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Published: December 28th 2007
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11-19 November
Boy, the compartment sure seems big without two Italians, eight Mongolians, 27 packages, snacks and drinks. With Sarah and Dalila missing the train, I have an entire four-person compartment all to myself for the five-day journey. So, I stow my gear, make some tea and start watching Mongolia pass by. We travel through the evening and in the middle of the night cross into Russia, which will be last country on my trip. The train is quite empty, with about half of my car full; and all the time I sojourn into the dining car I never see more than two other people there. As far as I can tell I am the only one on the train who is not either Mongolian or Russian. There were not many attempts to meet the neighbors, but others in my car included a small group of Mongolians in their 20s who were returning to Russia for either work or study, a Mongolian husband and wife in their 50s returning to Moscow, and a Russian family that consisted of a woman in here 30s, a husband in his late 50s, and a 2-year old child. The husband always followed his toddling
daughter up and down the car in a striped Russian-navy-style shirt and a perpetual "heh-heh-heh" laugh. To make a case for an increasingly globalized world, one of the Mongolians was a chef who was returning to work as a sushi chef in a Japanese restaurant, and the older Mongolian wife was an evangelical Baptist who passed out Jesus literature to an American bum who practices Buddhist meditation all the time.
The dining car was an acceptable escape from my compartment despite a perpetual ban on card games, overpriced food and monetarily dishonest staff. There was no hint of the raucous, drunken good times that are legendary on the Trans-Siberian, although to be fair I never visited in the vicinity of closing hour. To pass the time I watched a lot of Russia go by (think Minnesota with small boxy cars and big boxy fur hats), read Dosteovsky's "The Idiot", did my daily meditating and got off the train whenever possible, which usually worked out to 2-3 times a day and 5-20 minutes at a time. The train stewards in my car were never keen to let me off during the shorter stops, presumably because it was more work for
them to keep an eye on the stupid American, and I always had to fight and plead my way off the train and then for a few more minutes of looking around before getting back on the train. Most time off the train was spent procuring food from vendors and small stores on the platform for the next day, including delicious smoked fish from Lake Baikal that filled my compartment with the best smoky smell - every time I returned to my compartment I always closed my eyes, smiled and took the deepest breath I could. If I had been able to communicate in Russian I would have assured the guy that with $700 of plane tickets, a temporary and highly restrictive transit visa and no other way to get to Moscow there was no chance I was going to miss the train as it pulled out of the station. And even during the longest stops I never ventured into the grandest stations for a look at the architecture or people lest something go wrong and I wound up stranded at the train station endlessly repeating the only Russian I could remember from some college classes - "What's your name?
My name is Doug. I love you."
The highlight of the trip was the 200-km stretch along the shores of Lake Baikal - the "Pearl of Siberia". A few quick facts about the world's deepest (1,637 meters) lake:
There are more than 1700 plant and animal species that live in the lake, most of which live nowhere else in the world. The only freshwater seals live here, all 60,000 of them, and they can dive to 1500 meters. The lake represents 80% of all fresh water in Russia and 20% of all surface freshwater in the world - more than all of the Great Lakes in North America combined. Accordig to the Lonely Planet gudiebook, it was and is formed by an active rift valley and will eventually split Asia in two and become the earth's fifth ocean. It is very hard to get a good photograph of it through grimy November train windows.
My last night on the train was enlivened by a bunkmate named Victor; a 39-year old Russian who transports cars and trucks across Russia and who got on the train at about 5:00 in the afternoon. Five minutes after he got on the
train he had the sausages and vodka out and ten minutes after he got on the train his three friends came piling in with beer and chicken - they didn't leave until midnight. Many vodka toasts and conversations in broken Russian and English ensued, and I learned that he had a wife and daughter, one friend (who was a huge ex-soldier with a shaved head and a constant , let's say, "serious" expression on his face) was rather right wing, distrustful of America but apparently willing to make an exception on my case, and another friend who spoke pretty good English and had a rather provocative photograph of his young wife on his mobile phone. Everybody was happy to have the diversin of an American traveller, however, and the night passed rather pleasantly and blurrily. They all got off the train early the next morning to pick up a shipment of vehicles, leaving me to enjoy the peace and quiet for the remainder of the day until we pulled into Moscow at about 3:00 in the afternoon. I spent the rest of the day wandering around the city and looking for "reasonable" accomodation in the world's most expensive city and
when I finally checked in to a hotel I was so tired I never even left to go out for dinner.
The next day (my only full day in Moscow) I hit the man draws for Moscow - Red Square, Lenin's Tomb, St. Basil''s Cathedral and the Kremlin. Thankfully they are all right there together and if you don't want to pay to actually go inside it's all free. Lenin's Tomb was a bit bizarre - it's a two-minute dash through the tomb with a 10-second glance at the embalmed body before one of the dozens of soldiers on guard glares at you and start smaking a move in your direction to make you move along. No photographs of course, so you just have to take my word for it that 90 years of embalming treatments doesn't give the skin and hair that decidelyrealistic sheen, and could even leave some hurried visitors wondering "what's all the fuss about? Bury the poor guy next to his mother already, like he asked in the first place". The Kremlin, Red Square and St. Basil's Cathedral are deservedly famous though and another full day to thoroughly explore would have been nice rather than
my photographic blitzkrieg in the plummeting temperature on a November afternoon. The next morning I stepped on to a plane that would take me to New York City; my first time in America in 622 days.
So that's about it. My trip through the world, as told in words and pictures. I thank everybody that took time out of their busy lives to stop and check on my progress, I question the sanity of those who read every entry and I encourage everybody to have the adventure of their lives everyday, whether it's an exotic trip or nursing a sick kid at home. The world is a beautiful, bizarre, enormous and wondrous place, and it wouldn't be the same without you or me in it, and that makes it all the more fascinating.
Thanks for reading.
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