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Published: June 14th 2006
Trance-Mongolian Train
The view from cabin VI, wagon 7, train 004 from Moscow to Peking.Moscow. Day 0.
We move into our sardine can with an Irishman we call Dave and a Chinaman smuggler who crams bags and boxes of rowanberry vodka, cigarettes and bric-a-brac liberally about our cabin, and then disappears for three days. Our Chinese conductor speaks zero English (and we speak .0002% Chinese) and sports only one nametag: Conductor no. 186. He cooks himself delicious dinners of dumplings each day over a coal fire. Moscow slides far behind us.
Novgorod, Russia. Day 1.
Ramshackle tumbledown wooden cabins and newly plowed fields amongst fir forests. Pushups and situps daily in the train hallway. We place our feet in our compartment and our chests and arms out in the hallway, hands spread on dirty blue carpet. For every press-up we must touch our chins to the lid of a thermos flask. Yoga on the train: people passing to the dining car admire our headstands wobbly between four-berth bunks.
Yekaterinburg, Russia. Day 2.
HOT. Endless white birch woodland encased in grassland infinite. Small rustic settlements. A herd of cattle break the scenery for a few moments and then dense woodland. Birch, only white birch. Mesmerizing rhythmical pulse, lucid dreaming, heatwave in a
prefab cave on a line.
Novosibirsk, Siberia. Day 3.
Expanses of birch forest continue. Card games and cookies with Dave our cabinmate, London cabbie Neil and his fiery Mongolian wife Lydia who preaches the merits of eating with one’s hands, Mongolian-style.
You can taste the food better!!
Lake Baikal, Siberia. Day 4.
A ‘ten minute stop’ is only ever actually seven minutes. We (M, R and Andy) sprint like the spirit of the Siberian wind to the shore to dunk our heads in the immense, sacred freshwater lake known as the ‘Blue Eye of Siberia.’ Train pulls away from the platform nearly leaving us behind as we gasp in the high altitude air... we catch up just in time. High-ranking Conductor no. 197 throws his hat on the ground whilst screaming furiously at Andy, resident geologist in wagon number 7. But we made it!! And we’ve got five pure white stones from the largest freshwater lake in the world. In the evening, M dances with birch trees in the wind at the Mongolian border. Train station construction workers and the residents of several wagons look on. At dusk, green hills with horses give way to dusty plains with camels.
Rich cooks dinner
Gourmet salad from local produce. Train station platforms boast babushkas with veggies and sunflower seeds. Choyr, Mongolia. Day 5.
We wake with the powdered sugar-sand of the Gobi desert coating us all over. Out the window punctuating endless nothing are horses and yerts and camels. A pack of wild dogs feeds on a horse carcass. After a duet of contact improvisation and Aikido-- we’re becoming famous as the dancers on the train, and each 8-minute performance is exhilerated by the 8 hours of saved-up, cooped-up on-the-train energy we manufacture-- we discover desert fairy crystals just near the train platform. A luminous pure green kryptonite one, and another is a glittering chunk with purple and green hued together into a faceted desert sunset.
Beijing, Day 6.
Hello Great Wall! Hello smoking city of settled pollution. Hello stable ground, goodbye Trance-Mongolian express. Beijing rush hour traffic weaves along the main artery street like slippery tangled strings of chunky noodles boiling in a goat’s meat broth.
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mike the dad
non-member comment
wow..
I can only say wow... glad you're safe and moving towards the eco-dance city. Wish i could see the wonder of wonders where Richard Nixon so famously uttered, "It is almost as pretty as a postcard." Also hope Malaika has Don Mickelwait's address, as i believe he is in Bejing... Charlie Sweet may know... Dad of M.