Beginning the Tran-Siberian Ultragalactic Mega Super Express Rail Rama

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After four and half days in motion, Laura and I finally touched down yesterday afternoon in Europe. All I can offer here are a few mildly humorous observations about the numerous people we met on the way, and some casual remarks about the journey itself. Neither of us went mad. I didn’t sink into my soul and rummage clumsily around, rearranging my personality and the structure of my conscious mind. Nope. It was not a great voyage into the depths of our respective souls or anything that some people might hope a journey like it could be. We got on, played cards, read, chatted, smoked, ate, slept, toileted, wrote, listened to music and sang, and it was enjoyable and comfortable nearly all the way…

We boarded in Ulan Baatar with an English couple and a rotund, bespectacled Canadian called Steve. All five of us were from the same hostel, found ourselves to be in the same carriage and bound for the same hostel in Moscow (from where I write this now). Our four-berth cabin was comfortable and occupied by only us. We spent a little time playing cards and chatting with Steve but the rest of the day passed with only one incident of note: Laura and I saw a cyclone, albeit a pretty pathetic one with a woman standing nonchalantly by it, spectating. Dusty Mongolia- the ‘ger’s’, horses, and rolling barren lands- passed way around, without urgency or comment as we headed for the border.

Travelers are advised that the border crossing between Mongolia and Russia can take up to eleven hours. With this in mind we had settled down early, expecting to there some where close to midnight. This was so, but the whole affair, policed by it’s usual menagerie of authoritative and generally humourless officials, took no more than three hours. It wasn’t till the morning that we encountered problems. Having carefully and scrupulously arranged and paid for our tickets with what appeared to be a reputable agent in Ulan Baatar, we collected them the day that we arrived in the city. Early on the morning of day two of our journey, the conductor politely roused me on approaching Ulan Ude, a small Russian border town. Whilst this really meant nothing to us, it transpired that our tickets would only get us this far, and so, with sleep in our eyes and confusion raining in anxious torrents, we hurriedly gathered our possessions up and tumbled of the train. The conductor pointed us in the direction of the service centre and we ran for it.

In the end we had to splash out on two new tickets. Not awake enough to negotiate to our strengths nor Russian enough to negotiate at all in fact, it cost close to 200 quid each. Livid, seething and just plain angry, we headed back to the train. (At this stage in our journey an expense like this we could ill-afford). We found our new cabin (which looked like the old one) and had an argument. I stormed down to the empty, slightly shabby restaurant carriage were I smoked, drank tea and huffed, whilst a hi-fi system played Chris De Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’. This soothed me a little, but by the time Whitney Houston started winding up into ‘I will always love you’ I figured it was time to make peace with my companion. This we did, resolving to hunt down the agent that had ‘mistakenly’ sold us the tickets and exact our revenge!

All trains in Russia run on Moscow time, which can be confusing since there are seven incremental hours difference from West to East. This meant that- on day two- local time was half past eight, train time was half past three am, and we were wide awake and tucking in to breakfast. Day two was long. It so happened that our tickets bought us two meals a day- and we had scoffed them both by around half past eight train time. (For some reason they didn’t seem to make allowances for the time difference in the kitchen- but I suppose chef’s are notorious for being creatures of habit). We amused ourselves with cards and books and naps and so on. Early in the day we were joined in our cabin- with some reluctance on our part I must say- by two people. One was a large, blonde, middle-aged woman, with plenty of make up, jewelry and pride. Her short hair was combed back with precision, she wore too much cheap perfume and looked grumpy. Alongside her a short man, with thick-lensed glasses and army cropped hair, humbly trotted. He had the appearance of a mole. There was at least a foot and a half between them and he was probably ten or more years her junior, and they seemed to be on personal terms. Noticing their apparent incongruity, Laura and I questioned the nature of their relationship. I later decided that she was a minor celebrity, lifestyle guru, on her way to conduct a TV interview on a low-profile show in Moscow. He had been recently discharged from the army (on account of failing vision) and, lost and vulnerable after spending the entirety of his adult life ‘under’orders’, she had sucked him in. He was on his way to St Petersburg to carry out a murder on her encouragement, in the style of Doestoevsky’s Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment. How could I know how it would end?

Find out more (maybe) about these two people and the rest of our journey in installment two, due out soon…

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