Trans Siberia

Five Hours to Olkhon Island

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The next morning we are picked up at our homestay in Irkutsk by a sullen driver who drives us five hours over pot-holes, through the taiga and across a bay of the beautiful blue Lake Baikal to the small Buryat fishing village of Khuzhir on Olkholn Island with a population of 1500 (half are Buryat). Urr0g6ZfQ7ttYL19duYJfg-2006170133924757.gif

We stay at Nikita’s Guest House (Siberia’s only real traveler’s hangout) for five days. Nikita, we are told by some of the guests, was at one time Russia’s table tennis champion. Two multi-lingual Russian girls seem to keep things hanging together and they serve us great garlic-charged meals in a communal dining area. The guests are all European…no Americans…and the conversation is spirited…two Swedes quickly challenge a comment I made that they interpreted as being critical of Socialism.

We enjoy the banya (bathhouse) with wood-heated hot water we can pour over ourselves…although the first time we signed up we were the first on the list and the water was still cold.

Irkutsk…”Paris of the East”

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Off the train again, we dump our luggage at Nadia’s, our homestay and look for a cafe where there just might be an English menu. We find one…not too expensive…that looks full of the city’s hoi paloi. A tall man in a 3/4 length leather coat and fairly long hair by Russian standards, slowly enters the cafe. He moves almost majestically and sits at the coffee bar drinking a single espresso..jeweled ring on each pinky finger…while he waits for a table…whispering solemnly in the ear of the pretty, attentive waitress. He takes off his jacket and carefully hangs it before sitting down. He has a blue shirt on with pink stripes. I want to cast him in a movie.

Later, behind me on our way to the internet cafe, click, click. I move my smooth slow stroll to the side. Click click, she quickly passes on a mission to some unknown destiny.

Goodbye to Vladamir

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Vladamir makes crying motions with his fingers running down his cheeks as we prepare to leave him on the train. Astrakhan in 2–5 he writes on a piece of paper…Astrakhan in 2005 we say to him as he helps us to get off the train with our baggage…carrying his address and phone number carefully in my backpack.

To Irkutsk With Vladamir

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The evening we are to leave Yekaterinburg on the train, Bob loses his change purse containing a credit card getting out of a mini-bus. Olga’s son drives us in his car to the internet cafe on the way to the train station so Bob can email the bank.

Waiting for Bob, he and I have an interesting conversation. I make a comment about the importance of having all the information you can get your hands on and he agrees…free press or no. He tells me he has been reading a web site about American foreign policy and is afraid, that since we invaded Iraq, that someday we might go to war with his country. Alarmed, I try to reassure him that this would be very unlikely and give him my email address and ask him to send me the url.

We get on the train at midnight to find two adult women and a child in our berths and no amount of turning on the lights and loud talking and piling of our luggage in-between the beds will dislodge these people who are stubbornly pretending to be asleep.

We collar the carriage “mother” as I call her (who almost wouldn’t let us on the train in the first place because she was confused by the fact that we were ticketed through to Ulaan Baator) and she finds us a new cabin with Vladamir (is every Russian man called Vladamir?) who seems to be pretty familiar with this route. He is a diesel engineer on his way further east to Chita to “advise,” we gather, considering we have two words in Russian and he has maybe three in English. We settle in, glad there are only three of us instead of four.

The next morning we share each other’s food and he orders delicious Russian borscht for us all from the attendent at the end of the carraiage who makes our soup in a space maybe four feet by three feet at the most. Then Vladamir wants to talk…to tell us everything…in Russian. We get maybe a tenth of it by interpreting body language. “Maxi, maxi, he says and points to Bob when he shows him the map of Nepal and Mt. Everest.

I see some Russian girls dressed in skin tight pants with flat stomach showing beneath a short jacket and above a very short mini-skirt and knee-length spike-heeled boots with very pointy toes and with little short-handled purse slung over the shoulder clicking along the platform. “Russian girls,” I say to Vladamir. This he understands. “Russian gerls! Russian gerls! he exclaims proudly. Cick click they go down the concrete platform. They love the clicking…you can tell. They will spend a month’s earnings on a pair of shoes. There are websites with 40,000 of these girls looking for western men to marry, Sasha told us in St. Petersburg. They are sharp and are disappointed in their own men who only seem to want to spend their time drinking beer and vodka.

Hot Train Carriages

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Most carriages are of East German origin solidly built and warm in winter. Each carriage is staffed by an attendant whose “den” is a compartment at the end of the carriage. She collects your tickets, lets down the steps at stations, and comes round with a vacuum cleaner and a small broom dipped in a bucket of dirty water to keep the carpets swept. She maintains the samovar, opposite her compartment, which provides a continuous supply of boiling water for drinks and cups of dried soup. She is the ruler over all that happens in the carriage and you are her subject.

The only place where passengers may smoke is in the unheated area between carriages. In second class, there is a bathroom (such as it is) at both ends of the carriage and compartments have four births…two on each side with a little ladder that swings out for the person lurching onto the top bunk. (First class has only two bunks in each compartment but is twice the price so we are going second class.) People wear slippers to pad around in especially when headed toward the toilet where the floor is usually wet. Track suits are the fashionable attire of the Russians. There is a small table in-between the two bottom births under the window that passengers can use to share their lunches with each other and on which sets the vodka bottle.

During the day you will find yourself sitting on your bottom berth sharing the sitting space with one of the passengers from the top bunks. During the night, with window and door closed, the compartments are claustrophobic and hot as hell (as are most of the homes and public building, by the way.) One night in frantic despair of getting any sleep I take a pillow and lie on the filthy floor in the space between the cars where there is some cool fresh air.

We welcome our breaks from the train at various stops. Bob hops off in the freezing cold in his shorts and does some jumping jacks causing the locals on the platform to stare at this grey-haired foreigner in disbelief. Bob actually wonders later why all the locals don’t do this. This is dangerous however for another reason: if the train takes off while you are off the train all your belongings will be tallied and taken off the train at some unknown station! A Swiss couple we heard about luckily had enough money with them to hire a taxi to speed toward the next stop to overtake the train.

Yekaterinburg

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Yekaterinburg is most famous, however, as the place where Tsar Nicholas II and his wife and five children were murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918. Having seen where the bodies were interred in the family vault in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, we now traveled a few miles outside the city to view the site surrounded by a quiet forest of lodge pines and birches where the bodies were found and to see the beautiful Orthodox monastery and seven churches newly built in honor of each of the Romanoff “saints.”

We stop at the exact point where European Russia meets Asia and have our pictures taken wit one foot on each continent.

At Shirokorenchinskaya Cemetery we see monumental graves…one a life-size engraving in marble of a 35 year old gangster, with Mercedes keys dangling from his hand. I asked Shasha, our young English-speaking guide if the mafia was all gone in Russia today since these guys had finished each other off. “Yes,” he said, “now they are all in the government.” No fooling this young educated generation soon to take over the reins of this beleagued country where across the street you can see a vast memorial dedicated to the 20 million victims of Stalin’s Gulags many of which were in this Region. The bodies of 25,000 people from Yekanterinburg alone were found buried here.

Falling Out of Bed in Yekaterinburg

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This autumn of 2004, our second time around the world, our train wanders through a rolling fairy-tale landscape in Siberia filled with gentle grassland (steppes) and Birch trees (the forest is called taiga) with the sun glinting off the red and yellow leaves. Dilapidated little unpainted houses with gardens of cabbages, carrots and garlic appear every few miles…and the kids at home say they have nothing to do???

We arrive in Yekaterinburg, the capital of the Sverdlovsk Region which is the capital of the Urals Federal District, with the population of 1.4 million people.

We make our way to our next homestay with Olga, a pretty blond dressed in leapard skin tights with a nice caring smile. We are sleeping on a make-down counch next to the wall and during the night Bob crawls over me to go to the bathroom and tips the bed with the two of us falling onto the floor. Whomp goes the bed back down to the floor. My god, I say to Bob, she is going to wonder what the heck we are doing in here!

Olga wakes us up the next morning for guel and raisins and sliced sausage and cheese and black coffee for breakfast. She has already canned several beautiful small jars of zucchini with tomatoes and garlic and big jars of tomatoes, peppers and garlic. She wraps them lovingly in blankets on the living room floor before storing them “so the flavors will continue mixing.” She would earn awards at our state fair. She says her husband left her for a younger woman. Her son lives with his girlfriend, works and attends a local university, one of about 20 colleges and technical schools in the city. Yelsin grew up and was educated as an engineer at one of the local schools before he became political and ended up in the Kremlin.
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To Siberia & Lake Baikal

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We boarded a Moscow train at midnight. We are headed across Russia on the trans-siberian train system. However we will be breaking up the trip by getting off in Yekaterinburg and Irkutsk, with a side excursion to Lake Baikal, in Russia and Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia on the way to our final destination…Beijing China.

The next morning one of our cabin-mates, (there are four of us…two racks on each side of the cabin) Vladamir, starts his day with a bottle of beer. Enjoying the changing colors of the trees as we climb and dip through the Urals our cabin mates and we share all our packed lunches with each other and Vladamir, who knows no English shares his vodka with us. Diana, who is a translator in German/Russian for a Moscow law firm) does speak English, tells me there is no Russian like Frank Sinatra…and that she doesn’t like Antonio Banderas because he is “dark.” (We have discovered that anyone “dark” is called “black” and is discriminated against…as are homosexuals…hardly anyone out of the closet here.)

Unknown to each other, they are both traveling to their home town of Yekaterinburg, the third biggest city in Russia, to visit their parents. On the way our rich Moscow train passes through dirt-poor even though picturesque villages and Vladamir gets off at a town famous for it’s glass factory to buy a set of crystal glasses (about a dozen glasses for about $20) and bag of apples from the sellers who are tapping at our window. Regulars know what to buy at each stop-whether a bag of berries picked by bucket in the forest or a baked chicken from a babushka (grandmother). We even saw men hawking huge chandeliers. One man was trying to sell a stuffed bird with a wing span six feet wide!

An ex-pirate by the name of Yermak, who is recognized as the founder of Siberia, crossed the Ural mountains and challenged the fur traders for control of the land. In November 1581 he raised the Russian flag. By 1900 over a million people had made he long march to the squalid and overcrowded gulags of Siberia and the word, Siberia, came to mean a place for criminal and political exiles.

In 1891 Tsar Nicholas III began construction on the railway from Moscow to Vladivostock on the east coast of Russia near the Sea of Japan. The greater part was built without heavy machinery bu by men wit nothing more than wooden shovels. Nevertheless, they could lay up to 2.5 miles of rail in a good day, according to the Trans-Siberian Handbook. Most of the labor force had to be imported as local peasants were already employed on the land and the workers came from as far away as Italy and Turkey but the Chinese coolies were terrified of the Amur tigers with which the area full and the government subsequently turned to the prisoners in the gulags to relieve the shortage of labor.

The trans-Mongolian line (to Beijing) branches off from the main Trans-Siberian route (to Vladivostock) at Zaudinsky and follows the well worn route of the ancient tea caravans that traveled between Beijing and Moscow in the 18th and 19th centures. In those days traders made the 7865km journey in no less than 40 days. Since the railroad began operating in the mid-1950’s the journey now takes about 5.5 days.
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Free-Wheeling Moscow

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2004-09
Like in the big Central European cities we visited, there are cranes everywhere… old soviet buildings built during the Stalin era are scheduled to be razed and new one modern ones put up. Foundations for Stalin’s “Seven Sisters, called “Wedding Cakes” by foreigners, were laid in 1947 to mark Moscow’s 800th anniversay when Stalin decided that Moscow suffered from a ‘skyscraper gap’ compared to the USA.

Inextricably linked to all the most important historical and political events in Russia since the 13th century, the Kremlin (built between the 14th and 17th centuries by outstanding Russian and foreign architects) was the residence of the Great Prince and also a religious centre. At the foot of its ramparts, on Red Square, St Basil’s Basilica is one of the most beautiful Russian Orthodox monuments. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Moscow is a free-wheeling city. To the ambitious there are no limits…the streets around the hotels outside Red Square are lined with black Mercedes and BMW’s with black glass windows guarded by black leather clad “goon” drivers…looking like the mafia. I find a fancy hotel where there is free WIFI in the lobby while participants in a European Union meeting saunter back and forth and high-heeled jeans-wearing translators wait around having lively conversation with pipe-smoking goons.

While I sit here uploading text on our blog, Bob wheels off to find the American Medical Clinic where he has a smoldering tooth extracted by a Russian-speaking dentist before we get on the trans-siberian train for Yekaterinburg (birthplace of Yeltsin) Lake Baikal and Mongolia beyond. We miss each other at the end of the day and it costs me 600 roubles to get back to the flat in a taxi because I’m too chicken to hazard the buses and metros.

The night we saw “Spartacus” at the Bolshoi Theater, our bags were searched by monstrously big “security,” one at least seven feet tall. Tanya says, “I never see them there before…” I ask if it is because of terrorism and she says yes, terrorism. By the way, the suicide bomber that killed several of the people in front of the metro entrance was only about 5 minutes from her flat…she says she was at that metro only a few minutes before the bomb went off. People in Moscow worry she says, but what can you do? Yes, I said, I know, thinking of our Josh who works at a restaurant in lower Manhattan.

We are in the ozone at the Bolshoi, the first ballet for Bob who now says he is ready to take ballet lessons if you can picture that and we enjoy conversations with people around us during the intermissions…one older woman from Berkely and a young woman who is here for a few months to volunteer with an AIDS education Non Profit Organization. Come to find out, over a glass of champaign and caviar-filled pastry, her boyfriend, having graduated from Harvard, is working in Chicago as a chef and they are moving to Manhattan…so of course I take her email address to give to Josh.

We leave on a midnight train for Yekaterinburg.

On The Street In St Petersburg

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We hail down a minibus, just like we did in Viet Nam, which takes us across the Neva River to Nevsky pr (like Rodeo Drive in LA which has to have some of the most expensive stores in the world) where we peer into windows…looking for T-shirts..and graffiti. View image Hungry, we walk some steps down to the door of the Propaganda Cafe only because we are illiterate in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet and the restaurant thankfully has a menu in English. We find out later the Propaganda is a chain of expensive cafes all over the city catering to Westerners…a young Brit behind us is on the phone trying to peddle cheap tables to someone who seems skeptical.

We find a Georgian restaurant that night (with a “river” running through it, stained glass windows and walls carved with Georgian motifs) and relish traditional mutton and cabbage stew, stuffed peppers and sweet cheese blinis for dessert. Next to our table are three men, I imagine to be closing a business deal, toasting with vodka and chasers of cranberry juice at every shake of the hand (of course between multiple mobile phone calls).

The ‘Venice of the North’, with its numerous canals and more than 400 bridges, is the result of a vast urban project begun in 1703 under Peter the Great. Later known as Leningrad (in the former USSR), the city is closely associated with the October Revolution. Its architectural heritage reconciles the very different Baroque and pure neoclassical styles, as can be seen in the Admiralty, the Winter Palace, the Marble Palace and the Hermitage. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.