27 July, 2003
We board our train #007 - the Sibir - with no hassles. This provodnitsa is much more friendly and relaxed than our last one. She takes out ticket (without asking for our passports or any other documents) and shows us to our compartment. It is not the one we booked, it appears they are using it for themselves as her son is along for the ride, but that does not matter. We make a few trips into the car to get all our bags into the compartment and then sort it all out for our trip. We get out what we need and then bury the rest of the bags that we do not need as deep as we can.
Lars goes out and takes some last minute pictures around the platform and train station. This is the start of a very long train journey and there is a marker that indicates the distance to Moscow - 9,288 kilometers. We will, of course, be doing a bit more than that as we will be heading down to Mongolia and at the end of the trip up to St. Petersburg.
The train leaves pretty much on time and we begin our long Trans-Siberian journey. As we head up north, we pass by the Pacific Ocean and the beaches that line the water are filled with bathers. It is Sunday and the weather has turned out very nice - warm and sunny. And the locals are taking advantage of it. At one semi-secluded spot, an attractive, blond young lady is bathing totally in the nude. We passed by too quickly.
We then settle down and relax. We enjoy some of the fresh fruit that we have purchased, including cherries and raspberries. Large and juicy. We are hungry so we decide to have some dinner. We have carried with us some instant noodles that we have brought all the way from Bangkok to Singapore to Kuala Lumpur to Russia for this trip. They are Thai green curry noodles and we are looking forward to them. We have purchased some Tupperware bowls and on board each train car, they have a samovar with boiling hot water. So it is very easy to cook up our instant noodles - and they are quite a treat. Missed those flavors and spices.
The train seems to be a be a bit older than the train #006 that we took from Khabarovsk to Vladivostok, but it is still comfortable. One of the key differences is the knob above the window which allows us to adjust the volume, and shut off completely, the music piped into the compartment. The train is a bit warmer, but still comfortable.
As we cruise along, the train makes a number of stops along the way. In this journal, we will indicate the stops that we get off at or observe in blue, and will indicate the time we arrived (in local time and Moscow time - all the trains here run on Moscow time, even 6 times zone away) and the distance from Moscow and Vladivostok.
Ussurisk - 1739/1039 - KM 9,117/172: A long stop (about 18 minutes) at a blue painted station with a small platform. There was nothing much here, just time to stretch the legs. From here on, we traveled along flat plains with farms scattered here and there.
Sibirtsevo - 2100/1400 - KM 9,109/180: A short stop at a very small train station that is salmon colored. This was followed by another short stop at Spassk-Dalni - 2204/1504 - KM 9,050/239 - we will see many of these along the way. This was one of the places where Alexander Solzhenitsyn was imprisoned and helped build the cement works. After we depart this station, we relax in our compartment for a while and then get ready for bed. Our beds are made and we have changed into our sleeping clothes, so we just have to go and brush our teeth in one at each end of the car. We do not have much trouble falling off to sleep.
28 July, 2003
We are awoken around 6:30 AM, but as we have no where to go, we hang out in bed. Shortly thereafter we arrive at the next station, one we are familiar with.
Khabarovsk - 0655/2355 - KM 8,521/768: This is a big station and we can see from this side of the platform the renovation that they are undertaking on the station. But we are surprised to find no vendors selling food - maybe they do not let them on the platforms, otherwise it would be quite messy in a station like this. We recall our mad dash to catch the train here when we were going to Vladivostok, so we decide to stay on the train.
After we leave Khabarovsk, we cross the Amur River. We had expected to cross the river on the longest bridge on the Trans-Siberian, but we seemed to have taken the tunnel instead. The guide book had said that the tunnel, built in secret during the Second World War, was only used for freight trains, but we certainly seemed to have used it.
Just before 8 AM we decide to have some breakfast and break into the supplies that we have brought with us. We have some yogurt with some of the fresh raspberries that we bought in Vladivostok, some crackers with peanut butter and some fruit and tea. We are now passing through flat steppes with the occasional birch tree forest. For a while, a brand new paved road parallels us.
Birobidzhan - 0950/0250 - KM 8,351/938: This is an interesting place and we wish we had more time here to check it out. This is the capital of the Jewish autonomous region in the former Soviet Union and now Russia. It is quite an inhospitable place and the few Jews left seem to be leaving. They really never had any independence here anyway. The train station is the only one in Russia to have it's name in both Russian and Hebrew letters.
For lunch, at around noon, we had some sandwiches with salami and cheese. We pass by some of the quarries around here, along with the first tunnel to ever be dug through the permafrost. Now that must have been an achievement.
Obluche - 1233/0532 - KM 8,198/1,091: We have a long stop in this small town, where we are able to pick up some snacks from the food vendors. We are happy to be able to get some more fresh raspberries. After this stop we change time zones and turn our watches back one hour as we enter the new district. We now wind through tree covered valleys.
Arkhara - 1345/0745 - KM 8,088/1,201: This is a short stop at a modern, ugly station. There are not even vendors here (maybe they know it is a short stop). A short while later we stop at Bureya - 1437/0837 - KM 8,037/1,252: It is a small station where we make a brief stop. The tracks are even covered with grass. As with the other stations, the station clock is set to Moscow time. We have another brief stop at Zavitaya - 1521/0921 - KM 7,992/1,297.
We decide to go for a walk about on the train and explore a bit. We head towards the rear of the train and walk from car to car through the doors separating each one. We cross the banging plates between each rattling car. The car after our car is second class (four berths to a compartment) and that is followed by the dining car. There are then a few more second class cars and these are followed by the cheapest seats on the train - platskartny or third class. In effect, it is a dorm room on wheels sleeping 54. There is no privacy with no separate compartments. They have rather ingeniously stacked in the beds on either side of the aisle. It is quite a scene, with people stretched out everywhere, laundry and other things hanging here and there and children running up and down the aisle between the rows of bunks.
We head back to the dining car, where we decide to sit down and have a cup of tea. As we want to check out the dining car in more detail, we have to order something (and certainly not any of the food on offer), so tea it is. The lady in charge takes our order with a grim face and plops the tea down a few minutes later. We are the only customers in the whole car - we are never quite sure how many people come here to eat, especially with all the good food available on the platforms at many of the stations we stop at.
At around 4:30 PM we head back to our compartment and hang out there, enjoying another cup of our own tea. James, someone that we have met on the train, comes by for a chat. The next stop is at Belogorsk - 1710/1110 - KM 7,873/1,416, a fairly long stop. We get out to stretch our legs and see what we can find. We are pleased to see that there are more food vendors and we decide to pick up some more fresh raspberries. These turn out to be very good. We wander down to admire the Lenin statue standing in front of the prison bathroom green station building and then just walk here and there to get some blood circulating in our legs.
The terrain from here is flat, wet marsh land with the occasional trees. We soon cross over the Zeya River. Our next stop is at Svobodny - 1835/1235 - KM 7,815/1,474 - an ugly modern station. At around 7:30 PM we decide it is time for dinner and prepare our chicken rendang with bread. We have these pre-cooked packages of food that we have brought with us from Malaysia and all we have to do is place the silver foil in hot water to heat them up. We are passing through an area now that has many small villages and farms. The weather is dreary (matching the state of the villages), with low laying clouds. A brief stop at Shimanovskaya - 1942/1342 - KM 7,723/1,566, and after that we admire the many electricity poles that lay at drunken angles in the soft earth of the melted tundra. They are leaning in all sorts of directions and only the tension from the power lines keeps them from falling over altogether. Just before we decide to retire for the evening, our neighbor, a Russian woman, comes over to offer us some cucumbers to eat with our vodka (we had offered her a shot earlier). With her broken English, we try to have as much of a conversation as possible.
29 July, 2003
We wake up at around 8 AM, just in time to note that we have officially crossed from the Russian Far East territories into Siberia at KM 7,075. Just as we are about to have breakfast, we stop at Amazar - 0850/0250 - KM 7,010/2,279, where we stay for a while. They fill up the water tanks on the train, but it is otherwise quite boring. The weather is half foggy and half sunny. It just cannot seem to decide. We are soon passing through hilly countryside with many farms. It is these pleasant surroundings that makes the stop at Magocha - 1020/0420 - KM 6,906/2,383 much nicer. We have some time, so we jump off and get some fresh bread. But we were not fooled by how it nice it looked today. The top 10 cm of the ground that thaws out in the summer, soon freezes over in the winter with temperatures that drop to as low as -60ºC. Just 700 km from here (a short distance in Siberia), the town of Olekminsk holds the not enviable world record for the greatest temperature range: -60ºC to +45ºC. Not sure if the temperature range had anything to do with it, but this was the home of a strange Christian sect that saw their salvation in abstinence and castrated themselves to be sure of going to heaven.
Ksenevskaya - 1230/0630 - KM 6,789/2,500 is a small station, but with a very large and grand monument in front of the station building. We have lunch on the train and watch the countryside slowly roll by. There are many small villages and the houses have huge stacks of firewood already built up around them. They must be getting ready for the harsh winter to come. It was certainly tough to build the train track around here - throughout much of the year the ground had to be thawed out with huge bonfires before the track could be laid. We had a short stop in Zilovo - 1435/0835 - KM 6,670/2,619, looked like a nice, small town to us, but must not have been nice for the 2,500 convicts who toiled under horrible conditions to work the gold mines that were the property of the Tsar.
There are many small hamlets around here and we have a cup of tea (it is now 2:45 in the afternoon) as we watch the wooden huts and fenced in fields pass us by. About an hour later we have a long stop in Chernyshevsk-Zabaikalski - 1600/1000 - KM 6,670/2,696, so we get out and check out the vendors on the platform. We pick up a few snacks and have a look at the monument in front of the station. We also run to the top of the bridge passing over the train tracks and linking the various platforms. We have no need to hurry. The engine has been removed - they must be changing it. At this stop we discover that they do not allow the sale of vodka on the train and at the stations - very un-Russian, but a good idea. Must keep down the number of drunks on board.
After this station we notice that the terrain has certainly begun to change. As we are passing by so slowly, it is some times hard to notice the subtle, but gradual changes that are taking place. We are passing by rolling hills with green meadows and birch forests. We are now traveling alongside a river - we believe it must be the Shilka River. Shortly after we have a brief stop at Kuenga - 1730/1130 - KM 6,532/2,757 (with a large, modern station building), we pass by KM 6,511 where an abandoned white church and a couple of other buildings sit on a clearing on a bend in the river. In the afternoon sun, it is a beautiful sight.
We have a brief stop in Priiskavaya - 1810/1210 - KM 6,496/2,793, a run-down town with a couple of interesting two story wooden buildings. This is the station that serves the mining town of Nerchinsk, where the treaty of that name was signed in 1689 that handed over control of the Amur region to the Chinese. The Russians did not regain control of the Russian Far East until 170 years later. We have dinner (instant noodles) in our compartment before the next brief stop at Shilka - 1855/1255 - KM 6,446/2,843, a town with nice wooden homes and a small blue wooden church with silver domes.
Our last two stops of the night before we head off to sleep are, first, at Karymskaya - 2132/1532 - KM 6,293/2,996, where we have a long stop to fill up the water tanks and then at Darasun - 2230/1630 - KM 6,265/3,024, which has a nice wooden station building painted green with red trim. In between these two stations, we enjoy a nice sunset with a red glow on the southern side of the valley and it's trees.
30 July, 2003
Today is our last day on this train - we will be arriving in Irkutsk in the afternoon, where we will change to our train for Mongolia. While getting up to go and visit the toilet, we stop at Petrovski Zavod - 0700/0100 - KM 5,784/3,505, a grand station but with no platforms. The ironworks factory here was built by the Decembrists and there is a huge monument and memorial for them in front of the station building. Soon after we leave the station, and as we are snoozing, we pass through another time zone and are now Moscow Time + 5 hours.
As we are having our breakfast in our compartment, the lady from the dining car comes by on her regular rounds pushing a small cart in front of her as she cries out what wares she has available for sale. As usual, she looks and acts like she is in a foul mood. Never have seen her sell anything. The number of wooden buildings with gardens that line the tracks is increasing, and they all have stacks and stacks of firewood and hay surrounding them. Once again, we are reminded of what the winters must be like around here.
At 10:25 AM we get our first glimpse of Lake Baikal. It is huge and we pass along it for a good portion of the remainder of our journey to Irkutsk. We do not make many stops this morning. Lunch is in our compartment and at around 1:30 PM it begins to rain. The next stop is at Slyudyanka 1 - 1405/0906 - KM 5,312/3,977, which is just on Lake Baikal. Here are there are dozens of vendors who carry their wares and run from car to car. The problem is that they all seem to be selling smoked fish - that is it, just smoked fish. And they seem desperate to sell. This is the first time we have seen the vendors so pushy. It is only to late, just as we are about to leave, that we notice a couple of people selling strawberries. We have no time to buy any. The stop is shorter that scheduled - the train is running late.
It is now time to pack our bags and get ready for our arrival in Irkutsk. We have some tea and finish off the rest of our vodka as we wait. We arrive in Irkutsk - 1605/1105 - KM 5,185/4,104, over 4,000 km away from Vladivostok, and grab our bags and leave our home for the last few days. On the platform we are met by the agent who has arranged our train tickets for us. We head over to the station building, where we set up a small base. We sit down and go through the rest of our plans for the trip. He has the tickets for next legs and we have to pay him for them. We also discuss our plans in Irkutsk, where we will spend some time after our trip to Mongolia. We then just hang around and wait for our next train that will take us to Mongolia.