ein Boxer gewesen.

Reportagen #21 

Gemeinsam mit Jonas Breng

December 14, 2014 this is the apartment of the Committee against Torture after it was destroyed by the police or militia groups of Ramzan Kadyrov in Grozny, Chechnya. Image 2 : Sergei Babinets. Via svoboda.org and Human Rights Watch. 

http://goo.gl/6nrt5F :  " Today, about 9 o'clock, we came  together with Dmitriy Dimitriev from the hotel "Grozny City" to look at what's left of our office.  Impressive painting: everything is broken, furniture turned over and the same broken, office burnt out completely. We took some photos. Emergency workers arrived, we gave him an explanation, after he said that the naked eye can see that was arson. Meanwhile, we packed up the belongings from the apartment and put them in the car. We were about to leave when a man came to the house with 10 police officers, most of whom were without uniform. They began to inspect the office. We expected to leave, but we were asked to stay for questioning. <...> We have long argued and pointed the illegal action, but the police were adamant and move on to our body searches during which they seized 4 camera and two phones....  I do not understand.