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deviMongolia is my new favourite country. We're in an unexpectedly plush room in the Bayangol Hotel in Ulan Bator now, but the two nights before that were in a felt ger tent on the steppes, and I'm aching all over from many hours of horse riding. It was worth every twinge and then some. But more of that later. For now, it's the Trans-Siberian Railway!
(Pictures are here)
Four days on a train
Moscow to Irkutsk, September 11-15
The departures board at Komsomolskaya station, saying ‘Vladivostok’ in Cyrillic, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Our driver argued with people in the ticket booth and then led us along the still-trainless platform, weaving between waiting clumps of people with stacks of cases and boxes wrapped in gaffer tape. I hoped he knew what he was doing. He stopped to talk to another driver, and his charges – two British girls – cried, ‘You two speak English! Thank God for that! Where are – ‘ But too late: our guy was leading us away again. He picked a seemingly random spot. We waited. The lamps hung above the tracks led away into the dusk. The sky was dark yellow with cityglow in the east, the way we were going. Then the train – looking warm and almost opulent from the outside, with tasselled curtains, our home for the next four days – began to back into the station.
The train is a little world. After several days of rolling through huge empty spaces it starts to feel like the only world. You wonder what would happen if you were to somehow fall off, out of the train-world, in the middle of an endless deserted steppe. It’s not like you could thumb a lift to anywhere.
First there was our cabin. We had the two top bunks, each with a shelf for the essentials – mug, cup-a-soup, coffee, books, wet wipes (because there’s no way to wash). Below us were a middle-aged couple, Buryats (not Mongolians, the husband told us emphatically) from Ulan-Uday. The man was Sasha. His wife didn’t tell us her name and I managed to elbow her quite hard in the head while climbing down from my bunk. They had a little transistor radio, a basket of spotty apples and a sackful of ears of corn. The radio always seemed to be playing rap. They never went to the restaurant car, just lay on their bunks and quietly munched their way through book after book.
We were in Wagon 5. There were something like twenty wagons. Every time we went round a corner I’d crane my neck to see the length of the train curving behind us. There were maybe ten cabins in the wagon, a Cyrillic timetable in Moscow time in the corridor, and a never-ending hot water boiler, the samovar, at one end. We were lucky enough to be beside the restaurant car – lucky because the junctions between carriages, with their views of flying track through the cracks below, two heavy doors and shifting plates of metal, were scary places to be. I spent the trip in flip-flops because boots were too much to manage with the top bunks, and I feared for my toes. Especially while carrying two mugs of hot coffee to the restaurant car.
Ah, the restaurant car, with its pungent smells and buzzing flies and bangin’ old-skool Russian dance hits. The head waiter wore a sleeveless Camel Cigarettes shirt and had strange gnarled fingers that were half the normal length. And not a word of English, so he’d demonstrate the menu by acting like the animals that were available for us to eat. The first night he made like a fish, but we didn’t fancy fish so Ivan said, hopefully, ‘Moo?’ There was no moo, so we had oink, washed down with Siberian Crown beer.
The restaurant car was where you met people. Far fewer people than I was expecting, though. I thought everyone would pass through it eventually, but most people seemed to have gone the pot-noodle route and lived for four days on a stash of food that could be made by adding boiling water. (Sasha and Mrs Sasha in our cabin seemed to subsist on rap and very pungent sausage.) So we kept meeting the same people. On the first night we were trapped in our booth by a jowly, complacent Australian beekeeper who decided to tell us all about his dislike of Aborigines. He didn’t like them when they accepted government handouts (‘they wreck everything we give them because they’re Stone Age people’, he sneered). He didn’t like them when they tried to do business for themselves either, like organising tourism to places on their reservations (‘they like to make a dollar’, he sneered). He didn’t like the way there were places you couldn’t mine in Australia because there was a ‘sacred canoe tree’ (he sneered) nearby. Joe, his nice young Kiwi tour guide, made polite disagreements. I could see him twitching more and more. The beekeeper said there was a museum of Aborigine history in his town, but no one wanted to know about them. ‘I would,’ Ivan said. ‘I’d want to know about the real history, not just the last few hundred years of colonisation.’ I wanted to stand up and cheer. The beekeeper made his excuses and left. Joe said, ‘If he wasn’t on my tour I’d fuckin’ lacerate him.’
We didn’t see the beekeeper again for the rest of the trip. We ended up sitting with a German called David a lot, on his way over to Vladivostok to meet an old holiday romance of his. He was slightly stiff but nice and prone to sudden outbursts of generosity where he’d buy us massive amounts of orange juice. We sat and drank beer and read books and stared out the window and watched the staff smoking under the No Smoking sign and getting increasingly pickled as the day went on. The car was almost empty most of the time. One evening, though, it filled up and I looked up from my book to find two Russian men at the next table were demanding we join them to drink vodka. Joe had already been pulled in, saying to his Australians (with shot in hand) ‘You’re my excuse not to drink too much.’ I was wary of them but Ivan waded in with his phrasebook and was soon clinking glasses and laughing. Then it turned out that one of them was called Ivan too. ‘My brother!’ he cried, hugging him across the table and pounding him on the back. I swear he had tears in his eyes. ‘We must drink more vodka! I give you money, my brother, and we buy more vodka!’
‘Alcohol is not the solution,’ David muttered disapprovingly, but nobody paid any attention.
*
The first few stops were nothing special. Vladimir was deserted, just concrete glimpsed out the window at midnight, and at Kirov I hadn’t got the hang of the arrival/departure notation on the timetable and was afraid to get off. But then we stopped at Perm. The train from Ulan Bator to Moscow had just pulled in opposite us and what seemed like thousands of people were pouring through the station. Every window of the other train was full of people, selling jeans, blankets, dried fish and all sorts of things to the people on the platform, or just leaning out, waving and laughing. They looked Mongolian, with round faces and straight black hair. The Head Waiter was leaning out the open door haggling over a leather jacket and I was bobbing up and down behind him trying to take pictures, and a sudden feeling of – of otherness, of being Out There, rushed over me. I knew it would get stronger and stronger as the miles went by.
*
There were two provodniks - cabin attendants – in our wagon. In the guidebook their little cubby by the samovar is called ‘provodnik’s lair’, and with good reason. Both were small broad-shouldered women, one dark, one blonde, and they were a double act: good cop and bad cop, or maybe bad cop and worse cop. They were both icy to begin with, snapping at us in Russian and when we didn’t get it, SPEAK-ING VE-RY LOUD-LY-AND-SLOW-LY in Russian. But as we rolled on the dark one gradually thawed. I found the key to her affections was making the effort to speak bits of Russian, even dull things like ‘tualetnaya bumaya?’ (toilet paper) or ‘kakaya eta astanofka?’ (which station is this?) She actually smiled at me when I said that one. She seemed to be having more fun with the other staff too. At Ekaterinburg, one of the men serenaded her and she laughed, a real laugh like she meant it.
On the other hand, things that got us a telling-off from the blonde one included waiting outside the toilet, being in Wagon 4 (we thought, erroneously, that we could stretch our legs by walking to the other end of the train), washing soup residue out of our mugs at the samovar, and in fact doing pretty much anything that wasn’t sitting perfectly still. Ivan said she was ‘coincé du cul’ – her ass was trapped. By the end we were wondering what was the Russian for ‘power trip’, but at Baikal I found out that they only get paid 700 roubles a month – we spent 800 roubles on a meal for two at the hotel! If I had a salary like that I’d be on a power trip too just to keep some shreds of dignity.
*
Can anyone confirm that the Ural Mountains actually exist? When darkness fell on the second night everything was flat. When we woke up on the third day everything was flat again. All I have as evidence of the mountain range is the sudden cold and fog when we got off the train at Ekaterinburg. (And some lurching and going round corners in the night, but I might have dreamed that so it’s neither here nor there.)
I’d been lying on my bunk reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and then slipping luxuriously off to sleep. When we came to a stop the local time was 1am, my body thought it was 8pm and the train system thought it was 11pm (of which more later). We hadn’t managed to have dinner because when we went to the restaurant car the cook was asleep, and I was woozy from too much cup-a-soup and not enough solids. But the cold air was wonderful to breathe and felt like a wake-up shot to my brain. I smoked a menthol and took pictures of the hazy lamps in the fog and a shop front covered in blinking fairy lights. Then I realised three of the train staff were rushing up to me, shouting. I turned the camera off guiltily, thinking I’d broken a rule, but it turned out they wanted their photos taken with me. They threw their arms round my shoulders and Ivan obliged. They wagged their fingers at me for smoking, though they were as well, and for some reason got huge amusement from the fact that we were brother and sister. Afterwards a shiny-pated man, the one who’d been singing to the provodnik, followed us back to our cabin, gave me a bar of chocolate and shook Ivan’s hand. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
*
Time doesn’t exist on the train the way it does everywhere else. If you pay any attention to it you’ll end up hopelessly confused. If you ignore it and just go by the daylight you end up hopelessly confused as well.
It's easy on planes - you do the jump all at once, reset your watch and start working on getting your head straightened out right away. On the train you gain five hours in a slow drip over the four days, as you trundle along. Night falls earlier and earlier each evening. You could set your watch forward an hour each day so you'd be sort of right at least, but all over Russia the train system runs on Moscow time and you'd never know when stops were happening. (And it's vital to know when the stops are, because at stations they lock the toilets.) Your body gets confused and you sleep a lot at weird times, rocking gently in the cocoon of your bunk. I'd intended to go to bed a bit earlier each night so I'd be prepared for getting off in Irkutsk (7.30 local time, 2.30 Moscow time). But sleep refused to let me control it. I fell awake and asleep at random times and never knew when I ought to be hungry.
That put me in a strange mental state to begin with. And then there was the surprise of the view out the window. There are thousands and thousands of kilometres of the journey, huge stretches of the planet, that look exactly the same! Flat grassland. Silver birches. Small wooden villages. Pylons. The odd disused factory. Trees and grass, trees and grass. I felt a bit disappointed, though it made me happy to see this massive expanse of trees pumping out oxygen, quietly and without fuss, undisturbed while more famous forests are being razed. I wondered what it would be like to live out there, in that huge loneliness. And I kept thinking I saw wolves - prick-eared and reddish brown, standing very still and looking at the train with calm interest. Maybe it was my brain going slightly mad from the sameness, seeing wolves where there were only tree stumps.
But then the trees drew back and we were out in open grassland with a huge sky above, and something about it began to charm me, very gradually so I barely noticed it beginning. I started enjoying the emptiness, the being away from everything. The other world on the far edge of Europe, boiling with people, seemed like a dream. I sat there hypnotised by the empty nature flowing by, with nothing to stress about, no obligations to fulfil and no way to fulfil them even if I'd had any. Floating, in a between place, somewhere outside normal space and time, thinking big slow swooping thoughts instead of a swarm of little fretful ones. David's book called Siberia 'the sleeping land', and I felt privileged to be let into its dream for a while.
We staggered off the train at Irkutsk in the sleety dawn, body clocks gone haywire, stomachs in a mess from the moo and the oink, suffering cravings for bagels with cream cheese and eggs-in-a-cup-with-butter and all the things you can't get on the train, desperate for a shower. I can't say I was sorry to leave it (I nearly cried when we got to the homestay by Lake Baikal and a fabulous breakfast was waiting for us). But I'm very glad it happened.
(Pictures are here)
Four days on a train
Moscow to Irkutsk, September 11-15
The departures board at Komsomolskaya station, saying ‘Vladivostok’ in Cyrillic, made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Our driver argued with people in the ticket booth and then led us along the still-trainless platform, weaving between waiting clumps of people with stacks of cases and boxes wrapped in gaffer tape. I hoped he knew what he was doing. He stopped to talk to another driver, and his charges – two British girls – cried, ‘You two speak English! Thank God for that! Where are – ‘ But too late: our guy was leading us away again. He picked a seemingly random spot. We waited. The lamps hung above the tracks led away into the dusk. The sky was dark yellow with cityglow in the east, the way we were going. Then the train – looking warm and almost opulent from the outside, with tasselled curtains, our home for the next four days – began to back into the station.
The train is a little world. After several days of rolling through huge empty spaces it starts to feel like the only world. You wonder what would happen if you were to somehow fall off, out of the train-world, in the middle of an endless deserted steppe. It’s not like you could thumb a lift to anywhere.
First there was our cabin. We had the two top bunks, each with a shelf for the essentials – mug, cup-a-soup, coffee, books, wet wipes (because there’s no way to wash). Below us were a middle-aged couple, Buryats (not Mongolians, the husband told us emphatically) from Ulan-Uday. The man was Sasha. His wife didn’t tell us her name and I managed to elbow her quite hard in the head while climbing down from my bunk. They had a little transistor radio, a basket of spotty apples and a sackful of ears of corn. The radio always seemed to be playing rap. They never went to the restaurant car, just lay on their bunks and quietly munched their way through book after book.
We were in Wagon 5. There were something like twenty wagons. Every time we went round a corner I’d crane my neck to see the length of the train curving behind us. There were maybe ten cabins in the wagon, a Cyrillic timetable in Moscow time in the corridor, and a never-ending hot water boiler, the samovar, at one end. We were lucky enough to be beside the restaurant car – lucky because the junctions between carriages, with their views of flying track through the cracks below, two heavy doors and shifting plates of metal, were scary places to be. I spent the trip in flip-flops because boots were too much to manage with the top bunks, and I feared for my toes. Especially while carrying two mugs of hot coffee to the restaurant car.
Ah, the restaurant car, with its pungent smells and buzzing flies and bangin’ old-skool Russian dance hits. The head waiter wore a sleeveless Camel Cigarettes shirt and had strange gnarled fingers that were half the normal length. And not a word of English, so he’d demonstrate the menu by acting like the animals that were available for us to eat. The first night he made like a fish, but we didn’t fancy fish so Ivan said, hopefully, ‘Moo?’ There was no moo, so we had oink, washed down with Siberian Crown beer.
The restaurant car was where you met people. Far fewer people than I was expecting, though. I thought everyone would pass through it eventually, but most people seemed to have gone the pot-noodle route and lived for four days on a stash of food that could be made by adding boiling water. (Sasha and Mrs Sasha in our cabin seemed to subsist on rap and very pungent sausage.) So we kept meeting the same people. On the first night we were trapped in our booth by a jowly, complacent Australian beekeeper who decided to tell us all about his dislike of Aborigines. He didn’t like them when they accepted government handouts (‘they wreck everything we give them because they’re Stone Age people’, he sneered). He didn’t like them when they tried to do business for themselves either, like organising tourism to places on their reservations (‘they like to make a dollar’, he sneered). He didn’t like the way there were places you couldn’t mine in Australia because there was a ‘sacred canoe tree’ (he sneered) nearby. Joe, his nice young Kiwi tour guide, made polite disagreements. I could see him twitching more and more. The beekeeper said there was a museum of Aborigine history in his town, but no one wanted to know about them. ‘I would,’ Ivan said. ‘I’d want to know about the real history, not just the last few hundred years of colonisation.’ I wanted to stand up and cheer. The beekeeper made his excuses and left. Joe said, ‘If he wasn’t on my tour I’d fuckin’ lacerate him.’
We didn’t see the beekeeper again for the rest of the trip. We ended up sitting with a German called David a lot, on his way over to Vladivostok to meet an old holiday romance of his. He was slightly stiff but nice and prone to sudden outbursts of generosity where he’d buy us massive amounts of orange juice. We sat and drank beer and read books and stared out the window and watched the staff smoking under the No Smoking sign and getting increasingly pickled as the day went on. The car was almost empty most of the time. One evening, though, it filled up and I looked up from my book to find two Russian men at the next table were demanding we join them to drink vodka. Joe had already been pulled in, saying to his Australians (with shot in hand) ‘You’re my excuse not to drink too much.’ I was wary of them but Ivan waded in with his phrasebook and was soon clinking glasses and laughing. Then it turned out that one of them was called Ivan too. ‘My brother!’ he cried, hugging him across the table and pounding him on the back. I swear he had tears in his eyes. ‘We must drink more vodka! I give you money, my brother, and we buy more vodka!’
‘Alcohol is not the solution,’ David muttered disapprovingly, but nobody paid any attention.
*
The first few stops were nothing special. Vladimir was deserted, just concrete glimpsed out the window at midnight, and at Kirov I hadn’t got the hang of the arrival/departure notation on the timetable and was afraid to get off. But then we stopped at Perm. The train from Ulan Bator to Moscow had just pulled in opposite us and what seemed like thousands of people were pouring through the station. Every window of the other train was full of people, selling jeans, blankets, dried fish and all sorts of things to the people on the platform, or just leaning out, waving and laughing. They looked Mongolian, with round faces and straight black hair. The Head Waiter was leaning out the open door haggling over a leather jacket and I was bobbing up and down behind him trying to take pictures, and a sudden feeling of – of otherness, of being Out There, rushed over me. I knew it would get stronger and stronger as the miles went by.
*
There were two provodniks - cabin attendants – in our wagon. In the guidebook their little cubby by the samovar is called ‘provodnik’s lair’, and with good reason. Both were small broad-shouldered women, one dark, one blonde, and they were a double act: good cop and bad cop, or maybe bad cop and worse cop. They were both icy to begin with, snapping at us in Russian and when we didn’t get it, SPEAK-ING VE-RY LOUD-LY-AND-SLOW-LY in Russian. But as we rolled on the dark one gradually thawed. I found the key to her affections was making the effort to speak bits of Russian, even dull things like ‘tualetnaya bumaya?’ (toilet paper) or ‘kakaya eta astanofka?’ (which station is this?) She actually smiled at me when I said that one. She seemed to be having more fun with the other staff too. At Ekaterinburg, one of the men serenaded her and she laughed, a real laugh like she meant it.
On the other hand, things that got us a telling-off from the blonde one included waiting outside the toilet, being in Wagon 4 (we thought, erroneously, that we could stretch our legs by walking to the other end of the train), washing soup residue out of our mugs at the samovar, and in fact doing pretty much anything that wasn’t sitting perfectly still. Ivan said she was ‘coincé du cul’ – her ass was trapped. By the end we were wondering what was the Russian for ‘power trip’, but at Baikal I found out that they only get paid 700 roubles a month – we spent 800 roubles on a meal for two at the hotel! If I had a salary like that I’d be on a power trip too just to keep some shreds of dignity.
*
Can anyone confirm that the Ural Mountains actually exist? When darkness fell on the second night everything was flat. When we woke up on the third day everything was flat again. All I have as evidence of the mountain range is the sudden cold and fog when we got off the train at Ekaterinburg. (And some lurching and going round corners in the night, but I might have dreamed that so it’s neither here nor there.)
I’d been lying on my bunk reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and then slipping luxuriously off to sleep. When we came to a stop the local time was 1am, my body thought it was 8pm and the train system thought it was 11pm (of which more later). We hadn’t managed to have dinner because when we went to the restaurant car the cook was asleep, and I was woozy from too much cup-a-soup and not enough solids. But the cold air was wonderful to breathe and felt like a wake-up shot to my brain. I smoked a menthol and took pictures of the hazy lamps in the fog and a shop front covered in blinking fairy lights. Then I realised three of the train staff were rushing up to me, shouting. I turned the camera off guiltily, thinking I’d broken a rule, but it turned out they wanted their photos taken with me. They threw their arms round my shoulders and Ivan obliged. They wagged their fingers at me for smoking, though they were as well, and for some reason got huge amusement from the fact that we were brother and sister. Afterwards a shiny-pated man, the one who’d been singing to the provodnik, followed us back to our cabin, gave me a bar of chocolate and shook Ivan’s hand. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
*
Time doesn’t exist on the train the way it does everywhere else. If you pay any attention to it you’ll end up hopelessly confused. If you ignore it and just go by the daylight you end up hopelessly confused as well.
It's easy on planes - you do the jump all at once, reset your watch and start working on getting your head straightened out right away. On the train you gain five hours in a slow drip over the four days, as you trundle along. Night falls earlier and earlier each evening. You could set your watch forward an hour each day so you'd be sort of right at least, but all over Russia the train system runs on Moscow time and you'd never know when stops were happening. (And it's vital to know when the stops are, because at stations they lock the toilets.) Your body gets confused and you sleep a lot at weird times, rocking gently in the cocoon of your bunk. I'd intended to go to bed a bit earlier each night so I'd be prepared for getting off in Irkutsk (7.30 local time, 2.30 Moscow time). But sleep refused to let me control it. I fell awake and asleep at random times and never knew when I ought to be hungry.
That put me in a strange mental state to begin with. And then there was the surprise of the view out the window. There are thousands and thousands of kilometres of the journey, huge stretches of the planet, that look exactly the same! Flat grassland. Silver birches. Small wooden villages. Pylons. The odd disused factory. Trees and grass, trees and grass. I felt a bit disappointed, though it made me happy to see this massive expanse of trees pumping out oxygen, quietly and without fuss, undisturbed while more famous forests are being razed. I wondered what it would be like to live out there, in that huge loneliness. And I kept thinking I saw wolves - prick-eared and reddish brown, standing very still and looking at the train with calm interest. Maybe it was my brain going slightly mad from the sameness, seeing wolves where there were only tree stumps.
But then the trees drew back and we were out in open grassland with a huge sky above, and something about it began to charm me, very gradually so I barely noticed it beginning. I started enjoying the emptiness, the being away from everything. The other world on the far edge of Europe, boiling with people, seemed like a dream. I sat there hypnotised by the empty nature flowing by, with nothing to stress about, no obligations to fulfil and no way to fulfil them even if I'd had any. Floating, in a between place, somewhere outside normal space and time, thinking big slow swooping thoughts instead of a swarm of little fretful ones. David's book called Siberia 'the sleeping land', and I felt privileged to be let into its dream for a while.
We staggered off the train at Irkutsk in the sleety dawn, body clocks gone haywire, stomachs in a mess from the moo and the oink, suffering cravings for bagels with cream cheese and eggs-in-a-cup-with-butter and all the things you can't get on the train, desperate for a shower. I can't say I was sorry to leave it (I nearly cried when we got to the homestay by Lake Baikal and a fabulous breakfast was waiting for us). But I'm very glad it happened.
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...so I've iconned it:
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Date: 2005-09-21 04:59 pm (UTC)