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Published: December 30th 2007
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With the Russian rail network covering some 8 time zones, the least confusing option available to the railway administrators was to pretend only Moscow Time existed, so timetables are all in Moscow Time and the fiction even extends to station clocks throughout the country. Thus it was disconcerting to drag my bags to Irkutsk station with evening pretty much nigh but the station clock was proclaiming it was just after midday.
My sole cabin-mate on the overnight train to Krasnoyarsk was an older gentleman who slurped his tea, snored, and kept indicating he either had just vomited or was about to, with constant visits to the bathroom. Fortunately the vomit situation was never in the present tense.
The TSH informed me that, during the journey, we passed within 1,000km of the location of the Tunguska Event that made the headlines nearly a century ago. A fragment of a disintegrating comet destroyed 2,000 square kilometres of forest in a blast whose light was seen across Europe, and which in some ways represented nature's last hurrah before man took over the role of generating enormously destructive explosions.
As we headed west, it was clear we were entering a region that
Chapel of note
Chapel of St Parasceva Pyatnitsa had experienced a recent fresh snowfall. The wooden houses were thatched in pristine white and the trees' branches, outlined and thickened by the snow, glistened pink in the dawn light. Even the spoiling effect of a grimy window could not conceal the beauty of the countryside.
I stopped at Krasnoyarsk mainly to break up the journey to Yekaterinburg. It's not most people's idea of a tourist destination, with major local industries producing aluminium, refrigerators, and tyres. The city also shared its name with two nuclear processing facilities - Krasnoyarsk-26 (now known as Zheleznogorsk) and Krasnoyarsk-45 (now known as Zelenogorsk), closed and secret towns that appeared on no Soviet maps and whose original names were a reference to their post codes.
It appeared that Krasnoyarsk city council was even less of a fan of gritting/salting than their counterparts in Irkutsk so I slid my way around. My hotel room was a $40 per night effort with shared bathroom though the lack of cold water for most of the time I was there was a more effective bar on having a shower than the lack of hot water had been at times in Southeast Asia - a lack of hot
Siberia
As seen from the train water is merely uncomfortable but a lack of cold can give you blisters.
The town itself was not entirely charmless. I did the rounds of the local churches, one of which features on the 10 rouble note, and visited the recommended Museum of Local Studies. The latter was predominantly in Russian so much of it was lost on me, however the souvenir shop could only have been catering to the export market as their thermometers didn't go below 0C (the city often hits -40C in winter). The shop also contained the curious sight of a photo album with an image of a youthful Prince Charles (relative of the Romanovs) on the front, going for over $100.
One thing I've noticed in these parts is how tame the birds are. Blue tits and great tits, which are among the most skittish of the visitors to my parents' garden in the UK, won't budge until you're about to tread on them. I'm not sure if the need to find food overrides the threat of possible danger, or if people here feed the birds so much that they've become tame, but their lack of fear is slightly Hitchcockian.
Two nights
in Krasnoyarsk, then I was back on the rails.
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