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Published: September 8th 2010
"What do you mean, the train takes six hours? It's only 150 km; that's not more than three!" - a Polish person Yeah, about that.
The border crossing between Poland and Russia is
not part of the EU's
Schengen Area, so getting into Russia is almost as time-consuming, numbingly bureaucratic, and infuriating as getting into the USA.
The train between Gdańsk and Kaliningrad only resumed operation this summer, so even locals were surprised to know it was running. I actually scouted out the train station the day before, to be
absolutely goddamn sure which platform, and I arranged a cab from my hotel rather than deal with luggage and cobblestones and weather and my propensity to get lost taking irresistible "shortcuts" through the old town.
The train itself is adorable; that's the only word for it. It's a short train, and the last car is white with lace curtains with Cyrillic lettering woven in. I hopped on, and instead of the usual six-seater compartments (you say Harry Potter, I say Agatha Christie), I found odd little converted
couchettes: on one side, a full-length bench apparently convertible into three bunks, and on the other, an odd jump-seat, countertop with
sink, and closet. I claimed the jump-seat in an empty compartment and we were away - I wasn't going to have to share with anyone. Finding all of the possible seating options to be pretty uncomfortable, I intended to scout out more comfy-looking seating in the other cars, but a check with the car attendant revealed that
only this car would be continuing on to Kaliningrad; the others would terminate in Braniewo, on the Polish side of the border. Very well. Couchette it is.
Happily, said couchette remained all mine, and I discovered that the power outlet worked, so I had laptop! Without internet access, I barely remember what one is supposed to
do with a laptop, but no matter. I thought I'd offline-write some TravelBlogs about Gdańsk - which by now you've noticed didn't happen.
In Braniewo, a small stampede of Kaliningrad-bound passengers were herded from the non-Kaliningrad cars, and a couple of guys with a reasonable amount of luggage appeared in my compartment. As they shuffled around and put up their bags, I noticed a familiar sound. "Waitaminnit. Are you guys speaking English?!" Canadians! In my compartment! What're the odds? I put away the laptop and
Couchette
a.k.a. Home Sweet Home for next 6 hourswe got into the small talk.
I had plenty of time to get to know John and Mark, since our rail car proceeded to not budge from Braniewo. Polish border guards came by to inspect and eventually stamp our passports. We heard assorted clanking sounds and occasionally something jarred the train - presumably the unhooking of the other passenger cars and the re-attaching of some kind of engine. Nothing that caused the train to really move, though. I tried
not watching the clock, but in retrospect that seems to have made it worse. I took photos when we stopped and again when we started up, which confirm that the stop was "only" an hour; it felt longer.
An important note here, though: according to
some rail-enthusiast geekery online, we did
not, as I had expected, need to change the wheels on the train to match Russian rail gauge. (The differences between German gauge and Russian gauge
famously affected the Nazis' invasion of the Soviet Union during WWII.) Between Braniewo and Kaliningrad, "standard" (western European) and Russian gauge tracks run parallel to each other, and Polish PKP trains simply continue along the standard-gauge line. Elsewhere, e.g., the Polish-Ukrainian border, a time-consuming switch
occurs. I shudder to think how much longer we might have been...
We did eventually start moving again - I can confirm that I'm no longer sitting in a couchette in Braniewo as I write this. And so we rolled toward the Polish-Russian border. Crossing the border was fascinating. I don't think I've ever seen any border with double barbed-wire fences and a no-man's-land and guard towers, all of which this border still has. The train creeped through this area, and although my Canadian compartment-mates strongly recommended not taking photos, I had to sneak a few. Really awful ones. Which would not have been worth losing the camera over, if it had come to that. But it didn't. I don't really know how you'd defend against modern digital subcompact cameras anyway. They're tiny, silent, and it's really easy to palm the SD card and swap out a decoy card. If you really want to prevent someone photographing something, I think you have to prevent them
seeing it by erecting barriers or something. I'm not sure Russia cares that much about their antiquated border - I'm just saying.
Russian migration cards were handed out, and we puzzled over filling
Was a really bad idea to take this picture of the border
... and a shame it's such a crappy picture for all that. out all the little boxes with data from our passports and our visas. Twice: once for the entry card and once for the
exit card which we would need upon departure. The US State Department website warns that if the exit visa/exit card are not in order, Russia reserves the right
to not let me leave, and in this eventuality the US State Department wants me to understand that they are unable to assist and I'm likely to be eaten by a grue. Or end up in a ГУЛаг (
Gulag). Something like that.
Across the border, we pulled in at Мамоново (Mamonovo) and resumed our previous not-budging status. Russian border guards in very tidy uniforms came by to
collect our passports (which had the required Russian visas from the Russian consulates at home securely stuck inside) and our completed migration cards, and with these things of ours in hand, they disappeared. I was still trying to not-watch the clock, which I hadn't yet figured out didn't really help, so it continued not really helping. After a long time (about half an hour, according to camera), they returned, not totally surprisingly I guess, with our passports and our exit migration
Our view for another hour
That's "Mamonovo", not "mamo-hobo". cards, all properly stamped. After a total of about an hour, we were moving again. In Russia!
So now we know why it takes six hours to travel 150 km.
(For those of you who can do math, the remaining extra hour is caused by railway line construction in Poland.)
The rest of the ride from the border to Kaliningrad was mostly uneventful, except for my first foray into speaking any actual Russian. The previously-blogged-about CouchSurfer Emilia, already well-established as a delightful person, had also delightfully presented me with a gift at our second evening's meeting: a bottle of Soviet-era Polish lemon soda with a nostalgically authentic label. It was awesome, but I also decided immediately that I would have to photograph it and drink it, not try to carry it home. Friends and family will recall that in 2001,
I Had A Bad Experience™ with a glass bottle in checked baggage - in that case it was Scotch whisky which, after the bottle broke and I cried and stuff, evaporated and left my luggage smelling lovely for years afterwards. I can imagine what sticky sugary lemon soda would do, and I think it would be undesirable. So, no air travel
with glass bottles. So, it's my first trip into Russia and a perfect time to celebrate with some Soviet-era-reproduction lemon soda!
Which requires a bottle opener.
I'm 100% certain my hipster Lonely Planet Russian phrasebook is going to have the word in it for "bottle opener". I'm right. It does. I craft and practice my sentence: "Пожалуйста, у вас есть открывалка?" ("Please, do you have a bottle opener?"). Bravely, I make my way down the corridor to the attendant's compartment, and bravely, I deliver my question: "Пожалуйста, у вас есть открывалка?" and, in case there's any confusion, I hold out the bottle of lemon soda. It WORKS!!! I get a bottle opener and just like magic (or physics), the soda is opened! I march back to the couchette and share my triumph with John and Mark and drink my lemon soda. It tastes like victory.
So, yes, at this point in my head I'm twirling around like Fräulein Maria in Salzburg, cataloguing the many ways in which my trip to Kaliningrad will be wildly successful. We arrive at the grand Южный вокзал (south station, formerly the Königsberg Hauptbahnhof (main train station)), which has been nicely restored and
seems like a classic European rail station, and I meet the driver who's arrived to take me to my hotel.
As we pull out of the railway station's parking lot, and speed past the lovely park with the huge statue of Lenin still on display, across a wide bridge onto a massive Soviet-style boulevard crammed with автомобили (cars) and трамваи (trams) and троллейбусы (trolleybuses), oh my, and no apparent lighting or traffic control systems, and I start to see how
big this place is, really big, and we see lots of wonderful-looking sights but they all seem really far away from each other, and then my hotel is further away still from all of them, seemingly in the middle of nowhere and I have no idea how to get anywhere and even at the hotel only about half the staff speak any English, well, you know the part where Fräulein Maria arrives at the gate of the Von Trapp mansion and comes to an abrupt halt and says, in a very small voice, "... oh, help" and NBC cuts to commercial?
Yeah, like that.
What have I gotten myself into?!
See all my pictures from the Gdańsk-Калининград border crossing on Flickr:
On the Border: Gdańsk-Калининград 2010 Set
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Mom & John
non-member comment
Very interesting trip and notes!
We had a good laugh at all the problems you have had on this trip! A Joyce couldn't log into your travelblog so I cut and paste into MSword and sent it to her. She said your trip is very interesting! I agree! Got 2 Polish postcards from you today - love them! Thanks.