The Greatest Train Journey in the World

Just looking at a map we were instantly overwhelmed by the distance we had to travel. From St. Petersburg to Beijing is nearly a fourth of the way around the world, just over 8000 km!  The journey really impresses on you how big the world is and the scale of Russia; it is nearly twice as big as the next biggest country and it was not hard to imagine it from our train carriage.  The longest (and therefore most arduous) leg of our journey was between Yekaterinburg and Irkustk, some 72 hours of staring out of the window with no shower and a hell of a lot of super noodles to consume (there is free boiling water in each carriage).  The scenery is undoubtedly beautiful and we were delighted to see Russia as you imagine it; covered in snow and fir trees with small villages made of wooden houses dotted across a vast landscape.  By the third day the trees and mountains had grown significantly and we crossed huge frozen rivers (some with semi – permanent buildings on) and some very industrial looking cities.  There is however a limit to how long you can stare out of the window before needing a new source of entertainment. 

One of the numerous villages we passed

Devastating news arrived early on our journey when I discovered that the power sockets were 110 volts only. My dreams of winning the Champions League with Nottingham Forest on Football Manager had been ruined before they had started!  Entertainment on the train therefore came from a number of other means and it was surprising how quickly the journey passed in the end.  One of our favourite sources of entertainment were the cabin attendants. They spend their lives on the trains going back and forth between Vladivostok and Moscow. To say that they tend to be a little strange is an understatement. They usually have a side business going where they sell beer, instant noodles and snacks.  If they were not found in the restaurant carriage drinking vodka with travellers they were outside at stops building snowmen.  We had two attendants for our carriage; the honey monster was friendly enough during the day but at night a women with more make up on than Lilly Savage prowled the corridor looking for anyone to shout at when she wasn’t hiding between carriages smoking.  Train life passed by surprisingly quickly and we also played chess in between reading the Communist Manifesto as we meandered through Siberia.

The staff building snowmen watched by the honey monster

Smoked fish at the station

As the days passed we had learnt what to do and not to do on the train.  Timing going to the toilet between stations was important as they could be locked for an hour or so at stops and in towns as the toilet is just a hole in the floor (you get a very cold arse on the train in Siberia!).  Each stop can be up to 40 minutes (for the larger towns) and so over the course of the three days we estimated we had been sat in stations for some 12 hours! The stops were useful to get off and stretch your legs, as well as seeing what local produce you could buy.  At one station we managed to get dinner from one of the numerous old women selling smoked, raw fish.  Although our smell offended everyone in the restaurant cart the fish was amazing!  I also learnt that changing in the carriage when you pull into a station can lead to a lot of flashing.  One poor kiosk worker who had stepped out for a cigarette was greeted by my naked backside arriving into the station, although things only got worse for her when I turned around just to make sure she had got the full show.  We also realised that the worrying clangs from the train were people knocking off the ice from the wheels and brakes that had built up although they became the bane of my life waking me up all night every two hours.  

Dinner in the restaurant

We were lucky to meet some fantastic people in our carriage, all of whom thought we were mental to spend so long on the train.  We met an 11 year old junior national champion for ballroom dancing our first night who acted as a translator for her mother.  Her dad was a fisherman who travelled across to Alaska from Vladivostok (is that even legal??)  and who had supposedly killed a bear recently.  After they left us at Omsk we had the luxury of an empty carriage until around 3 am when a Russian engineer joined us for 12 hours.  He was going to the north of Siberia via 3 trains, a plane, a helicopter (which had crashed the week before killing 10 workers) and snow cat to the gas fields.  He told us that his gran remembered the Trans – Siberian being built by all of the prisoners from the gulags.  She also described the resettling of anti - communists who arrived by being thrown off of a ship into the river to survive with nothing.  If they survived the winter by living in homemade caves underground they often came to the villages to seek work in the local towns, in which many of their descendants still live today.  In the compartment next to ours a smiley young lad and his sister were kind enough to save us from another super noodles meal by giving us boiled eggs and chicken his gran had cooked them before they left.  Yet again the people of Russia and been as amazing as the country!  We also met a group of 12 backpackers who were on a tour one night in the restaurant and played speed dating with them (whilst apologising for the smell of our fish).  To my amusement they had been on the train for three nights without working out how the taps worked in their carriage and as such had no water to wash with!  All of a sudden we didn’t feel as bad about our own odour.  After three days however we were very pleased to arrive into Irkutsk early in the morning to head across to Lake Baikal and see the world’s oldest lake.