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I entered the arrivals lounge at St Petersburg airport to be confronted by a peroxide blonde holding a sign with my name on it. She led me to a Volga (a typical Russian car once used by Soviet officials). For the next 10 hours I was driven to Petrozavodsk, the capital of Karelia in Northern European Russia by a man who did not speak once.

My first experience of rural Russia was when my blonde guide, Alya, asked if I needed to go to the toilet. After five hours of driving I was pretty desperate but after seeing the "toilet" - a hole in the ground in wooden hut on the motorway that everyone seemed to have missed - I decided to hold it in. It was at this point in the journey, I started to ask myself what the hell I was doing. Why had I decided to go to study Russian all on my own in a small town 10 hours away from the nearest McDonalds? Why hadn’t I just gone to a university near Moscow with the rest of my class?

As they dropped me off at a rundown block of flats probably built under Stalin, I wanted to run back to Britain but I forced myself to stay - and ended up having an amazing time. I spent most of my weekends island hopping - yes, I did say island hopping - in Karelia which is bigger than France and stretches from St Petersburg to the Arctic Circle. It is home to over 60,000 lakes, including Europe’s two largest, lakes Lagoda and Onega.

When I tell people I’ve been to Russia, they always ask: “How did you survive the snow?” If only they knew the truth, they might spend their holidays in Russia instead of in Spain. Russia has a light, hot summer with temperatures soaring to 38°C in some regions so there is no snow in sight.

Another amazing feature of summers in Northern European Russia are "white nights" - few weeks around the summer solstice in June in areas of high latitude during which darkness is never complete because of late sunsets and early sunrises - which means that it is just as light at four in the morning as it is at four in the afternoon.

The first island I visited was Kizhi, which is situated in Lake Onega. The whole island serves as an open-air museum with a beautiful collection of wooden churches and houses. Its masterpiece is a 22-domed wooden cathedral, which is a Unesco world heritage site.

In the summers, you can get to Kizhi from Petrozavodsk by hydrofoil but the only way to travel there in winter is to charter a helicopter or plane.

The island’s tour guides live on a neighbouring island and take a boat to work everyday. They wear traditional dress and carry out activities such as embroidery to show tourists what 18th century life was like. This is a day trip and tourists aren’t allowed to stay overnight on the island but luckily my landlady was friends with a tour guide and I stayed on a neighbouring island with them. In the evening we rowed a wooden boat to neighbouring islands where the men chopped wood for a camp fire as we ate and sang Russian songs.

My landlady took me to another island from Kizhi. When we got there she told me that there was a mental hospital on the island and the patients were free to walk around. Cows also freely roamed around the island. It was very surreal. We then walked for three hours in the boiling heat to visit one of her friends, who quite literally lived in the middle of nowhere. He was Polish writer Mariusz Wilk, who likes to place himself in extremely remote areas for years and then write about his experiences. He lived in Solovetski Island for six years and wrote ‘The Journals of a White Sea Wolf’, an account of his time there.

Another must see is Valaam, a breathtaking island in lake Lagoda, which is inhabited by monks. This island had a troubled past under Communism as the regime did not believe in God. In the time of the Soviet Union, all monks had to return to the mainland and live like every other citizen.

The monks are now safely back on the island and it was surreal to see young men dressed as monks and to think of all the vows they had taken - especially when compared to British men!

The most enigmatic island by far was Solovetski, a remote archipelago on Russia’s northern White Sea coast. It used to be home to the worse gulag in Russia under Stalin. Isolated from central command, guards kept prisoners in horrific conditions, torturing or killing them as they pleased. Famous inmates included linguist DS Likachov and poet and priest Anatoly Zhurakovsky, as well as hundreds of other artists, writers and intelligentsia. The prison was closed in 1939.

I found it very eerie that there were hardly any remains of the gulag. In comparison to the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz in Poland, which wants to remind people of what happened, it seems Solovetski just wants to forget. It is hard to believe something so impossibly beautiful has witnessed so much unthinkable horror.

Despite it’s gruesome past, there is a much more upbeat atmosphere on the island these days, with much to do. I rented a bicycle and cycled around the whole island visiting many of its attractions including beautiful botanical gardens and the Kremlin.

It is incredible to think that these people are stranded here in the winter because of the extreme weather. The only way you can get there is by helicopter but even that is quite dangerous.

There is so much more to Russia than meets the eye - you just have to step off the tourist tracks of Moscow, St. Petersburg and the Golden Ring. Although you will have to find these mysterious places yourself, once you’re there you will be so grateful for all your groundwork. It will feel like you’ve stepped in on a closely guarded secret.

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