Dear Pasha,
I have been thinking about your Russian Misery Travel concept. If you will permit me, I would like to pursue some thoughts and reflections on this extraordinary concept for Russian tourism. If you like them, I will think of some more.
The sort of misery you describe will need a mix of ingredients to succeed (and to attract Western tourists who, as you know, are all spoiled wimps with attention deficit span disorder from diets of cola, chips and MTV.) It must be unusual and daring in a purely Russian way, culturally informative, and it must be fun. That is most important with shallow Westerners. They want to be entertained; it cannot be the real thing, only a taste. And you should supply plenty of opportunities for relief, recovery and some wild behavior if it’s the stinking rich youth of the world you want to attract. Let your intrinsically subversive nature guide you.
OZ Bus Model
A Russian Misery Tour could be a travelcoach, or what we call a bus service in the States, that travels along a scheduled route to various cities, but stops along the way to provide cultural experiences in misery, debauchery, hopelessness, obtained at historical locations and contemporary scenes of anomie. For example, in Australia there are OZ buses that I rode (http://www.ozexperience.com/). Look at their website. If could be a model for what you want to do.
They’re big, modern buses that travel all over Australia. People (mostly spoiled twenty-somethings with daddy’s cash) buy tickets to get from one place to another on them (i.e., I took the Sydney to Cairns trip, a south to north route along the east coast), but that’s not their real purpose. They’re real purpose is fun and marketing. By marketing, I mean that they promote travel experiences at various locations to a captive audience, the bus passengers. (They get money for doing this and for driving tourists on side trips to fun locations.) We were shown a video that our driver appeared in about bungee cord jumping, and where we could go to break our necks at the next stop. Furthermore, the driver told us all about the landscape of the area we were passing through, how it was settled, and so forth. It wasn’t entirely commercial. They’re not shamelessly materialistic Americans.
Then we stopped at a typical rural hotel in a town in the middle of nowhere to spend the night. It was like the Old West in the States, but rougher and really gritty. We all slept in bunk beds and drank in the old hotel bar. It was a riot. The next day we stopped at one of the most beautiful parks in Australia for about an hour and walked the trails. Then we arrived at a coastal town where some of us got off and others got on. The drivers even arranged the accommodations at hostels for everybody on board with a cell phone while driving.
The next night, we stayed at a working ranch, or a station as the Aussies call them, in the Outback and carved digereedoos, a native musical instrument. – I won’t go into all the details, but you catch on. It is a bus trip that is about much more than just getting from one place to another.
You wouldn’t have to do it on the OZ scale, of course. Make if fun for yourself and build it up. Give us a Moscow Misery Tour. This would be purely for sightseeing, but with a distinctive difference. Take us into Lubiyanka Prison where Stalin tortured and executed all of his Bolshevik buddies (in fact, whole days could be devoted to the scenes of Stalin’s crimes against humanity), and the really scary, haunted parts of the Kremlin, such as where Ivan the Terrible murdered his son, or personally hanged dissenting boyars. Show us the courtroom where U.S. Pilot Frances Gary Powers was publicly humiliated for the international press after his spy plane was shot down over Siberia. Spare us nothing! But you must break it up with happy, positive experiences such as taking us to a really nice place for lunch, and to a great banya to recover from our misery at the end of the day. – That’s the Russian thing to do! Banish misery with overpowering, physical experience!
It is late. I must sleep.
Best Wishes,
Peter Harrer