Moscow to Irkutsk and Beyondce

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Quick, write something.....I heard him say.

6 hours to kill at the beautifully archaic, baroque-ish, multi faceted Yaroslavsky railway station

Luckily there's a bar across the street....although somewhat odd...in the way that everything in Russia is 'somewhat odd' gotta try and put my finger on it...

And, I thought it odd, there's not a map to be bought within 1,500 metres of this major railway station, now here's a business idea......

The God of travelling companions is smiling on me again!

Finally onboard and meet my rolling railway roommate, a 55 yo Russian doctor, he tells me his name is Vova , short for Vladimir! A neurologist, he works in Moscow and every 3 months makes this trip to somewhere east of Irkutsk to a regional hospital. He takes the train because he has a big box of medicine. He returns by plane after 5 days.

As a brief aside.....no-one seems to take this train by choice, even the number of plane crashes at Irkutsk airport (5 in 5 years) is not sufficient deterrent!! But I didn't think it was too bad, in fact...well, read on a bit

Wonderful, Vova has everything organised, he knows all the conductoresses and the barman in the restaurant car. He is able to explain all the intricacies of the train to me, not an insignificant matter, including how to slip in between the cars for a smoke. It's noisy, rolling and rattling hence not frequently used, good for health!

The restaurant car is a baroque/Art Deco masterpiece, heavy embroidered brocaded red and gold curtains, and the booths, inlays of red and gold leather on solid wooden frames. It only holds about 30 people and the cook, an elderly woman, has a tiny kitchen and cooks each meal individually!

There's a group of 20 Dutchies travelling together, when they're in the restaurant we know we're going to have a long wait....but it's not a problem, Andre the chief looks after us. He's got an almost caricature face, huge, flat, black sad eyes and an impossibly long, pointy chin. He speaks quite good English and has a ready supply of cold beer, and local vodka of course.

Our conductress gets about in starched uniform when she's on duty, then a shapeless nylon nightgown when she's off, and 'off' is the word!, and it's not shapeless, it's exactly, form fittingly her exact shape, big, bountiful, huge pendulous, well, we won't go there, there's a chance kids may get to read this and it's not pretty....suffice to say we have scary passing manoeuvres in the narrow passage, rocking and rolling as we rocket across the steppe. Now, that's a good question, what exactly is the steppe? Go on, wiki it.

We could be on an endless loop, an amoeba loop(?) the sameness, the sameness, the sameness.....I'm could swear we passed that clump of forest 2 days ago.......

Busy as Birch Street......nightmare on Birch Street?....but not unattractive, the predominant landscape for most of the journey is birch trees, dense forests or small clumps or individual trees. Endless birches, sons of birches...I could go on.....and they're beautiful, beautiful, especially as the leaves are starting to turn. In fact the landscape is very attractive and occasionally, from a slight rise, you can see that it just goes on forever and ever and ever, thousands of kilometres of nothingness....well, somethingness if you include birches..... If you had to endure an endless scenery scroll this wouldn't be too bad, like a desert island disc visual. And I know where I don't want to be in winter, although it would be a sight....and probably sore eyes.

And it goes on forever, vast emptiness with the occasional city.....I'm told one city makes washing machines.....another has a car plant....why are they so far out in the middle of nowhere?

And the occasional genuine Solzhenitsyn style gulag with rolls of barbed wire and guard posts. The locals don't want to say much about them. In fact, within the first 5 minutes of meeting Vova we had agreed to not mention politics...at all!....later, Nicholas was pressing Vova on some political interests, and it was interesting, but the response was quite alarming, astounding, curious, (maybe there's a big lack of independent news reporting here?)....Vova, and, in fact, every Russian I've met, is passionately supportive of Putin, able to justify Ukraine intervention with absolute logic based belief....sort of reminiscent of our 'weapons of mass destruction' and 'children overboard' experiences.....everyone now accepts it was bullshit but somehow it's all alright....wtf?

Anyway, we have become one big family. Stephan is Russian but living/working/studying in Switzerland, his girlfriend, Petra is Swiss, they speak German together, he speaks Russian with Vova, his English, with me, is about intermediate, Petra speaks upper level English. Nicholas, Helena and their baby Matilda are German. She speaks some English and Chilean espanol with me, he speaks German and good English as he lived a year or so in NZ and Oz. they are so perfectly wonderful, I couldn't get my head around it until I realised they are so young (21), an amazingly refreshingly wonderful optimism about life, concepts of world peace, talking about world harmony, it is so lovely despite, or due to, its naivety. They are on their way to China where he has 6 month contract doing something......and somewhere away from the worst pollution....and there's the Italian guys, another couple of Russians and the Dutchies.

I was awake early, as usual, we've stopped, as we do every few hours for 10-20 mins, Stephan is out and about taking photos in the early morning light, eventually Vova wakes and somehow we start the day with a couple of shots of voddy, the local brew, only for sale in Siberia and with a shoot of wheat or barley in the bottle. And its not all bad, we are ploughing our way through our collection of rail tucker, cheeses, sunflower seeds, chocolates, tea bags, biscuits, dried fruit, pistachios and walnuts, and more.

Being terribly a smart arse I'd decanted a bottle of voddy and 1 of scotch into plastic water bottles in my Moscow hotel to save weight carrying bags to the train. It was all good until the 3rd morning when I awoke a tad parched and reached for the nearest water bottle and took a big, long, deep slug.........

Vova is our de facto manager, he's constantly getting us organised , arranging us for photos, leading us this way and that. We are becoming the big family, it is just so wonderful, I can't believe my good fortune to meet up with such a bunch of amazing people. Have I changed my view about Russia and Russians....oh yeah!

Then there's the Chinese family, he is about 140yo, she is about 30, their kid is a real live wire of 8 or 9, we play chasey on the platform whenever we stop, his mother is horrified but laughs with us. There are a couple of Chinese guys who never leave their cabin(?) We finally get talking to the older Chinese guy, turns out he's a famous artist, he gives us copies of a couple of his catalogues and then does a quick sketch of Vova.....amazing, every day something new! He says he has 3 of his works in Oz, 2 owned by rich Chinese businessmen and one in a gallery, maybe Adelaide. His works look pretty good and apparently worth a lot of money.

Finally some verticality, low, rolling hills, after 50,000 kms of dead flat! And newer looking houses, this looks quite modern in comparison to the former ..

There's a bizarre timelessness to this train. It's like one of those sci-fi movies about a colony onboard a spaceship going off to colonise another planet, travelling 1,000 years together.

And, How wonderful to have no contact with the outside world, no phones, internet, newspapers....nothing. The train stops every few hours for 5 or 10 minutes and people stagger outside, check the little kiosks on the platform, wander over to some local attraction....usually not very attractive! We are enjoying the lovely sunny days. And the chance for a cigarette or three.

It's a very reminiscent of the ongoing sense of rockin and rollin you get after a few days at sea, coming off the train we stagger about like sheep in the rye grass.

And I remember getting off those really loooong escalators in the Moscow Metro, at the end you've almost forgotten how to walk and everyone's stumbling off trying to coordinate legs that have lost all muscle memory of walking on the long flight down.

Then an early dawn and were suddenly at Irkutsk a remarkably unremarkable small city....some very emotional farewells as our 'family' breaks up....then it's gone. I'm alone and wandering the station, I find the cloakroom and stash my case coz I'll be back here for the train to Mongolia in a couple of days. I catch a taxi to the mini bus station to find a way to Listvyanka and the amazing Lake Baikal.

Now the pics and movies, might take too much space, I'll see....and I'd like to thread all the movie clips together for a panorama of 5,000 kms of Russian countryside.

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