Russia and the Trans-Siberian Railway to Lake Baikal

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Since we began travelling in 2013 we have crossed many borders overland, but we were a little more apprehensive than usual as we approached the border between Estonia and Russia. We had no real justification for this other than the bureaucratic process we had been through to obtain our Russian tourist visas, our very poor understanding of the country and possibly having both watched far too many James Bond movies as children. We fully expected a stern man in a grey suit to greet us with the words “ah Ross and Liz, we have been expecting you” whilst stroking a white cat. Needless to say, this did not happen and we were greeted by a pleasant border guard who almost managed a smile, stamped our passports and waved us back to our waiting bus and onwards into Russia. We even had time to appreciate the historic significance of this border crossing, with the Narva Castle standing on the Estonian side of the border facing a Russian fort on the other, with just the Narva River separating the two.

Within no time at all we arrived at the Baltic Coach Station in Saint Petersburg and quickly located the metro. We had read that the Saint Petersburg metro system is one of the deepest in the world and it did feel like we were slowly descending into the bowels of the earth as we chugged down the crowded, long and dimly lit elevator until we finally reached the bottom and emerged into a grand and decorative hall (just as if we had descended into the Ministry of Magic in the Harry Potter films). The underground station was amazingly opulent with marble, chandeliers and decorative columns; quite unlike any metro station we had seen before. We discovered that this is a feature of metro stations in St Petersburg and Moscow, with many of the stations being exquisitely decorated in Stalinist style and each being slightly different. We made a point of riding the trains for a few hours during our stay, jumping off at each station to see as many as possible (hours of fun for 50p!).

In between metro stations, we wandered through the huge bustling old town, pretty streets and spectacular buildings, such as the Winter Palace overlooking the vast Palace Square and the Church of the Resurrection of Christ. This colourful church gave us our first glimpse of the classic onion shaped domes we were to see throughout Russia and the equally impressive mosaics inside. Just by chance we happened to be in Saint Petersburg on the one day of the month that the State Hermitage Museum, housed in the Winter Palace, was free to enter. So we took advantage of this to wind our way through the many tour groups and get a good look at the interior of this grand old building, as well as seeing some of the famous exhibits and paintings.

Having had a great few days in Saint Petersburg, we took the superfast Sapsan train to Moscow and on arrival we once again stood gaping at the splendour of the underground station whilst commuters shoved their way past us. Eventually we arrived at our accommodation just in time as the rain started to fall. Although the weather was not so good, we ventured out the next day to see the sites of Moscow, but after passing through about the third security check in the historic centre, we realised something was going on. We soon found out that there was a huge Moscow day celebration running all weekend with events and concerts in and around Red Square. This meant that on our first attempt we could not get anywhere near the famous sites due to the crowds, but the following day, which was much brighter, we managed to visit Red Square, The Kremlin and the iconic St Basil’s Cathedral, and spent our remaining time in Moscow exploring the rest of the historic centre.

From Moscow we caught a train east to Vladimir where we immediately hopped on an old style Soviet bus to chug our way to the picturesque village of Suzdal. Suzdal is part of the Golden Circle, a string of the country’s oldest towns which mainly escaped Soviet industrialisation and reflect an idyllic bygone era. Suzdal was full of wonderful old log built houses and boasted an impressive Kremlin from which Prince Yury in the twelve century founded a small outpost to the west, an outpost which was to become Moscow.

After wandering around pretty Suzdal for a day or two, admiring the many churches and decorative onion shaped domes, it was time to head back to Vladimir where we had a quick look around and some lunch before boarding our first overnight train on the Trans-Siberian Railway. We had booked a second class cabin for this twenty-three hour journey to the city of Yekaterinburg and were slightly apprehensive to find out who we would be sharing our four birth cabin with. We were soon joined by a guy who spoke some English and introduced himself as Rick. Rick was also going to Yekaterinburg and was very pleased to practice his English, which was good for us as he was able to explain how the overnight trains worked. Rick also gave us an insight into the country and its people, as he explained that he was from the Tatar nation. We had not previously considered the fact that Russia is of course comprised of many separate peoples, nations and cultures all under the banner of the Russian Federation. After a great deal of interesting conversation, we finally called it a night and climbed into our bunks to be lulled to sleep by the rocking of the train. We were awoken at some time in the dead of the night by a new passenger boarding and taking up residence in the empty bunk in our compartment. This is something we would get quite used to as we journeyed east to Siberia.

Once we arrived in Yekaterinburg, Rick insisted that we accept a lift to our hostel from him and his son who had come to the station to meet him. We felt a bit guilty about this as it meant they had to crawl through the city centre in Friday afternoon traffic, but neither of them seemed to mind as they happily pointed out places of interest along the way. We finally waved goodbye to our chirpy train companion and after a bit of confusion regarding our hostel, which involved another incredibly friendly guy who owned a different hostel actually walking with us to the door to make sure we were in the right place, we eventually got to our apartment-hostel where we were met by a very sullen and possibly stoned teenager. The teenager just pointed us towards our room before disappearing back to his computer game and after some email communication with the hostel owner it transpired that the owner was out of town and his “Administrator in Chief, actually no just his cousin, a student, Igor” was in charge. This made us laugh and fully explained the sullen teenager who probably did not want to be in charge of anything, but if he wanted to maintain a roof over his head, had little choice. Awkward Igor gave us much amusement and we enjoyed a couple of days in Yekaterinburg following the appropriately coloured red line, which is painted along the streets to guide tourists to all the main attractions, the most historically important of which being the Church upon the Blood built on the spot where the Bolsheviks executed Tsar Nicholas II and his family in 1918.

From Yekaterinburg we caught an early morning train to the city of Tyumen. We boarded the third class carriage just as people were starting to stir from their overnight slumber, so we were as quiet as possible, got ourselves a cuppa from the Samovar (the ancient boiling water urn found in every carriage) and settled in to watch the forests in full autumn colour roll by. Apparently we crossed the Ural Mountains somewhere on this journey and therefore crossed from Europe into Asia, although the Urals here must be no more than slight bumps as we didn’t notice them. We arrived in Tyumen late in the afternoon and just had time to head into town for a very tasty lunch before catching another train heading slightly north to the town of Tobolsk. The train’s destination was somewhere in the depths of northern Siberia and it was clear that our fellow third class passengers were mainly miners or oil field workers returning to work after the weekend. These guys were overnight train professionals stowing their gear, making their beds, eating some pre-prepared food and then settling down to drink a few beers with their colleagues, all the while being extremely courteous to other passengers and particularly to the lady who is in charge of each carriage (the Provodnista a.k.a. “she who must be obeyed”) as these ladies, whilst always friendly and super-efficient, appear to have the power to strike fear into the heart of even the most burly of miners.

We arrived late at Tobolsk station which is unfortunately located ten kilometres from town, meaning walking was out of the question at that time of night. Fortunately Russian efficiency meant that a local bus to town arrived five minutes after the train had arrived. Unfortunately and contrary to what we had read in our guidebook, this bus did not go anywhere near the centre of town where our hotel was located. When we realised the bus was heading off into a different part of town, the conductor noticed our puzzled looks and after some vague communication shook her head and made sure we jumped off at what would be the closest point to the centre. This left us with an eerie walk through some very deserted and dimly lit communist style concrete housing blocks, which was not so pleasant, before we found our hotel. The hotel, however, turned out to be anything but eerie and dimly lit. We had booked a basic twin room with shared bathroom, but as it was out of season we were upgraded to a fancy double room with en suite and even a free buffet breakfast thrown in. Needless to say this lifted our spirits no end.

Tobolsk was once Siberia’s capital and it received a rave review in our guidebook. Whilst the city does have a fantastic Kremlin situated on a hill with far reaching views across the Siberian forests, unless we missed something, it has absolutely nothing else to see, not even a decent coffee shop to while away a few hours. Never mind, the hotel restaurant did a great Spaghetti Bolognese with pancakes to follow. Liz was beginning to realise that the Russians really love pancakes and that they are always on the menu as one of the cheapest dessert options. The pancakes we ordered were always huge, came in twos or sometimes threes and were accompanied by a bucket of whatever sweet sauce you chose. Ross was beginning to wonder if he would ever be able to get Liz to leave this land of pancakes.

From Tobolsk we had no choice but to retrace our steps back to Tyumen before jumping on the train for our next leg of the Trans-Siberian to the city of Novosibirsk. After testing third class during the day-time we decided to buy third class tickets for this overnight journey as it was not nearly as bad as we had been led to believe. We had seen it described as “cattle class” and “a rolling dormitory resembling a refugee train”, but it really was not too bad at all and we both slept as well as we had done in second class, if not slightly better, as there was more air flow through the more open compartment making it cooler. We were joined sometime in the night by a young mother and her three year old son in the bunk opposite ours. In the morning, despite the language difficulties we managed to gather that they would be on the train nonstop for a further four days. We did not envy them as we thought one night at a time on the Russian trains was plenty.

Novosibirsk, despite being Russia’s third largest city was fairly nondescript, but made a convenient and perfectly pleasant overnight stop before our next deviation from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the city of Tomsk, some four and a half hours away by bus. Tomsk was a really interesting and surprisingly pretty city, with a lot of character and many examples of old wooden buildings and a vibrant student/art scene, which is not surprising when one in five of the town’s residents is a student. We found it interesting that so much English was spoken by staff in cafes and restaurants given Tomsk’s location right in the middle of Siberia. We often had a crowd of slightly nervous waiting staff arrive to take our order, all keen to try to understand the native English speakers.

In Tomsk we stayed in a hostel in an old wooden building with a big shared kitchen where a jovial Russian family seemed to have taken root. They were dismayed at the sight of our evening meal, a plate of pasta with a tomato sauce and some veggies thrown in, and after confirming that we were not actually vegetarians, insisted that we share a lump of their cold meat with our pasta. This was very generous of them, but their idea of meat was a little different to ours. We don’t mind a bit of fat on our meat but they preferred a bit of meat on their fat. Ross managed to get most of his down whilst making all the appropriate noises of appreciation, but Liz failed and had to hide most of hers under some uneaten pasta. We decided to strategically avoid that family during meal times for the rest of our stay, especially at breakfast, as who knows what their generosity may have led to us eating with our muesli and yoghurt!

We enjoyed a couple of days in Tomsk wandering through the historic streets and the huge park overlooking the river and Siberian wilderness. We also visited the Oppression Museum which is housed in the basement of the old KGB building. The museum was small but interesting, especially poignant was a map of Russia painted on the floor showing the locations of all the Gulags (Soviet labour camps), we had no idea there were so many and could only imagine how horrific the conditions must have been.

With a connection at Taiga train station, we were once again boarding an overnight train to the city of Krasnoyarsk where we arrived early in the morning. The city had a nice feel to it and was within a local bus ride of the Stolby National Park which we decided to visit, although we unfortunately didn’t get off the bus where a chairlift would have taken us up to the park, but instead had to walk six kilometres up hill to the entrance before then walking around the impressive rock formations that the park is well known for. The park is also well known for having bears, which would have been great to see but when we got a bit lost at one point in the dark forest, we decided that perhaps bears would not be such a good thing to see close up and quickly backtracked to the main areas of the park.

Having had a great day at Stolby National Park enjoying all the autumn colours, we decided to spend an hour or two in the evening investigating the train crossing from Russia to Mongolia as our month long Russian visa was steadily running out. Until now we had been happily buying our train tickets for each journey just a day or two in advance using the not so straightforward but not impossible Russian Railways website. However, when we looked more closely we discovered that we could not purchase international tickets online. So after a bit of mild panicking on Liz’s part, as tickets were sold out until the very last couple of days in which we could legally be in Russia and a quick look at alternative options for leaving the country (one of which was flying to South Korea), we quizzed our helpful hostel owner using google translate and he reassured us that we could buy international tickets at the station in Krasnoyarsk.

We headed off to the train station the next day with more than two hours to spare before our onward train to Irkutsk departed, intending to use this time to buy the tickets to Mongolia. The queues to buy train tickets in Russia are always long as it takes ages for each ticket to be issued and after queuing for quite some time at three different windows, we finally got directed to the international sales desk which of course was closed for a half an hour break. We were not going to risk being in a queue here so camped out at the window until the ticket lady eventually returned. We handed over our piece of paper we had prepared in Russian with all the details of the train we required and to our relief she nodded and started the lengthy process of issuing our tickets, made all the more time consuming by the cleaner temporarily ousting the ticket lady from her chair mid proceedings to mop the floor. We finally had the tickets in our hands with only just enough time to spare to purchase some supplies and jump on the train to Irkutsk.

We arrived early the next morning in Irkutsk, too early to check into our hostel, but fortunately we found a nice warm coffee shop that was open to get a coffee and a muffin for breakfast. The coffee shop was called Lenin Street Coffee and sported a logo almost identical to that of the well-known American chain Star Bucks. We imagined that Lenin would not approve.

Irkutsk was a very pleasant if not slightly cold city, with a lot of interesting historic buildings and streets. This time a green line guided us to all the main tourist sites in between coffee stops to warm up. Irkutsk is the closest city to Lake Baikal so from here we caught a mini bus to the lakeside village of Listvyanka, where we made our way to our hostel on the outskirts of the village, overlooking the golden colours of the forest. Unfortunately the weather was not great, but we did glimpse the mountains on the Eastern shore of the lake and enjoyed a walk up to a great view point overlooking the lake. Some crazy folks (mainly Brits) were even taking a dip in the lake, much to our surprise given the temperature, perhaps because legend has it that a dip in Baikal prolongs your life by twenty-five years. Oddly enough even Liz was not tempted to join them.

After a quick stop over back in Irkutsk it was time to catch the train to Ulan Ude, our final destination in Russia. We chose a day train for this as the railway hugs the southern shores of Baikal for much of the journey and we were rewarded with some brilliant views of the lake, forests and mountains. We arrived late in Ulan Ude, so just walked to our hotel and did not venture much further than the restaurant next door for dinner. The following day we visited the city centre to take a look at the giant statue of Lenin’s head in the main square, have a final lunch of borsch, which is a surprisingly tasty beetroot soup, and of course a mountain of pancakes before boarding the train to Mongolia. We decided to treat ourselves to first class for this journey as it was not that expensive and as we had already spent ninety hours on Russian trains in every other class, we felt we deserved it.

During our adventure across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway we have learnt:

- Despite much of what is written about the Trans-Siberian Railway, it can easily be done in as many stages as you like by purchasing train tickets for each journey as you go along.

- Although we left the Trans-Siberian and branched off on the Trans-Mongolian Railway, the Trans-Siberian continues all the way to Vladivoskok on the east coast of Russia. A number of trains rumble along the nine thousand kilometre route every week taking six to ten days, depending on the train you choose. Why anyone would choose to do this journey all in one go however is a mystery to us.

- Third class is actually quite comfortable for one or two nights.

- Russian trains all run on Moscow time. This is very confusing in a country with multiple time zones.

- The people of Russia and Siberia are incredibly friendly and are almost always willing to engage in conversation even if this does mean lots of sign language and laughter.

- There is almost always a statue of Lenin somewhere in a Siberian city, although you can pay homage to the embalmed body of the man himself in Moscow if you really want to.

- Russians apparently enjoy vodka with caviar or failing that salted cucumbers.

- There is a subterranean world beneath the streets of Moscow including a three floor shopping centre.

- Russia is a fascinating country, one which we have barely scraped the surface of on this trip, so we hope to return if they’ll let us back in.

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