Siberia ... East of Moscow

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Days 16 to 20 of 80

In our previous blogs we have been saying that we are due to travel on the Trans-Mongolian Express across to Beijing, allbeit with a couple of stop offs on the way.

Turned out that, when we arrived at the station late Sunday evening for our first leg journey, of 4 nights/3 days, it is the 'famed' Trans-Siberian that we do our first leg on.

There are three very-long distance routes emanating east from Moscow. The Trans-Siberian goes straight across the country to its furthest eastern coast at Vladivostok.
The Trans-Manchurian turns southward from that route somewhere east of the Mongolia border to turn down to Beijing
The Trans-Mongolian turns south at Ulan-Ude, about 200 km beyound Irkutsk, to pass through Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and the Gobi Desert on its way to Beijing. That is the route we are following, stopping off at both Irkutsk and Ulaanbaatar, 3 days in each.

The Trans-Siberian from Moscow to Vladivostok is the 'longest' single rail route on the world at 9289 km, though there are two other routes - Moscow to Pyongyang and Kiev to Vladivostok that are longer, both of which travel on a substantial part of the T-S. On the M to V route it goes through 8 time zones. Our journey to Irkutsk is just 5185 km of this, though we travel around another 200 km on the T-S route next Monday before turning south into Mongolia.

Construction started in 1891 under the direction of Tsarevich Nicholas II (later Tsar Nicholas II ), and given the extreme length of the line being built it was split into 7 sections all of which were being worked on simultaneously, 66,000 workers at a time. By 1898 the route was complete except for one section, and that was from the NW edge of Lake Baikal, 70 km beyond Irkutsk, to Khabarovsk on the other side.

To bridge the gap 2 ice-breaking train ferries were used, designed in Russia but built in Newcastle. The ships - not engines and fittings - were bolted, not riveted, together in Newcastle, all the parts numbered and then the kit of parts transported to Lake Baikal where they were reassembled like a piece of giant IKEA furniture. Hope Newcastle remembered to send the Allen key.

The ferries were used until 1904 by when a connecting rail link was built skirting the western and south-western shores. The larger ferry burnt in the Russian Civil war in 1916. The smaller, the Angara, is now a museum just on the southern outskirts of Irkutsk.

Our departure, from Yaroslavskiy station in Moscow went smoothly. This was our 2nd Russia train trip and these main stations are well signposted, with obvious directions to ensure you are on the right train. Then they also check off your ticket as you board so you can be absolutely certain you are heading correctly.

There are, in essence, 3 classes of cabin on these Russian sleeper trains.
1st class has 2 people per cabin, 9 cabins per carriage. Usually arranged without any secondary upper berths so you use the lower as seating during the day and then pull the back down to make it into a bed for night.
2nd class has 4 people per cabin, not necessarily a group travelling together. So, if you book a solo or couple into 2nd class you will share with others unknown.
3rd class is more open. Sets of berths in 4 arranged as in the cabined area but with no doors for separation, and with a further 2 berths hung lengthwise on the other wall, with an open corridor between.

Our next leg, Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar, may have different arrangements as we believe that it is a Chinese, not Russian, train that does the Beijing -><-Moscow route. We may even get a personal shower cubicle in our cabin.

We asked our special agent - no! Not that kind of agent. We are not in 007 territory; a rail agent. We are using a Russian agent as a recommended method as they are hooked in to the booking system more readily than us and understand its ins and outs. With a web recommendation it was only $5 booking fee per ticket. We asked for first class. Tickets go on sale a set number of days in advance and it turned out that all 1st class tickets sold immediately. But, one of the advantages of using an agent, they had the knowledge to book us all 4 berths in a 2nd class cabin, total price almost the same as 1st class.

Once on board it appears that the only material difference will be that our carriage with its 36 passengers will share 2 toilets / wash room, whereas 1st class share only between 18, though it looks like two other cabins in our carriage only have two occupants.

The cabin is comfortable enough. Bedding was fine. We have a TV, ... with 2 Russian channels showing serious art-house films, in Russian of course. We got 1 meal per ticket, so we could, theoretically, eat a meal on 2 of the 3 days we are on the train. Also, a couple of carriages away is a restaurant car which has a pretty extensive menu. Surely it must be all frozen, but hey, so what.

We have packed some provisions, coffee sachets, tea, drink, biscuits, cup-a-soup, chocolate, Snickers ... all the essentials, so we won't starve.

NB As an aside, we read about the power cuts in the UK and passengers stuck on trains "we were without food for several hours". Ah, diddums. How do they think those poor unfortunates in the world's poorest nations would feel about being without food for only "several hours "?

Our first noticeable introduction to our attendent - Provodnitsa as the females are known - around 30 minutes after departure, came when she was trying, with very little English, to establish what we wanted to eat, and when. We eventually deciphered that she meant chicken or meat and on which of our three days. So we went with chicken on Monday and 'meat' on Wednesday. We asked what time it would be served, expecting some reference to the Dining car, but she misinterpreted that as being a question about the toilets! So we didn't press on the matter.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when at about 09.15 on the Monday morning, a bloke came around and delivered 2 airline style boxes of warmed chicken in a sauce with rice.... at 9.15 AM .... just after we had had cereal and milk for breakfast (we had brought that in with us for the first morning ). It didn't appeal.

The Wednesday meal, a meat patty with buckwheat, appeared at 10.45am train time. Paul has taken quite a liking to buckwheat despite it reminding him, in appearance at least, of something his parents used to take fishing with them to use as fish bait. But at 10.45 this didn't appeal either.

Each carriage has at the attendant's end a permanently switched on water boiler, a samovar. They also provide pretty sturdy glass goblets in a metal holder - available to buy too ... along with chocolate and savoury type snacks, tea and coffee sachets, bottled drinks. ... and 'Team Russia' knick-knacks, key rings and the like.

There are several stops each day at major destinations, listed on a timetable displayed in each carriage. Some are mere drop off/pick up, but some are 20 to 40 minutes long. A chance for those that require their nicotine fix to drag through as many ciggies as they can light in the time available. Regrettably it makes the fresh air outside anything other than 'fresh'!

Enterprising ladies, mostly, populate the platform at the longer stops selling all sorts of goods from mobile carts. Foods, of course, bread, cakes, biscuits, fruit, pizzas (!), but also 'souvenirs' of all sorts of weird and wonderful items - pottery chicken shaped egg holder anyone? And cuddly toys. Kiosks stock even more items ... tinned meats and fish, toiletries, ..... At one stop on Tuesday evening the women appeared to be selling smoked 'Fiiissshhh', very golden brown in colour, like a decent kipper. But we are thousands of miles from any sea so they must surely be a freshwater fish.

At one station there was a low metal fence separating the station platform from 'outside'. This seemed to be a specific boundary and several ladies were selling their wares, food, vegetables etc, over the fence. But curiously there were also 8-12 kiosk/huts the bodies of which were on out-of-station land and the doors to which were level with the fence line.

Sleeping was fine, if a little airless. We seemed to have no control over our internal environment. There was a heater vent at ground level which was producing heat occasionally, and a cooling air conditioning vent which did the opposite, also occasionally. The window was locked so no air available there.

The digital display board in the carriage was very basic, essentially date, time, temperature, though given the biting wind and drizzle at two of our early stops it is doubtful that the temperature it was showing was that of outside.

During day 1, Monday, we passed through two time zones. We know because the timetable on the wall shows arrive/depart times for each stop, but in 'local time', but with a side column showing how many +hours we are beyond Moscow (and a column of a further +1 hour for UTC) .... this is all starting to sound very Einstein-ian. But the train digital time display stayed on Moscow time through Monday - all very confusing, especially when upon waking up on Tuesday morning, we found that the train clock had progressed to 'local time' for the zone we were in. Three days in that seemed to be the system. .. they reset the 'train clock' overnight for the time zone applying when you wake in the morning.

We had read that, until fairly recently, Russian trains throughout the country, even in their furthest +8 hours time zones, all ran to timetables in Moscow time. It seems ironic to know that the UK only went to country wide standard time at the introduction of the railways when it was realised that rail timetables don't work if the start, finish and in between stops are all working to a different time - though given recent timetabling issues in the UK you wonder if the rail companies wish they still had the ability to fiddle timetables through the fuzziness of 'local time'.

We were due to arrive in Irkutsk at 07.40am local time, so we have decided to move our watches forward with each time zone so that we are continuously correct. And because we don't want to oversleep and miss Irkutsk! We set all our devices set to 'loud' to wake us in time for disembarkation.

We had nearly 80 hours to kill on the train. Pip has her Kindle, an absolute boon on these trips.

Pip, reading her Kindle "I've finished reading Peter the Great , so I'll go for something lighter. Ah yes, Thomas Hardy, Return of the Native, that'll do!'.

Paul doesn't usually bother much but even he is lugging around a massive volume - 1000+ page SF short story and novella anthology, parts of which he dumps as he reads, plus a couple of smaller sciencey books for backup.

For most of the journey there was pretty relentlessly only one landscape to see ... forest, from the track's edge. Wild mixed deciduous, no evidence of mass conifer planting. Lots of silver birch, sumac, horsetail, giant hogweed, bullrushes, ragwort. Within this are occasional clearings and small hamlets of wooden huts. More sparse are larger urban settlement.

Have seen very little in the way of agricultural, no ploughed fields nor crops, until late morning, Tuesday, when the ground came to larger, more open areas. No livestock - cows, sheep etc - either, just the semi domestic animals associated with cottage gardening, goats, chicken. In the village settlements especially gardens appear to be totally given over to vegetable growing, very few flowers. Large plots of potatoes, and no way to know whether these are for eating or for making vodka.

It was also, again until late Tuesday morning, very wet. Boggy ground and muddy tracks, clearly in use from their tyre marks, possibly from tractors or wood-cutters. We have seen several wood processing yards. The rivers we have passed over seem to be in spate, and very brown from soil-wash.

Tuesday night sleep was helped by a couple of enormous, for us, Russian beers in the dining car. The night stop that night was in Ekaterinburg, a place we couldn't fit in to the 30 day limitation of our Russian tourist visa, but famed of course as the final destination of the Imperial family. The place where they were incarcerated and then murdered in July 1918. They had been taken from the Alexander Palace, St Petersburg, the previous year, leaving their home and possessions behind. Initially to Tobolsk in Siberia, then to Ekaterinburg. Their train journey almost certainly took them, at least in part, along the same route as our transportation.

And very little wildlife. Nothing large mammalian - no deer, or bears ?. And very few birds of any kind, just a few kites. Paul did, some time Monday middle morning, spot two black, turkey size birds but we were past in a flash.

On Tuesday night we braved a meal in the dining car. And it wasn't too bad either, certainly way better than the microwaved-to-order grot we had at the station on Sunday evening before boarding the train. And it turned out that our thoughts had done them a disservice - the food, chicken schnitzel, pork escalope, fried potatoes, was done fresh. We even heard chef bashing the chicken and pork flat in the kitchen, and, given the size of her when she was sitting away from the kitchen, we guess the chicken called 'I surrender! ' pretty damn quickly.

The train, despite being up to 20 minutes late at stops on late Tuesday into Wednesday, arrived and stopped in Irkutsk spot on at 07.40. A short taxi ride, price agreed before we got in, got us to our hotel for an early pre-booked check-in.

After catching some winks we took a stroll through some of Irkutsk. A look of faded glamour seems to pervade the place. And, if the street corners and building information signs and the tourists info offices are anything to go by it seems to be better attuned to tourists needs than Moscow or St Petersburg.

The other things it has in abundance is old wooden, cabin like buildings, most of which seem to be in need of serious renovation.

Irkutsk, around 600k population, was started in 1661, granted city in 1686. It is clear that it grew rich being the centre of Russian -Chinese trade in the later 1700s. It was also the place to which, in 1826, the first group of exiled Decembrists arrived. The Decembrists were, in their way, early Russian revolutionaries but about 90 years too early. A group of army officers and Royal Family military members led a revolt by around 3000 soldiers. However, unlike 1917 their actions were unsuccessful and they were exiled to Siberia.

It is also called "the middle of the Earth" as it is almost equidistant from the Arctic, Pacific and Indian oceans.

And it lies on an active fault, so who knows, we may feel our 3rd tremor on our travels.

We have booked a Walking Tour for tomorrow, but got out and about to some places today, photos of which are attached. Whilst we were near the river we were aware of some very active jet noise some miles away beyond the river. When we finally caught the aircraft in our vision we witnessed for several minutes, allbeit from a great distance, a state of the art Russian jet Fighter, being not so much flown as thrown around in the air. The pilot was taking it up vertically then allowing it to drop backwards, he was stalling it then tail spinning it, he was throwing it around like a rag doll, but always recovering. Great piloting skills. He finally went below the trees, we expect to land somewhere over there.

We have since looked on Google Maps for an airfield in that direction and it turns out that 'over there ' is an airfield with associated plane building plant where they build the supermanoeuverable Sukhoi Su-27, a direct 'competitor' to the USA F-14 and F-15.

Fortunately (sic) Paul was UNABLE to get a photo of it even with his zoom lens!

We also fitted in a very serious coffee shop. You firstly choose your method of coffee making - filter, cafetiere, espresso, aeropresse, Turkish, French press... Then you select the coffee bean you want, and how much, for strength. It is then ground to order amd coffee made to your specification.

We are here for 3 full days after today.

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