After 9288 kilometres of what is mostly birch forest, two parallel lines of iron wind their way round the edge of China, down to a much-overlooked corner of the world’s biggest country, just across the sea from Japan. Most of Russia is ignored- often for understandable reasons. It is too cold, too far from anywhere that is not Kazakhstan and too, well, Russian. The two capitals of this massive country are bearable because you can fly there from London in three hours, find a heated café in winter and buy olive oil for less than £20 per bottle. These are things which, it is understood, are impossible anywhere east of Yekaterinburg or perhaps Novosibirsk. And it is not as if things were any better in the past. Areas in central Siberia and beyond are known to historians as the locations of brutal gulags, to aspiring globetrotters as somewhere where they once constructed a vast railway line which crossed places so inhospitable that there had to be a break in the line, so your train could drive on to a boat and cross the world’s deepest lake. That is unless it was during the five-month winter, when you had to traverse the lake’s frozen surface by horse-drawn carriage, and get on a different train at the other side. Maybe those globetrotters and historians are now aware that these places are no longer the homes of prisoners of a politically repressive regime, and that in 1904 a track was built around the southern tip of Lake Baika, allowing a non-stop service from Moscow to the Pacific Ocean. But destinations this far from Europe are still only accessible by spending 168 hours in a small train compartment with a smelly and hostile old Russian man named Vladimir. Why would you do that when, for a similar price and time sacrifice, you could still see that lake which contains a fifth of the world’s fresh water, and cross the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and see your train lifted from one gauge of track to another, arriving at the end of it all in Beijing, Olympic city and exotic 3000-year-old cultural centre?

After Pyongyang, Seoul and Tokyo, Beijing is in fact the fourth closest national capital to the headquarters of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, which is a fairly high position on a list of around 30 capital cities which are closer to this particular harbour than Moscow is. So why is this territory not managed from Ulan Bator, or Delhi, or Bangkok, or, for that matter, Darwin, Australia? These are all relative neighbours when compared to the seat of the Russian government. The reason, apparently, is because in 1860, the Russians laid claim to this beautiful and sheltered bay, naming it the Golden Horn in honour of its resemblance to a similar inlet of sea in Istanbul. Though superlatives of distance abound in describing where exactly this formerly Chinese-controlled piece of land is, at that time it was simply the south-eastern limit of a colossal Russian Empire which already had hundred-year-old settlements, much further east in what is now Alaska. And in its way, the Federal Maritime Region has more in common with places like Alaska or north-eastern China in terms of climate, biodiversity and peoples. The region’s heraldic symbol, the Siberian tiger, is surely influenced by the proximity of Harbin in China, which is the location of the largest park for these feline beasts. One of the regional capital’s main streets is named after the Aleut people, the same group who give their name to the Alaskan Aleutian islands. That regional capital is Vladivostok, and a cursory glance at the geographical realities of the city barely tells you the half of what this place is really like.

However, there can be no doubt that the nature of Vladivostok’s surroundings plays a defining role in the appearance and feel of the city, though it often seems to be less an embracement of these surroundings than a struggle against them, which really makes Vlad what it is today. Principally of course, the Golden Horn lies a very long way away from Moscow and, as if trying to force this gaping distance closed, successive governments have left ample evidence of their attempts to include Vladivostok in their own vision for Russia. The Tsarist regime commissioned the building of the city’s classically Russian over-the-top railway station, and more recently, the Soviets erected the ‘Monument to Fighters For Soviet Power in the Far East’ in the centrally located Square of Revolutionary Forces. This towering statue was presumably in some way supposed to be proportional in size to the length of time it took for the Bolsheviks to reach the city; from 1917, the time of the revolution in the west, it took a further five years for Vladivostok to fall, in October 1922.

Today, the city exhibits two quite different struggles against a natural setting. Firstly, the often very steep hills over which Vladivostok is spread pose a practical challenge to developers and road-builders alike. Not renowned for the quality of their work anywhere in this vast nation, Russian pavement makers undoubtedly struggle to fashion concrete or tarmac into a smooth surface on these slopes, and this makes getting around the city on foot an extremely trying task. This is worsened because these sidewalk engineers have at times clearly felt that it was not worth trying to make any kind of walkway along the edges of many of the roads, and the carriageways themselves are no less treacherous, with a complete absence of markings of any kind throughout most of the city. What makes things worse is that in contrast to the Ladas, Skodas and Volgas driven choking and stalling in much of the rest of Russia, almost all cars here are Japanese. This means both that the steering wheels are on the same side as the cars drive, and that local drivers are able to indulge their desire for speed to their hearts’ content in cars which perform far better than their left-hand drive Russian counterparts. The presence of these cars imported on big ferries from Japan gives an insight into the second of the region’s principal struggles. Evidence of the city’s East Asian location is present wherever you look in Vladivostok, from the Korean buses with route maps from Busan and Seoul still plastered to the backs, to the vast sections of imported Japanese noodles in supermarkets, and the popularity of the study of East Asian languages at the city’s universities. But as is the case elsewhere in Russia, statistics for violent crimes perpetrated against people of obvious non-Russian provenance are alarmingly high, and conversations with some locals will reveal views on race which would most likely shock anyone with a ‘western’ point of view. A lack of willingness to embrace what neighbouring countries have to offer also extends to official spheres, where Chinese immigrant workers or tourists feel they have more trouble every year obtaining the correct travel documents for legal entry into Russia. In the opposite direction, China has recently extended a three-day visa-free amnesty period to Russian tourists and traders wishing to cross overland into China to shop or simply look around- an ever more popular pursuit for bargain hunters from Vladivostok. The study of the languages of up-and-coming China and already highly-developed Korea and Japan, which often seems to be the driving force behind Vladivostok’s tertiary education sector, is ostensibly driven by the necessity of being able to be competitive in a difficult and not particularly fluid job market. However, the apparent lack of real academic interest on the part of many students of these languages could merely be symptomatic of an unusually large student body focussing on certain subjects. Unwillingness, in official as well as informal spheres, to open up fully to the potentially very beneficial influences of other nations around the Primorye region can make relations with these countries seem like a vain yet constant struggle. Perhaps it is the very emphasis historically placed on including Vladivostok and its surroundings in any vision of the Russian empire which leads to an overly defensive stance, both of people and government, against nations which are seen to be as much a threat as a partner in the region.

Despite the difficulties for Chinese people associated with doing business in Russia, the markets are thronged with Chinese stall owners selling their goods, and Chinese restaurants are far and away the city’s most common outlets of foreign cuisine. South Korea, Japan and China all have consulates in Vladivostok and even North Korea has diplomatic representation in nearby Nakhodka, so situated to avoid being in the same city as South Korean officials. The USA is the only western country with a full consulate in or anywhere near this part of Russia; Britain’s closest Russian consulate is over 5000km away in Yekaterinburg. The closest thing greater Europe has to any representation in Vladivostok is a recently opened Alliance Française, and an elderly German Lutheran pastor, who has been here since the city opened to foreigners in 1992. The small community of western foreigners in the city is quite a select, some might say odd, bunch, perhaps by virtue of the fact that these people made it here at all, and it is by no means surprising to meet a Frenchman who has cycled here from Strasbourg. But the presence of such westerners in this city is merely a muted return to a way things were in Vladivostok’s heyday, as a frontier town and multicultural centre of international trade. Russians were in a minority here when the grand German department store was built of bricks brought from Hamburg, or when actor Yul Brynner was born in an attractive Art Deco house to Swiss parents. The observant visitor will pick out all sorts of architectural relics of a pre-revolutionary period of prosperity and vibrant internationalism. Just as gold drew prospectors to the American West, the trade and import – export opportunities offered by the multinational community, and excellent natural harbour, brought western Europeans, Americans, Chinese and those Siberians already enticed east out of European Russia by the former boom in furs, flooding to this edge of the Eurasian landmass. Like a USA in mirror image, large settlements in this far-eastern part of Russia are far more spread out than those at the opposite longitudinal extreme of the country, and local railway stations here are named along the lines of ‘Kilometre 94’, simple measurements from the closest large population centre. There is evidence of official enthusiasm to tie Vladivostok to the western American cities which grew up around the same time, on the other side of the Pacific. The hosting of the APEC forum in 2012 is presumably supposed to be seen as an opportunity for Russia to demonstrate its importance in Pacific Rim affairs, complementing its oil and gas diplomacy in Europe.

There is not much danger of Vladivostok going the way that Alaska did in 1867, and becoming property of the US. People here do of course feel disconnected from the political machinations of the Duma and Kremlin, but no more so than Muscovites themselves do. Support for Dmitri Medvedev in March’s presidential election was as high here as elsewhere in the country, and the only real difference that you will hear mentioned between residents of Moscow and Vladivostok is that the former speak more slowly, a linguistic difference as small as that between people’s views.

The material privations in Vladivostok, which manifest themselves in water and electricity problems at the university dormitory in which I was initially housed, were by no means the main challenge to be encountered as a resident of what I saw initially as a mysterious end-of-the-earth kind of a place. Incidentally, these shortages may even have helped me on my path to discovering exactly what this place is, by giving me insight into one of the city’s historically notorious characteristics: it was said that in the 1990s you could have water, electricity or heat, but never all three.

Seven months in a place definitely changes your perspective on what it means to travel, to move house, to live somewhere. You do not lug 43 kilogrammes of luggage halfway round the world just to go backpacking, but equally you do not move house with only a suitcase and a rucksack. It takes at least 14 hours of flying on two separate planes to get home to Britain, and it is actually easier to spend Christmas and New Year in Korea or China. This blurring of the lines between travelling and living, occasioned by being a temporary resident in a place, and yet being here for long enough to want to invest in a few things to make life easier, has undoubtedly fashioned my relationship with Vladivostok. And yet despite the ever-present knowledge that I am a kind of western European ghost passing through here, there has been a gradual yet significant process of getting more used to the city. While every trip to the Tsarist railway station during the first few weeks brought both a sense of wonder that there were trains every day to distant Moscow, and a desire to get on one of them, later visits have seen me much more appreciative of the station itself as an important building in the city in which I live, rather than the gateway to a direct- if slow- route out. My first weekend was spent at the home of an Azerbaijani friend out of town in Dunai, a hundred-year-old settlement east of Vladivostok, highly representative of the small and young centres of population which are dotted throughout the region. Returning to the regional capital after that weekend already felt like a return to something known, at least in comparison to Dunai, and the process of familiarisation had begun with noticeable effects.

Of course the much-discussed location of the city also blurs lines between what one normally understands as East and West. Frequent assertions by residents of this area that they are European have always sounded strange to me, given both the difference I perceive between the local way of thinking, that which I remember from Europe, and the region’s proximity to China and other definitely oriental countries. In the Russian Far East more than anywhere else, a European is perhaps drawn to the historical Slavophile view that Russians are very much their own people, pursuing a middle path between Europe and Asia. In Moscow however, a European can simply justify Russian idiosyncrasies as being a result of the Asian connection, and Asians in Kamchatka or Khabarovsk can attribute equivalent oddities they notice to European-ness. Evidently, as far as location is concerned, Vladivostok is very much locked in Asia, yet the apparent reluctance to accept the presence and influence of its neighbours combined with the obvious non-European characteristics of its population leave you wondering where this region, and, by extension, this country, fits. Stereotypically Russian weather certainly seems keen to stake its claim on the area, as every winter sees the Sea of Japan frozen thick enough to drive on, despite Vladivostok’s latitude being the same as that of Marseilles.

It is easy to grow used to seeing dilapidated buildings, worn down steps and shoddy construction work, to the extent that they are hardly noticed after a period of settling in. But having come to accept such difficulties visual and practical in everyday life, you come to appreciate enormously functioning lifts, clean and navigable pavements and other evidence of a government which cares for its subjects, and a society in which people appear to care for each other because they are given the space and time to do this. Under the Soviet Union from 1958 until 1992, Vladivostok was off limits to foreigners, and Soviet citizens alike, as the headquarters of the Russian Pacific Fleet, and in this sense, Russia had its own Forbidden City, just as nearby Beijing had had years before. Only time will tell whether Vladivostok and the Primorye region choose to draw on a more recent Chinese, Japanese or Korean example of modernisation and development, while still making the most of its ties to the West. It is a city in a country which lies partly in Europe, and has the legacy of the international cosmopolitan centre it could be once again.