Day 283 - Travelling in style... relatively

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After a very good long nights sleep we were refreshed and ready for the relaxing day ahead. It was fantastic to read, chat and watch the Russian countryside go by. Life aboard the train is not terribly varied, but at the same time there is always something to look at and it's nice just having so much time on our hands. And after crossing countless timezones in the previous few days it was great to be able to sleep whenever we wanted (which was often).

Our trip from Moscow to Beijing will be broken by visits to Lake Baikal in Siberia and to Ulaan Baator, the capital of Mongolia. Our compartment for the first and longest leg of our journey was relatively quite plush - super deluxe first class - which meant we had a shower and an armchair, although neither were actually quite as plush as they might sound. Even so, the tickets were remarkably cheap since we got a Russian travel agent to buy them rather than do it ourselves or use a Western travel agent. Other on board facilities can be listed comprehensively: toilets, a restaurant car, a samovar for a constant supply of boiling water and heating. And did they have heating. It's part of Trans-Siberian folklore that the trains are ridiculously hot and we weren't cold that's for sure. The windows are locked shut at this time of year to conserve heat and at times it was uncomfortably warm.

So that's our home for the next few days. We have our trusty guidebook which describes every point of interest or semi-interest along the way, and the brilliant thing is that mileposts (!) mark the distance from Moscow in kilometres so you always know where you are and know when notable things are coming up. Often this refers to a town, and a typical description goes along the lines of 'this unremarkable town began life in the Soviet era and it was responsible for producing tractor tyres'. We were able to get out at some of these stations whilst the train had a rest, usually only for about 10 minutes. But that gave us time to buy things from people wandering the platforms. Finding wodka was harder than we'd expected because they're not allowed to sell it at the stations apparently. Anyway it wasn't much of a surprise that the woman selling homemade potato salad-type thing was able to point us in the direction of a woman conspicuous by the fact her wares were kept tucked inside her basket. Wodka purchased we then turn our attention the the Chinese guards (we were on the Moscow-Beijing train) all manning their positions by their respective carraige doors, immaculately dressed, who are telling us to get back on. This train remains remarkably punctual over the course of more than a week, and that sort of train waits for noone!

The first major town was Nizhny-Novgorod, previously called Gorky and Russia's 4th largest city, which was off limits to foreigners until 1991. There were quite a few places like that and lots of military towns didn't even have names, just numbers. Just after the town the train crosses the 1km wide Volga river, and in days gone by Russians would take off their hats here as a mark of respect to the mighty river!

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