Trans Siberian Train

Lingering Images of Russia

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Siberian countryside with endless kilometers of grassland and golden pine and white birch trees… small wooden, weathered, unpainted, picturesque, single story bungalows throughout Sibera with blue painted shutters-the banya (toilet and shower) in a small building nearby…Outside the cities groups of small two-story dachas (2nd homes with three-sided pitched roofs with garden in front providing relief from tiny flats and a chance to grow their own vegetables for those who can afford it…intensely flavored wine-red berry jam on Olkhon Island.

Drab, dilapidated Stalin-era block style apartment buildings that make maximum use of space but with absolutely no aesthetic value… there’s definitely a market niche in this country, Bob laments, for brooms, scrub brushes, soap and paint…. black leather jackets, Lenin-style hats (never saw any baseball style hats) and shoes with pointed curled up toes on men and women with spike heels—click click click)…. Especially in evenings, but any time of day, people strolling or standing around with an open bottle of beer in hand… Occasionally someone toppling over from inebriation to be caught by a comrade before falling…people with an aloof veneer-not an air of superiority-just reserved as in “I’m minding my own business…you mind yours”-sometimes seemingly shy but when the exterior is cracked they smile readily and extend themselves with varying degrees of warmth and good humor-especially on the train where we have an opportunity to interact……deep underground metros-monumental works of art in themselves (no photos allowed)…wonderful rich soups and more soup, each a little different than the next…

Experiencing daily life in cozy cluttered apartment homestays with friendly middle-aged to elderly single women who get 30% of what we paid. The provided breakfasts range anywhere from here’s the eggs-cook your own to elaborate spreads in tiny rooms… tiny bathrooms (literally wc’s) with sit down toilets that took three times to flush clean…overheard conversations that sound like arguments in a tone of voice you and I would take offense at but then we think it’s all just bluster…people walking in-between and in front of us with no regard for personal boundaries but not intending to be rude…urban store windows full of fashionable clothing and products that only about l% of the people can afford and then only because they operate on the black market (one woman who works for the central bank whispered “yes, we take white money and black money.”

Grueling Border Wait

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The wait at the Russian-Mongolian border is a grueling 5-6 hour wait for customs to go through each carriage and take our passports, return to the office to fill out forms and then return with our passports. Olga takes a six inch wad of $20 bills out of her hand bag and counts it three times.

We are desperate to get off the hot claustrophobic train and get some cold fresh air. We find a very small market a hundred yards from the train where we buy dried apricots, apples and dried noodle soup.

To relieve the bordom a young guy from Chicago (they have put most of the foreigners on this carriage) pulls out his frisbee and plays with an older guy from Australia out on the platform and when one toss ends up on top of the carriage, the guy from Chicago climbs up to get it but can’t resist the urge to pose playfully for all the cameras that appear down below…but not for long. Officials appear and grab all our cameras removing batteries, film & digital chips and tapes. They spend an hour filling out forms and waiting…for what…an offer of money? No one wants to pay money but we shuffle and wait nervously. Finally just before the train pulls away the cameras etc. are returned to their relieved owners.

The Mongol border is a good 2-3 hour wait too… Mongolian sellers and money changers come on board. Olga takes an offer from a guy wanting to exchange our Russian money but then slams the cabin door in his face as she lets in a Mongolian woman who gives us a better offer. Olga has obviously done this before.

After crossing six time zones out of a total of 9 or 10 in Russia, the train thankfully rolls into Ulaan Baatar at 7 the next morning.

Hiking Olkhon Island

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Back at Nikita’s “resort” I spend half a day taking care of monkey business while Bob goes hiking around the island. It is the end of September but Siberia lives up to it’s reputation. It is cold. On the trip to the island it snowed and now each day hovers below zero with chilling winds and puddles that don’t thaw. In another six weeks the lake will begin to freeze and the island will be cut off until the ice is thick enough for vehicular driving. The thaw will not arrive until May. We did not bring appropriate clothing and each dash from the cabin to the squat toilet is a determined gritting.

Tomorrow at 6pm we leave on the train for Ulaan Baator Mongolia.

Hanging Out On Olkhon Island

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After hanging out a couple days…glad to be off the train…Gregory, a former University teacher of German, drove Bob and I, three Germans and a Pole on a half-day excursion to the north of the 70km long island to visit various geological sites and views of the lake but most especially to see a world renowned Shaman ceremonial circle called Three Brothers that is sacred to two faiths practiced here, Buddhism and Shamanism. Two years ago almost 300 Shamans from the world-over came together here. We lay a one rouble coin at the foot of the prayer flag pole while the “Sarma” or east wind blows fiercely over us.

The Buryats are of Mongolian descent…nomads who spent time herding their flocks between the southern shores of the lake and what is now northern Mongolia. They lived in felt-covered yurts and practised a mixture of Buddhism and Shamanism.

Gregory is driving Nikita’s four wheel drive van…a Russian vehicle designed 30 years ago and that was so successful they used it as an ambulance. “There is only one reason Russians sent the first man into space,” says Gregory the Kamikazi driver thumping over mud hole roads at least 90km per hour…”is because of the roads!” Later he says “we at the moment are using two wheels…if it gets really complicated we will use four!” “Normally we sacrifice two persons…usually 50% survive this trip!” Any of our U.S. vehicles would have rolled over at the first turn but this one mysteriously keeps it’s four wheels on the ground.

We pass through beautiful valleys with sheep and cattle farms…two of which are rich and have beautiful houses “because they don’t drink,” Gregory says. We pass by one small house of an old woman who lives alone with her cow…the rest of the houses in the area appear empty. We are shown an area that was a gulag during the Stalin era and whose inmates produced cans of caviar from the lake sturgeon that was then sent to the Kremlin for the enjoyment of the party bigwigs). I see a straggly triangular three wooden stick affair on the top of a hill and ask Gregory what it used to be. “Local KGB headquarters,” he says throwing his head back in laughter. I ask if the Russians and Buryats intermarry. “Seldom,” he says.

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.