World Adventure

Hi All,

We read in a guide book that travelling on the trans siberian train is one of the 'famous and romantic and potentially enjoyable of the worlds great train journeys' ...

A bit of a description of the train. The train is divided into carriages which each have two attendants who are called Provodnitskas who check tickets on the way onto the train, clean the carriage and toilets, lock the toilets at stations, open and close the doors at stations, round people up who have gotten off on longer breaks at stations, keep the hot water urn full, run the heating system and finally find you and let you know when to get off the train.

The carriage is divided into 9 lockable compartments which contain and upper and lower bed on either side of the sliding entrance door. There is also a 2 bed compartment in the carriage which is used by the provodnitskas. There is a hallway about 800mm wide that connects the compartments to the toilets and external doors. The beds are about 600mm wide and 1900mm long with the lower beds doubling as seats during the day. Each bunk has a roll out mat, a pillow, a blanket. The provodnitka provideds the sheets for each bed. Each bed has a reading lamp on the back wall and there also is a main light for the compartment. There also is a small ladder for climbing onto the upper bed but this is inconvenient as it inconveniences the person in the lower bunk. The space under the lower bunks is divided in half with and enclosed section closest to the door and the rest unenclosed.There is a window with curtains on the opposite side of the compartment and a mirror on the back of the entrance door. Above the entrance door is a luggage storage compartment as wide as the cabin and about 250mm and 1200mm deep. The space between the beds is about 600 mm and there is a small collapsible table underneath the window that is about 400mm wide and protrudes 700mm. Underneath is a heater. So it is a tight squeeze with 4 people travelling together.

There is no 220V power in the compartments but there are 2 outlets in the hallway but the provodnitska only allows the use of one.        

The single toilets are located either end of the carriage so with a full carriage there are 38 people utilising the services. There is a notice on the outside of the door indicating which stations that the toilet will be locked and for how long before and after. Not particularly useful unless you have an idea of what time the train arrives at the stations on the list. There is a list of the train timetable from start to final destination with times, in moscow time, stopping at stations and length of stop. This can then be cross referenced to the toilet closing list to get the times when the toilet will be open and closed. Very useful information as sometimes the train stops for 40 minutes and the time before and after is 30 minutes so the toilet can be out of action for 100 minutes and that is assuming that you are first in line when it re-opens.

There is also a dining carriage on the train and it is accessed by walking through other carriages to reach it. It is only for eating. Not sitting and talking.

Random entry. We met an Australian girl staying at the same hostel in Moscow and she had had problems getting out of Poland with her passport. Why? She had written in pen on each countries immigration stamp the countries name so that she could identify them when she got back to Australia. Not a good idea. On the inside rear cover of the Australian passport it says 'you may enter personal particulars on the notice page and alteration to any other part may make the passport invalid and may make you subject to prosecution.'

The weather had been remarkably warm on our last day at kazan and it was -4 deg C during the day and had even been sleeting and raining. This is not a good scenario as the snow melts and then refreezes as ice as the temperature drops overnight. So when we left the hotel we instantly found that the surface was covered with slippery ice which was not good when carrying large backpacks, daypacks, water and food for the trip. It was even worse at the station and the walk along the platform to the train was treacherous. Not only was the platform covered with ice but the enthusiastic and inconsiderate russians rushing to the train were bumping into us from behind.  

We were met by the provodnitka at our carriage which did have numbering in the windows this time who wished to check our passports against the tickets in the poorly lit platform before allowing us to get on the train. We had already devised a plan of action for unloading and storing our gear and were delighted when there was noone in the compartment when we arrived so it gave us time to get organised. Now keeping the description of the compartment in mind. Our tickets were setup so that we had the upper and lower bunks on one side of the compartment. Vanessa went straight into the compartment putting the smaller packs on the lower bunk while still having her larger pack on her back. I also half entered the compartment and put my smaller bags onto the lower bunk then assisted Vanessa with taking off her backpack and threw it up onto the upper bunk then Vanessa got out  of the way so that I could drop my backpack and then put it onto the upper bunk. Then we removed any items such as sandals for walking around the train from the larger packs before standing on the lower bunks to get access to the upper storage area. It was quite a shove to get the large backpacks into the area but I managed to secure them safely and left about 1/3 of the space free. Then we moved the gear from the lower bunk to the upper bunk and raised up the lower bunk to access the enclosed storage space where there was just enough space to put the day packs and our large winter coats. The rest of the space was for food, water and our boots which were replaced by sandals and slippers during the trip. Organised!

There was noone else in the compartment until the first stop about 3hr later where we met Rafkhat and Dinor, a father and son, returning to work at a gas production plant. They shared the compartment for the next 24hrs. Dinor spoke some english but his father only spoke Russian so it was slow going communication and I wished that we had purchased a russian-english dictionary as it would have been much easier to find the words that often had to be drawn or described. Rafkhat was generous and shared his food with me. Vanessa wasn't so keen to try the horse meat sausage or salami but both tasted fine. I declined on the beer on offer. It is a tradition that you share the food that you have with the others in the compartment but neither Russians were interested in our fast food noodles and soup when I tried to reciprocate. It was a pleasant but frustrating experience and I got a bit of Russian language training along the way.

When they left the train their beds were taken by a 'barbie' female russian and a 'grumpy bear' male russian who spoke no english. We were happy with our previous experience so decided to just share the compartment but not try and communicate other than offering our food. We kept to ourselves for most of the time but repsected each others space and it worked. Barbie slept for most of the time and the bear filled in his crossword puzzles while we read and listened to music or watched movies in between getting hot water for our noodles and eating our manderines.

The language was frustrating. The provodnitkas did not speak any english and neither anyone else it seemed in the carriage. We were quite isolated in that sense so it was good that we had each other. We seemed to be the only westerners in our carriage and probably on the entire train

Many hours were spent just looking out the window of the train. Sometime in the compartment and other times in the hallway with other travellers.

We slept quite well at night despite the train noise. The train rocked and rolled, creaked and groaned and the constant click of the wheels on the joins of the railway tracks was relaxing. Even the loud banging of the wheels at stations by the maintenance workers wasn't enough to disturb us too much.

It was fascinating to look at the small villages along the way with some with more than 500mm snow cover on the house roofs. Some of the buildings were beautifully carved and often just the window sills were painted with the rest of the wood natural. the colour was generally light green, the colour of hope or melancholy blue. I was surprised that the forest was not as dense as I expected and it seemd to be patches of wood but perhaps this was as it was near to the train line and therefore more accessible.

The further we got into Siberia the deeper the snow cover became and it was dry. When the wind blew the snow was just blown around like talcum powder and formed drifts.

The russians seem to spend a lot of time managing the snow. Wherever we stopped there was always someone sweeping the snow or shovelling it into piles.

There was a superb sunset one evening. The sun was so clear and the sunset went apricot and pink then as the sun got closer to the horizon which had a small village in the foreground the sun became orange and had a blurring halo. There was no wind outside. The train was not going to stop

There was a bit of a time lag travelling to Irkutsk with a 5 hour time difference over 3 days. As we were travelling west to east we were losing time and we had to adjust our sleeping pattern as we changed into each zone.

We knew that the temperature outside was quite cold as ice was growing on the metal sections of the window during the day. Overnight the inside of the window froze. The temperature progressively dropped on the journey and it had reached -28 deg C by the time we arrived at Irkutsk.

There were 1km markers along the way and I was just able to catch the distance numbers by pressing my face against the compartment window and looking sideways. This allowed us to determine our location and measure the speed of the train as we travelled by measuring the time between markers. No we were not bored. The speed of the train for that section was 75km/h.We covered 4365 km between Kazan and Irkutsk in 68 hrs on the train and up to this point had travelled 5835 km from St Petersburg not including the side trips to the cities of the gold ring towns.

The trip went remarkably quick and we feel that we could have travelled the complete trans siberian railway of 7 days in a continous journey without much effort. We were met at Irkutsk at 331am by an english speaking agent who was glad we were dressed for the cold and then took us to our hotel. The agent gave us our train ticket for Chita to Harbin and an explanation. We had a quick check in and the hotel was quite nice. It was still nice to have a shower after the trip.

Bye,
David and Vanessa