Ever since 1987 when Maryam d'Abo played the blonde Russian cello playing 'Bond Girl' - Kara Milovy - in the 15th James Bond movie - ...The Living Daylights..., I've been strangely drawn to Russia.

The land of Catherine the Great dramatically became all the more fascinating for me after witnessing Bond (a miscast Timothy Dalton) escape down a snow covered Russian mountain, tobogganing in Kara Milovy's cello case, with her in one hand and her Stradivari in the other.

The cello playing was tracked down easily enough, as after nearly a month in Russia I found myself sitting in the Rachmaninov Conservatorium on my last night in Moscow, listening to the Kazakhstan National String Quartet. To be honest, this wily band of Kazaks looked more like brigands from an episode of 'Monkey Magic' than any Bond girls I've seen, but at least their program of Beethoven and Shostakovich took care of the musical element of my quest. The snow covered mountain wasn't quite as straight forward however ...

Mount Elbrus is nestled in the Caucasus Mountains, 1300kms south of Moscow, within view of Stalin's Georgia to the south, and hardly 200kms from the discontent of Putin's semi-autonomous Republics of Chechnya and Dagestan. It stands at 5642m above (Black) sea level, and after a four day expedition, a three man 'part-time Queensland mountaineering team' stood at 5642m also, having braved a final 8 hour ascent through ferocious wind, bitter cold and the rusted, decaying litter of Soviet machinery and human waste that poisoned the icy slopes. Despite what the French (and many other Western Europeans) would have you believe, Elbrus is the highest peak in Europe, which made for a satisfying climb of one of the Seven Summits, and despite the absence of a cello case and beautiful blonde spy, a reasonably easy descent.

The celebratory vodkas, with the obligatory collection of German mountaineers (once again showing themselves to be the omnipresent nation of world travellers) proved however, to be far more dangerous. Having previously passed through Moscow before flying to the Caucasus Mountains, I was perhaps inspired by the Soviet style amusement arcade games which fill Gorky Park, based predominantly upon sniper shooting, Rocky IV boxing bags and other physical strength based 'amusements.' I fear that my application to the KGB may be in jeopardy now - as brave though I gather my efforts may have been in the late night arm wrestling, Kara Milovny would probably have held her vodka, balance and consciousness (even espionage secrets) better than this would-be agent.

So after an intelligence leak like that, and when you are ...Spies Like Us..., you dust your snowy tracks and return to the anonymity of dark glasses, tinted luxury car windows and the indecipherable Cyrillic street signs and menus of Moscow. Russia and its capital in particular are places of 'mixed tenses', as the Golden Arches famously illuminate the Kremlin, while austere Soviet concrete facades compete with the gaudy cupolas of St Basil's Cathedral, built by Ivan the Terrible to commemorate his successful military campaign against the Tartar Mongols in 1552 (no mention of who the Kazakhstan String Quartet sided with in that battle).

Moscow also has a slightly uneasy feeling of being one big game of chance - not only hosting the largest number of casinos of any capital city (always go black, never red), but also corrupt police, a history of mafia businesses and the spectre of recent terrorist strikes. So much like Mick Jagger's devil, ...I stuck around St. Petersburg, when I saw it was a time for a change ....... Northwest by train from Moscow, this former capital of Peter the Great on the Gulf of Finland lives up to its reputation as one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. Its centrepiece remains the Hermitage and Winter Palace, home to the Romanovs until the Bolsheviks as, again told by Mick Jagger, ...killed the tsar and his ministers, Anastasia screamed in vain....

There is a definite intrigue about this country that Ian Fleming only hinted at in ...The Living Daylights..., not least of all its astonishingly beautiful women (...From Russia with Love..., perhaps). It suffered an experiment with communism that was so forceful that Stalin even managed to exile God (churches remained dormant for 70 years) along with Russia's great writers of the 20th century. It now experiments with capitalism, flaunts its female tennis players and sadly has a decreasing population and life expectancy. But this not-so-undercover spy leaves behind a country that has survived a history of sieges and repression (from both within and outside its constantly changing borders), grateful for the ...Living... highlights, not just the ghosts of the past.