Long Train Running

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I know I have fallen terribly behind in this blog. I'll blame it not only on the lack of internet on the train, but also on the lack of time and sleep I had once I rolled into Mongolia. I did type out much of the following as I rode on the train, I just haven't had the time to put it all together until now! When I last left off, I was on the platform in Yaraslavsky Station in Moscow...

While waiting I met a retired couple from Sweden who were also taking the #4 train to Mongolia. Alan was a farmer who has visited the US previously. He went to visit his son who was then living there. The son is now working in the Swedish government. Alan’s girlfriend J? and he are traveling for 2 months. They are stopping in Mongolia and will take the same train as I, on to China. They then go on to Japan, Australia and California.

When we boarded the train, it turned out they were in the same carriage as I, two compartments down. The train is fairly empty and so far we are the only passengers in first class. There is at least one more first class carriage and it’s completely empty of passengers. Only the Chinese Provodiks (carriage attendants) ride in it. Well the good news there is that I have my compartment completely to myself! I can spread out and organize my compartment as I see fit (I like to have my things about me). The downside is that there aren’t as many people to interact with, which is said to be one of the attractions of this journey.

The compartments are nice. On one side there’s a couch-like seat which becomes my bed at night. There’s a second bunk above it, but that one’s folded up against the wall since there’s only me here. Under the window there’s a small table, complete with white tablecloth. Across the table and facing it, is a single seat. Next to that on the far wall is a small bump out with a door that goes into a small washroom. The washroom would usually be shared with the adjoining compartment, but again, since that one has been empty, private washroom! That’s not as great as it sounds, as there is only a sink in there. The attendant advised me that the floor drain doesn’t work in my washroom, so I couldn’t use the shower. He said I could use one of the empty ones if I wanted. Unfortunately, the showers are all just freezing cold water as it’s freezing outside. How cold? Well at one stop I tried to use a wet cloth to clean the outside window of my compartment. The hot water I was using immediately froze to the glass. Yeah, I’m not showering it that! I’m sticking to my Fresh Bath body wipes. (maybe “sticking to” was a bad choice of words)

Anyway, back to the compartment, next to the washroom door there’s a little coat closet. Under my bunk, there is a metal box which stores my roller case and excess clothing. There’s also room down there next to the box for the foldable duffle I brought to use as my “feedbag”. All the food I brought or bought goes in there with my utensils and foldable bowl. At mealtime, I pull out the portable kitchen in a bag. Hot foods are prepared thanks to the hot water available in each compartment. At the end of the compartment there is a big samovar which continually heats water to boiling temps. Actually, on the other side of the wall from the samovar, there is a coal fired stove which supplies the whole compartment with heat. At most stops, a truck comes around and they fill a small tender on each compartment with coal. The locomotive is powered by electricity, but the compartments are still run by coal fire. The first night, the attendant brought each compartment a big thermos pitcher full of boiling hot water. We can refill it whenever we like.

I brought packets of oatmeal, cup a soup, hot chocolate, mashed potatoes and even a couple freeze dried camper meals along. Ramen noodles are for sale on most platforms. So with a little boiling water… dinner! I also brought peanut butter and jam, several kinds of jerky and packaged sausages, foil packets of flavored tuna and tuna or ham salad. Living high on the hog indeed!

I’m glad I brought the food, as I had breakfast in the dining car the first morning and it was sketchy at best. Also kind of expensive at $11 for scrambled eggs with a little ham mixed in, two pieces of cheese, a couple pieces of bread and a cup of tea. The Chinese attendants run the carriages, but the dining car is run by Russians (at least as far as Mongolia, then we get a Mongolian dining car until China). They are pretty friendly, and one lady wanders around the carriages a couple time a day singing and selling chips or cookies or soda or beer.

The days are starting to run together. The scenery started out mostly forest, birch and evergreen. It was kind of like riding through Northern Wisconsin. It opened out into steppe regions, which are now snow swept and bleak looking. It’s gotten colder as we move east as well. The Ural Mountains were pretty unimpressive as mountain ranges go. It just got hilly for awhile. We’ve crossed some pretty big rivers though. Heavy bridges built to withstand ice blocks moving downstream.

The days are punctuated with stops every so often (usually only 4 or 5 a day, and only 2 of these during daylight). The stops are only for about 20 minutes usually, so there isn’t time to leave the station platform. Most platforms have someone selling food, water, beer, etc. Sometimes there is a little kiosk, but more often there are people walking around or pulling sleds piled with treats, selling chips, rolls, fruit or dried fish. At one early stop, ladies had pre-cooked meals wrapped in plastic wrap for sale. A little cutlet and some potatoes, or a leg of chicken and a vegetable. Many sell pastries with things cooked inside. Today I bought a puff pastry thing that was very tasty in a little shop on the platform of a small town. The pastry was almost like a filo dough, very sweet and flaky. The filing was, I think, potato, onion, cheese and a little cabbage. About 60 cents and very nice! Another early stop had a lady selling all kinds of wicker goods, including wicker slippers!

A lot of the smaller stations also have dogs who stop by looking for handouts. I took some beef jerky with me out on the next platform. I’ve since become very popular with Russians of the canine persuasion. Russian dogs like beef jerky! Go figure!

As we neared Perm, it started to get pretty hilly. It was also very cold and they had already gotten a lot of snow. We crossed the very wide (~900 meters) Kama river on an old bridge built in 1899. There were only a few vendors on the platform there and I bought my last bottle of water (1.25 ltr. for 70 Rubles, around $2.50). Perm was a good sized city, around one million people per the guidebook. After Perm we stopped in Yekaterinburg, which was also known as Sverdlovsk in Soviet times. This was the town near where the czar Nicholas II and his family were killed in 1918.

Sometime in the night, as we traveled on, we officially crossed the mark dividing Europe from Asia.
In the morning, Asia looked pretty much the same as Europe had. It seemed like it was getting dark very early as time went on. I realized that it wasn’t getting darker that much earlier, we were just on the wrong time for the area. What I mean by that, is that the trains all over Russia run on Moscow time. So all the schedules and even all the clocks in the stations are on Moscow time. The problem with that is that as we travel east, we cross six time zones throughout the trip. Yet we stay on Moscow time. If you got up at 8:00 a.m. train time every day, by Mongolia it would really be 2:00 p.m. local time. That’s part of the reason that the trip is so disorienting. Another is the lack of any set times when you eat, sleep or stop. As I said, the stops are fairly infrequent, but they became something to look forward to and plan your day around. You only get a few minutes to get off, look around, stretch out, feed any dogs and maybe pick up something to eat. They also lock the bathrooms about a half hour before each stop, so you need to be aware of that as well!

Before we arrived in Ishim, I started to see log cabins pretty frequently. Many with “fine tin roofs and real wooden floors below,” I’m sure! At Ishim they have a fairly small station where you can walk across the tracks to a platform by the station. There they had a kiosk selling food, etc.. I crossed over the tracks and was in the process of buying crackers when one of the attendants yelled from the train. He pointed out another train approaching on the tracks I had just crossed. I had to rush back or I would have been trapped on the other side of that train when our train left. Didn’t get my crackers, but I also didn’t miss my train! Lesson learned.

The reason I was trying to buy extra food was that I was planning a Thanksgiving party in my compartment. I bought a bag of chips from the train lady (Lays cheese chips, mmmm) and later bought two more bags of Russian puffy baked chip-like crisps at the platform at Omsk. I had brought Turkey jerky and Old Wisconsin Turkey Sausages, chocolate and peanuts. Quite a spread! I had the Swedish couple over and explained Thanksgiving. We tried to get the Chinese attendants to join in, but I think they have some rules about fraternizing with passengers. Alan from Sweden brought over a bottle of Old Grouse Scotch and we ended up having a very nice Thansgiving party rolling through Siberia.

I had said earlier that I had bought my last bottle of water in Perm. That was because after that I perfected my method of “Makin’ Water”. My method was to fill the large thermos with boiling hot water. I would use what I needed to make my meal, then let the rest cool off for awhile. Then I would pour the rest of the water into my aluminum water bottle for the rest of the cooling time (the thermos took too long). The next step was putting the cool water into one of the empty plastic water bottles I had saved. I found that the floor of the little closet was mostly uninsulated and that it got cold in there. It made the perfect refrigerator for storing my now refilled plastic bottles. And that was all there was to “makin’ water”. Not very exciting, but one of those things that run your life on a five day train ride.

There was an electric outlet labeled for shavers in the compartment. It had enough power to charge one thing at a time in my arsenal of electronic equipment, sometimes. It was touchy and sometimes just wouldn’t work at all, until we stopped again. I don’t know if it reset somehow when we stopped, but if it wasn’t working I had to wait until the next station stop to get another chance.

We passed Barabinsk at 3:30 p.m. train time, 6:30 p.m. local time. Very cold and dark. A lady on the platform had a sled full of food and drinks she was selling. Next was Novosibersk. The third largest city in Russia. Understandably it had a very large station with many platforms. A group of Mongolians got on the train here back in second class. There were other people back in second class, but you had to walk through three empty carriages to get back to them. We mostly saw them on the platform at stops.

After stopping in Krasnoyarsk early morning (where a dog on the platform didn’t like jerky!), I made breakfast. I tried the freeze dried scrambled eggs and bacon. Actually pretty tasty (better than the dining car!). Along with PB&J on bread and a cup of hot chocolate, a fine meal! I spent the rest of the day looking out the window, napping, reading (with classical music playing on my smartphone) and snacking on leftover Thanksgiving turkey (o.k., sausages). Another fine low stress morning.

That afternoon we stopped in Ilanskaya and I bought some type of onion cheese pastry from a platform Babushka. We lost another hour around here, so by noon train time it was getting dark out. I met the only other American on the train. A young woman named Kate from San Francisco. She was on her way to stay in China for a while. She had lived there previously and spoke Chinese really well. The Chinese train attendants used her as a translator when they needed to talk to someone with more than the limited English they had. Kate’s roomate was a woman from Holland. Next door there were two guys from England. The Mongolian guys also came bouncing down the hallway. Literally bouncing off the walls! The other folks said that they had been drinking since they had gotten on the train the night before. They were very friendly, just extremely liquored up!

At Irkutsk (and I thought it was just a place on a Risk board) we picked up another neighbor. Richard, from Switzerland, moved into the compartment next to mine. He is an engineer on vacation who has also been visiting various cities in Russia. We skirted Lake Baikal and got good views of the lake in the morning. It’s the deepest freshwater lake in the world and holds more water than all the great lakes combined! On to Ulan Ude, then the border crossing in the next evening.

At the border we first stopped at the Russian side for about three and a half hours. Not much going on there. After the Russian guards came on and looked us over, they took our passports for processing. We could get off and look around, but it was dark and cold and not near anything else. There was a small shop/café hidden around on the far side of the station. They had a restroom which could be used by giving the shop lady 10 Rubles, at which point she would give you the door handle and point you to the bathroom door! Back on the train, the Russian guards came on again with a dog sniffing for who knows what. They finally brought back our passports and scrutinized our faces to make sure we were the people pictured. I even had to take off my hat so the guard could be sure. Very thorough! After more waiting we chugged out of the station. At the station they had also pulled off the dining car and changed over to a diesel locomotive before we headed into Mongolia.

Across a no-man’s land type of area and we finally passed a barbed wire fence which I think was the actual border. A short time later we pulled into the Mongolian border post, and repeated the process again. We only stayed there for about one hour and forty five minutes, passports once again scrutinized and stamped. Mongolia shifts train time over to local time, so it was the middle of the night by the time we pulled out of the station.

One last night on the train and arrival in Ulaan Baator in the morning. We pulled in around 6:30 a.m. and said goodbyes all around. Many of us will meet up again on the train on to Beijing in four days. I tried to get Mongolian money at the train station, but the ATM there was out of service. So, luggage in tow, I trudged off into the still dark, cold morning. The train station is only a few blocks from the main street in town, known as Peace Avenue. Once there, my hotel was just a few blocks up Peace Avenue. After wandering around for while, I found the hotel and checked in. Safe at my home in U.B.!

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Photos

Samovar
Unlimited boiling hot water thanks to the coal burner behind it.

Town Along The Route
Early on, the forests were thickest. Plenty of snow!

Platform Traders
Note the blue train on the other track. We left Moscow a short time after the Russian "Rossiya" train which goes from Moscow to Vladivostok on the same route as far as Ulan Ude. We saw them frequently at stops for the first few days.

Station Temperature Gauge
Only -19 degrees Centigrade, -18 is zero Fahrenheit. A balmy night in Siberia.

Our Train From Above
Some stations had overhead walkways to the platdforms. As I recall, this is where the dog didn't like jerky.

Lake Baikal at Sunrise
20% of the world's surface fresh water. Big damn lake!!