Russia/Mongolia/China Trip Days 8-12: Trans-Siberian Railroad

Because I don’t want to bore you (any more than I already have with my little Russian history lessons and explanations of virtually every item in the Russian Armoury) I will not have a blog post for each of the days on the train. It was boring enough going through it without having to recount each day in minute detail. Furthermore it would be just a lot of “then we sat staring out the window for an hour” and therefore I am just going to combine the approximately 90 hour train journey into one post and highlight for you some of the interesting (or not so interesting really) things about the train journey.

KM zero of the Trans Siberian in Moscow

The train would make lots of stops and at each stop everyone would get out and try and get some fresh air. It was here that we got to catch a glimpse of the Russian train population. Never in my life have I seen so many overweight men with their shirts off! It seemed like every single Russian on the train just wandered around shirtless all day with their huge bellies hanging out. Not pleasant and not attractive....

Each stop was known for selling various items. Little old babushka ladies would walk around the platform with their food to sell. Some of the various things that were sold (that we either ate or passed on) included

-grilled whole chickens

-waffle cones filled with caramel

-potato pancakes filled with meat

-dried smoked fish

-potato dumplings

-ice cream

-veggies and fruits

The train compartment (for 4 people) was a ginormous 5ft by 7 ft by 8ft space. Two beds on the bottom served as benches to sit on, the two bunks on the top were really just used for sleeping (or getting better access to the open window). There was no air conditioning and the windows only opened about 3 inches making for a very very stuffy compartment, especially when the train wasn’t moving. There was a small table in between the bottom beds that folded up (to leave more room, a whole 3 square feet more) and storage for baggage underneath the seats and in a small compartment over the top bunks. The sliding door on our compartment was very finicky and would get stuck (either open or closed) quite often.

The toilet was another experience altogether. Everything in the toilet was made of chrome (and not too clean chrome either) and the toilet itself simply opened up to the tracks below. Because of this the toilet would be closed for about an hour before and after all the major stops (which was really inconvenient in the mornings).

Electricity was a major problem. First of all, the major plugs in the train were 50V which is barely enough to charge a camera battery let alone a laptop. There was one plug in the carriage that was at 220V but the energy capacity of the entire car was so low that if you tried to charge a laptop it would short out the circuit of the car and it would need to be reset every few minutes. Therefore we were unable to charge our computers making for a long journey. My intention was to use the train journeys to get a significant amount of work done on my thesis and because of this I had only brought a single book (Harry Potter 1 in Hebrew) with me so as to not have anything to distract me from my work. However, when you have a computer that is dead after the first few hours (because I brought it onto the train not fully charged) that is not a good thing... So my computer sat useless for most of the trip and I was stuck with one book and an iPod that had to be rationed so as to last me the whole time.

Our train carriage had 2 attendants, Olya (nickname for Olga) and Pavel. Olya was a plumb blond woman whereas Pavel was a very skinny, very tattooed (perhaps with prison tattoos, we never asked) Russian man. It wasn’t until the final day of our journey that we learned (much to our surprise) that Olya and Pavel were actually married! We’re pretty sure that we gave them hours of entertainment as the only tourists on the carriage.

We met some interesting people on the train. The highlight (or perhaps lowlight) had to be a Russian teenager (perhaps 19) named Dmitry who drunkenly stumbled into our compartment one evening. He tried to speak English to us but his vocabulary was extremely limited. Whenever he didn’t know a word he decided that profanity would be a good substitute and would just drop the f-bomb without abandon. Eventually he started babbling something about James Cameron (we never figured out what he meant), he kept pointed at my Newcastle shorts and saying “Newcastle United” and all of a sudden he was talking about the Lakers and Shaquille O’Neal. We didn’t know exactly what was going on and so we decided to just kind of ignore him and hope he shut up or went away but finally when he spilled beer on our carpet and started to take his shirt off it was time for him to go and we never saw him again.

We played lots of games. Cards were a lifesaver and we played more games of Euchre, hearts, Screw your Neighbor, and Phase 10 then I can count. We also played the game where you write the name of a movie character/celebrity/literary character on a piece of paper, stick it on someone’s forehead, and they have to guess who they are by asking questions. This was a great way to pass the time even though it took me well over an hour to figure one of mine out (it was Wilson the volleyball from Castaway, so its not like it was an easy one).

We passed some interesting landmarks and places but considering we couldn’t get off the train for more than 40 minutes at a time we were only able to say “oh, interesting, this is where blank happened, guess its time to get back on the train.” Some of the landmarks/locations we passed included:

-Perm 2: The last stop in Europe, the border between Europe and Asia was a few hundred kilmeters from this stop. This also used to be a Gulag (hence the number, there were many of them).

-Sverdlavsk: Formerly called Yekaterinburg, this city is where the Romanov family (Tsar Nicholas, his wife Alexandra, and their children) were murdered. The palace in which it happened was demolished by Yeltsin and now a church called Church on the Blood stands in its place.

- Tyamen: The first stop in actual Siberia, this stop was important to us because it is Masha’s hometown

-Omsk: The seat of Western Siberia during Imperial times and the second largest city east of the Ural mountains

-Novosibirsk: The largest city in Siberia, and third largest in the country behind St Petes and Moscow. Also probably the nicest of the stations we visited.

-Krasnoyarsk: The last stop before the Yenisy River which marks the border between eastern and western Siberia

-Irkutsk: THE END OF THE LINE (well, for us at least, not everyone)

On the whole, the train was defo an experience. I didn’t enjoy it per se but I’m glad I did it. Here is our Trans-Siberian Moscow to Irkutsk train journey by numbers:

-1 train

-1 border crossing (Europe to Asia border)
-2 times members of our group were kicked out of the dining car by the very angry dining car operator for staying too long after we had finished our drinks
-3 different Russian beers tasted

-5 time zones

-16 stops of more than 20 minutes (and countless other short ones)

-28 degrees C approximate average temperature (low 80’s F)

-87 hours

-5,193km travelled (or more than the distance from Maine to Los Angeles)

-1 very happy camper when we got off the train in Irkutsk