This morning the train pulled into Irkutsk at 3:13am - 77 hours after leaving Moscow. It seems quite a long time 77 hours but we were both sad to get off. We had a very comfortable compartment with two single beds, a table, plenty of storage space and a couple of cups and a teapot so that we could make ourselves coffee and soup whenever we wanted. Our neighbors were a French couple - one a writer and the other a photographer. Each carriage has a samovar at one end so hot water was never a problem. Although the carriage slept twenty, I only counted 7 other people in our carriage during the entire journey - and only three of those spoke English.
Here is what has happened since my last entry in Moscow
JUNE 9th
Got up at 8am and packed our room, , then put our packs in storage at the hostel. While Sara went shopping for food and drink for the following days on the train, I went back to Red Square with our friends Ronnie & Erika so that I could tend their bags while they went to see Lenin. Met Sara back at the hostel in the afternoon then caught the Metro to Komsomolskaya where two key railway stations are situated - i) Leningrad Station for trains to St Petersburg and ii) Yarlslavl Station which is the beginning of the Trans-Siberian Railway. After a short wait at the station we boarded train no. 2 bound for Vladivostok, carriage 7, berths 9 & 10. I took a few photos of the train and then we took off, right on time. It was a wonderful evening watching the first few towns and hamlets roll by as we sat there glued to the window drinking coffee. Bit of a panic after two hours when we heard breaking glass and two people running through the compartment. We saw blood on the floor throughout the hallway and the glass on the door to the neighboring carriage was smashed. We could only assume that someone has slipped and hit the glass, maybe with their head, and run off in a panic. The initial route was slightly different to the one in my guidebook - we stopped at Vladimir for 20 odd minutes and then close to midnight we rolled into Gorki.
Train #2 headed to Vladivostok
Our carriage
During the night we made a few stops (Kirov, Glasow) and awoke to find us stopped at Vyatka. The countryside in between the towns was very flat and many of the towns were no more than a few hundred people, the majority of which were farming their own land. Coffee and soup for breakfast, then we left our door wide open and read for much of the day waiting to see the Urals later that evening. Quite a long stop at Perm (which was at one time called Molotov, after the cocktail guy) in the early afternoon but already we were caught out with the time changes and the day was passing much quicker than expected. We had gone forward two hours already. The Urals were quite frankly not worth writing about. I've seen bigger mountains in Dallas. At about 8.30pm Moscow time (everything train related in Russia runs on Moscow time to save confusion with the time zone changes) we pulling into Sverdlovsk which I mistakenly called Yekaterinburg. Same place I thought - just a different name. It was here in 1918 that Tsar Nicolas II, his wife and children were murdered by the Bolsheviks in the basement of the house they were being held in. Their remains were found about 10 years ago in a shallow grave nearby. No time to do much at the station - it was raining and we had an important backgammon tournament going on.
Inside out two berth sleeper
Woke up just before the train pulled into Omsk. Got a few provisions at the station and then had coffee and chocolate for breakfast. Most of our more wholesome meals were either soup or yummy Russian noodles. On the south side of the tracks are kilometer markers so that you can tell exactly how far from Moscow you have come - or have left to go. Some of them are tricky to spot because they can be very close to the train but I spied the 3010km maker and knew we were over half way to Irkutsk (about 5,200km). At 5pm Moscow time, 8pm local, we crossed the River Ob and into the sprawling city of Novosibersk - the biggest city in Siberia. It's a typical Soviet city with huge industrial centres and very gray. Once we got moving again we decided to try the dining cart for dinner - we shouldn't of bothered. The food was disappointing and it would ruin Sara's morning the next day. Forward another hour.
One of the many station stops along the way - cannot recall where this is
The utilitarian toilet
JUNE 12th
With Sara diving between our compartment and the toilet she missed some of the better landscape. We stopped at Krasnoyarsk in the morning, another town closed to foreigners until recently because of the secret nuclear weapons cities located nearby. Heading out of the city we crossed a 1km long bridge over the Yenisey River. A short while later the countryside changed dramatically. Flat prairie land gave way to lush rolling hills. Tiny hamlets clung to the hillsides and all about the place people were out farming, walking and going about their business. Later in the afternoon we stopped at Ilanski - another pretty station. It seemed that for the rest of the evening the scenery just kept getting better. Sometime in the evening I put the clock forward another hour to Moscow +5 - by my reckoning we should stay in this time zone for the next month at least. More pretty station stops at Taishet and Nischnevdinsk and then it was time to try and get some rest. The train was due to arrive at Irkutsk at 10:13 Moscow time - 3:13am local.
The train station at Taishet
Small communities in Siberia
Checking the wheels at one of the stops
And that's about it for the train journey. It was much more fascinating than I ever imagined and now we can't wait to get on board the next train - a 36 hour jaunt around lake Baikal, then south to Mongolia. We have a few days to explore Irkutsk but the main reason for stopping here is to see the lake. That's the plan for tomorrow.
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