I arrived early for the 48 hour train journey to Novosibirsk and waited on the platform with a line of grannies whose wiry grey hair was stuffed into headscarves and their mounds of plastic bags tied tightly with string. The door of the train finally opened and the provodnik stepped out, carefully inspected our passports, ticked our names off his list, and slowly, one by one, let us board.

A 3rd class platskart carriage has 54 bunks arranged in groups of 6, with an open corridor the whole way down. At either end is a toilet which opens straight onto the track, and a metal sink with taps that only drip orange water from rusty screws. By the provodnik‘s compartment at one end is the samovar for everyone’s tea needs, and he will lend out cups and cutlery or sell crosswords and pot noodles.

This is what the Trans-Siberian Handbook has to say about my seat: “Avoid berth No 38 at the toilet/smoking area end of the carriage like the proverbial plague.” But I found it a rather convenient spot, off the tea route and with good access to extra windows. It was an upper bunk bed in the corridor, just below the luggage rack and with enough room to raise your head and squeeze in, but not enough to actually sit up.

To begin with I sat by a group of bored soldiers, hair trimmed to reveal every pimple on their scalps and yawning their whole journey. I made sure to be interested in the landscape outside. Hour after hour of the same forests and lines of silver birch, with the occasional village, swamp and freight train, made it feel as though the train wasn’t moving anywhere.

After the soldiers came an inquisitive man who, on discovering I was English, announced this to everyone nearby, who all nodded wisely. We chatted, as far as my Russian allowed, about the standard train journey topics of conversation: where are you from, do you like sport, what do you think of Russia, what’s London like, where are you going, how much is it costing you? By the first evening, the men were miming all the Australian animals they could think of.

The following morning I woke up to find Russia’s new national kickboxing champion sleeping in the berth below me. Opposite us were his trainer and father, and the usual conversation took place. Then the champion’s father phoned up his nephew who spoke English and passed the phone over to me: he was in the middle of working out (it was mid-morning for us but 2.30pm for him, wherever in Russia that placed him) and his shoulder ached, but he wanted to know if I actually was who I said I was. When I had convinced him that I really was English, he told me all about his wedding and how he had enjoyed it so much he wanted to get married again.

A few more rainy hours of forest later and I suddenly heard unmistakeably English voices boarding the train. They turned out to be students from Kazan on holiday. By this time the kickboxing champion and his gaggle of adolescent fans had plucked up courage to ask questions (the usual), and then we all started listing as many Garry Potter characters as possible. New Russian names appeared such as Neville Longotton and Bezgolovina Nick, and I was, to general astonishment and ridicule, able to produce Bertie Botts Every Flavour Beans. Afterwards, it was the Russians’ turn to teach us a card game which only the Russians seemed to understand, and so each English player picked up a Russian assistant to play their hand for them.

And somewhere outside in the black night, we passed the tall white pillar marking our entry into Siberia.

Next morning, a young woman who had boarded the train with her children the day before invited me to share her table. She began, shyly, to make conversation in surprisingly good English. She had come from Bishkek where she lived with her Kyrgyz husband and was going home to Yakutsk, where her parents had moved decades ago to work in the diamond mines. Her whole journey was 6 days, with a three year old and six month old baby. We chatted about yoga, I showed her photographs of Europe, and she gave me kurut, a traditional Kyrgz salted milk snack which looked like a bonbon but which tasted surprisingly pleasant. She was 23, and told me about wanting to visit the Kyrgz mountains and travel, but just looked at her children and shrugged. I agreed to come and visit her in Kyrgzstan, and we would see the country together.

The train passed through the Barbara Steppe, hundreds of kilometres of swampy ground interspersed with patches of trees. At a station in the middle, I stepped off the train and bought a smoked fish from the ladies on the platform, who carried them strung by their eyes on a kind of metal coat hanger.

At last, we arrived at Novosibirsk, the capital of Siberia and one of Russia’s most industrial cities. I said my farewells to the train and made my way to suburban hippy land, a foretaste of my life in a Siberian village I think.

The train from St Petersburg to Moscow served as good practice for the Trans-Mongolian, though next time I won’t have the luxury of a four-person compartment. We travelled past forest in a straight line for nine hours.

Whereas St Petersburg is the cultural heart of Russia (so I was told), Moscow is the financial heart – and you can feel the difference. Moscow is not pretty or particularly beautiful, though there are few nice streets and squares, but it does have certain buildings that stand out. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, for instance, is a spectacularly grim tower.

Everyone morning I pass the walls of the Kremlin and see dark cars entering or leaving, and with the souvenir shops selling mugs and t-shirts with Putin’s face on, I feel myself drawn into the Putin cult. A rather sombre counterpoint to this is the great shrine to Boris Nemtsov on the bridge where he was killed. It was something of a surpise then when I went inside the Kremlin, and it didn’t feel like we were anywhere near the political heart.

The armoury is a treasure chest – coronation robes, the real Monomakh’s cap with sable fur and gold filigree, huge ornate wooden carriages the size of lorries, and faberge eggs (including one of the trans-siberian railway!).

The main attractions were the icons and churches. There were some extraordinary ones, many of them famous, and with wonderful names – the Saviour of the Fiery Eye, the Saviour of the Fierce Eye, the Saviour Not Made With Hands, and my favourite, the Saviour with Golden Hair.

Seeing Rublev’s icons was definitely the high point. They were beautifully simple, and sometimes on an enormous scale, and they have aged well – the colours haven’t really faded, and the tones haven’t been lost – it’s just a few fragments that have artfully flaked away. I went on a final trip to the Museum of the Russian Icon (which is free, “in order to encourage interest in the subject”, and is the consequently the only museum that has a decent toilet) and saw a ‘Master’ at work in his studio. He did some things slightly differently from what I’m used to, like adding vinegar to the egg mixture, then grinding the egg with the powder for up to 20 minutes, and then painting the gesso a pale brown before starting so that the bright white doesn’t affect the colours or the Master’s perception of them. And he preferred linseed oil to yacht varnish!

St Basil’s Cathedral, the image of Moscow I suppose, is of course beautiful. Inside was not what I was expecting at all – it is a maze of thick frescoed walls, linking a lot of dark, smaller churches together into a warren. As I climbed the stairs, the sound of singing drifted down, and when I reached the top I saw a choir was singing and the whole church had stopped, completely entranced by this heavenly scene.

Coming back down to cobbled earth, spring is at last arriving here. The leaves are nearly out, the fountains are being tested, and everything (everything) is being repainted. In fact, Moscow has pre-empted nature by creating an artificial spring: there are arches of plastic flowers in the squares, giant metal easter eggs with plastic butterflies, and in GUM (the state – now main – department store, famous for being expensive) there are cherry trees in blossom and bird song is piped through the speakers over opera singing while everyoone walks around eating ice cream.

I am reading Master and Margarita and so went to Bulgakov’s house, where there is a tram slicing off the head of Berlioz and, rather alarmingly, a large black cat. I then thought it appropriate to go and read at Patriarch’s Pond, where the devil first appears. The spirit of the devil appears to still be there, because when I got up I realised that all the benches were still wet with paint and my bottom was now bright yellow. Everyone else had made the same mistake and was now trying to discreetly inspect their rears in shop windows. Over the next few days I saw several people in the street with smears of yellow paint.

When I told my Moroccan dormitory neighbour about this, he shook his head and said that wasn’t the devil, and had I actually seen the devil? We then argued and watched numerous videos of exorcisms and people writhing around in agony as the Qur’an was read aloud. This was all in French, and my Russian has since been utterly confused. (I have also met some students from Chechnya, who explained what the various republics of Russia were, and a Belarussian student, who talked a great deal about life in Europe’s last dictatorship).

The last part of Moscow I visited was VDNKh, or the Exhibition of the Achievements of the National Economy, which is now a kind of Soviet theme park. Among the hundreds of buildings, there are various temple-like structures dedicated to each of the Soviet Republics, a pavilion of Consumer Cooperation, and a Fountain of National Friendship. Music is played all day long, people go to rollerblade and eat ice cream, and thousands of people are employed to sweep the streets and polish the fountains. This crubling park may have inadvertantly succeeded in creating a happy Russia. But behind the main avenue are abandoned streets of bungalows, rotting buildings and bakeries, deserted honey shops, and suddenly it all seems slightly too sinister.

I’ve enjoyed my week in Moscow. It’s a hipster (or as they say here, ‘gipster’) city, full of coffee shops, glossy 4x4s, policemen hanging around, people walking their dogs on hoverboards, children and tourists practising their goose stepping, Soviet souvenir shops and street signs that don’t even make sense to Muscovites. I’ve paid my respects to my literary heroes and made my pilgrimage to the icons I so wanted to see.

Moscow is eternally busy, a city for living in and doing things, for writing epic novels and organising revolutions. As a humble tourist, I feel welcome, but a little out of place.

Just as I thought spring was coming and the sun was beginning to feel warm, it started snowing – proper Russian snow which blew horizontally and felt like it was cutting you with every flake. Suddenly the city was a white mist, and the guard uniforms and solid palace walls made a little more sense.

My trip to the Peter and Paul Fortress was abandoned, though the snow certainly gave an edge to the Trubetskoy Bastion (where Dostoevsky, Trotsky and Gorky among thousands of others were imprisoned); I had been in danger of thinking the concrete cells looked reasaonably decent. Instead, I retreated to the metro and went to a rather more downmarket part of St Petersburg to visit the appartment where Dostoevsky lived for the last three years of his life. There were just six rooms, furnished as they had been during his lifetime. It was very simple, with a few little details about him as a person, like his love of shopping, and on the table in the main room was a cigarette box where his daughter had written “28th January. Today papa died.”

The next day things were back to normal.

I think I’ve only seen one really Russian church so far – the Church of our Saviour on Spilled Blood, with its splendid mosiac interior and shrine to where Alexander II was mortally wounded. Its infamous exterior, with its colourful onion domes and decorative brickwork, is so beautiful – I love the way it all bulges with life.

However, mostly the churches here are famous for being unusual and baroque. These churches have grown on me the more of them I see. St Isaac’s Cathedral, which was briefly converted into a museum of atheism, has over 100kg of gold leaf, six enormous malachite columns, and two lapis lazuli columns that were infused with myrrh during construction. I have learned so much about marble and other stones over the past week! I think my favourite is the pink rhodonite from the Urals.

In between visiting churches and pretty buildings, my command of the Russian language extends to directions and food, but not proper conversations. This clearly really annoys some people: on my final day I needed to use an internet cafe, but couldn’t work out how to say what I wanted in Russian and resorted to English. The man behind the desk pulled up Google translate and we typed out a comprehensible and reasonable exchange. Then when I got up to pay, he started typing a very long paragraph and showed it to me: it turned out to be a huge diatribe about you foreigners coming to our country expecting us to speak English when I just live at home and have never learned English and never will, etc….. I stared back at him not knowing what to do with this, and then must have smiled in bemusement because the next thing he typed was simply, “Your laughter disgusts me.” So I just walked off and that was the end of that!

I said my farewell to St Petersburg by going to the post office for stamps. Apparently, none of the Russians in the hostel had really seen stamps before and they oohed and aahed at them very excitedly. After our obligatory goodbye photo for facebook, I left to catch the train to Moscow.

I’ll miss the grand streets (though not the three miles of Nevsky Prospekt), all the palaces and lovely types of marble, and the endless feeling of being cultured. But luckily there’s still a lot more left to do for next time.

The train from Helsinki to St Petersburg passed through more wintry forests and great frozen lakes. At the Russian border they brought the dogs onto the train and suddenly the guards were wearing fur hats; it was almost comically Russian, down to all the moody visa inspectors.

I arrived at Findlyandsky Station, where Lenin arrived for the October Revolution, and I felt a strong sense of culture shock. After I had recovered I found my way into the metro: the escalator goes down and down, further than you can see, below the rivers and the marshy land. Once underground, the stations are beautiful; some stations are deep red with art nouveau brass fittings, others have chandeliers and crystal columns.

My hostel is extremely friendly since it mostly houses young Russians who seem to have nowhere else to live, and tourists provide a great source of interest and entertainment. One resident is a dance instructor and so we are treated to rehearsals every evening. I have even acquired a new pair of polystyrene slippers.

The first thing that struck me in St Petersburg was the terrible air and dirt, a mixture of car fumes, winter dust and smoking plastic from cigarettes dropped in dustbins. At this time of year, the never ending neoclassical buildings along Nevsky Prospekt are a rather delicate shade of dusty pastel pinks, greens and yellows. But the more time I spend here, the less I seem to notice the dirt, and the streets become more and more beautiful.

The first thing I had to do was visit the Hermitage. I know everyone says it is enormous, but I hadn’t imagined just quite how enormous it could be. I wandered around for five hours and don’t think I saw the same room twice. By the end, I was still discovering throne rooms and halls that would easily have been star attractions anywhere else.

There were rooms with twenty types of marble, a malachite room, one with gold leaf wallpaper. Rembrandt had his own hall. There were Siberian mummies, room after room of Buddhas, furniture made out of gnarled tree roots, this amazing gold peacock clock, and, my favourite, a room of ceremonial sledges.

I’ve been doing all the usual tourist things, visiting galleries and buildings and prisons, so won’t bore you with them all. There is a lot of imperial magnificence that is elegant and impressive, and I have seen the double-headed eagle so many times I now find it rather frightening; one could almost forget there had ever been a revolution.

I wonder if the double-headed eagle symbol had anything to do with Peter I’s interest in human and animal deformities? One of the first museums ever built for the public in Russia is the Kunstammer, Peter’s collection of curiosities. There is a huge range of ethnographic material covering the native peoples of Siberia and North America, tribes in Africa (“all African women want to be fat”) and Indonesian warriors, but the main attraction is a scientific room full of bottled body parts and foetuses, and 18th century experiments in how to preserve in the most life-like way. It is fasinating and utterly grotesque.