In Which You get to Spend 30 of the 48 Hours on the Train With Me

12 and 13 June

It was late on the afternoon of 12 June as we lugged our belongings onto the train and shuffled down the narrow corridor to our cabins. Because we’d decided to keep the same groups in each compartment, getting ourselves in place and our bags stowed took less time than on the previous two trips. We had clearly developed a system. We settled in and watched as the taiga rolled past our windows.

One common denominator of the provisioning process was that at some point we had all purchased several containers of noodles. You know the kind: just add hot water and voila! dinner. This is a wonderful purchase when you’re travelling as we were and in countries where not only is the spoken language unfamiliar but the written language can be equally cryptic. Noodles are easy to carry, easy to prepare, and the contents usually easy to identify by the box illustrations. Tonight, although we’d provisioned with fancier fare – cheeses, breads, nuts, cans of spicy tuna and octopus – we had a long journey ahead so we decided to have a noodle party for dinner. Erin and Lu joined the four of us in our cabin and we slurped away as we swapped our impressions of the trip to date.

A few hours after dinner, I heard some raucous laughter from the cabin next door and popped in to investigate. It turned out that after a bit of language confusion yesterday the women decided that Ana was going to learn a word a day in English. As I understood what had happened yesterday, the confusion arose over Erin’s use of the term ‘chicks’ to refer to the four of them. Perhaps a bottle of wine had been opened but this somehow devolved into a lesson about the proper pronunciation of ‘cork’. Lu’s accent makes it sound closer to ‘cock’ especially as she’s using the ‘r’-less Aussie dialect of Rose and Erin as her standard. I wasn’t present for any of that discussion but it was clear that raunchiness and hilarity ensued.

Tonight’s discussion was sponsored by the letter ‘F’ triggered when a man walked by their compartment and blasted a fart that, according to Rose, would have killed the proverbial canary. The Aussie pronunciation, akin to ‘faht’ became closer to ‘fight’ when Lu’s Brazilian accent was layered on top of that. Of course, the conversation turned to providing some more politely euphemistic terminology – passing gas, breaking wind, and the like. Aussies also use the term ‘fluff’. At this point I chimed in noting that none of them should try using this term in the States because it would be meaningless at best or seriously misinterpreted as a reference to the pornography industry at worst. In a funny, funny twist, Ana – whose English has improved but is still significantly less fluent than Lu’s – understood my explanation of a fluffer’s job before Lu grasped it.

We (our group not the train) ran out of power at about 23:00 when we were a mere six hours into our forty-eight-hour journey. Sleep will bring us a few hours closer to the end point and sometime during the night we will lose the first of the three hours on this leg of the journey. Fall back.

I should note that we are now officially on the Trans-Siberian rather than the Trans-Mongolian route. We are on our first Russian carriage or ВАГОН (wagon). This train is newer than its Mongolian and Chinese counterparts. It’s a bit more nicely appointed with wood colored Formica wall paneling. Thankfully, this train has ПРОВОДНЙКАС (provodnikas or conductors) so the toilets are reasonably clean. The biggest trade off is its use of an air circulation system the prevents opening any windows. This means that the carriage can get warm and stuffy during the longer stops when the engine isn’t running and that all our photos

Are likely to be subject to window dirt and glare. C’est la vie.

I’ve skipped ahead and it’s about 22:00 on 13 June and still light enough for me to write. Unfortunately, there’s very little to write about today. Even meeting a chap from the Netherlands and two young women about Erin’s age from the UK one of whom is matriculating at the University of Chicago in the fall has added little spark to the day. These folks were neither as willing to talk nor as interesting as Stefane and Iulian. At this point we’ve been on the train for about thirty hours. Anytime we have a stop that is longer than a few minutes we race off the train en masse for ten to fifteen minutes of fresh air and free movement. Eighteen hours remain until our arrival in Ekaterinburg.

I was up and stirring about at 06:30 which was 07:30 on my body clock because we changed time zones overnight. I snapped a few photos and finished my notes for yesterday’s long entry. The landscape is simultaneously monotonous and varied. The particular configurations of small hovel filled hamlets

long green and brown plains with a sprinkling of wildflowers

(these are yellow sometimes they’d be orange, white, or purple) and stands of silver birch and spruce trees

are all unique but the day has passed looking at mile after mile of hovel filled hamlets, long green and brown plains with a sprinkling of wildflowers and stands of silver birch and spruce.  You can see all those exciting photos and a preview of landscape across the Urals in this album.

It’s official. At some point between Irkutsk and Yekatrinburg (where we’ll soon arrive) the Siberian landscape became an “ooh-ahh.” I’ll explain: When I was on safari in Kruger Park in South Africa last year, among the first animals we saw was a herd of impalas. Everyone got excited, grabbed their cameras, and snapped away. Our guide told us that she and many of the other guides refer to impalas as “ooh-ahhs” because initially everyone reacts as we did – they “ooh” and take lots of pictures. She assured us that impalas would be so ubiquitous that even by the end of the first day, an impala sighting wouldn’t prompt anyone to even remove the lens cap from their cameras. Our reaction would be, “Ahh, they’re only impalas.” Hence, “ooh-ahhs.”

As we closed in on Ekaterinburg, no one was standing at the windows. Cameras had been all but forgotten and, for those that hadn’t, the lens caps remained in place thereby conferring official “ooh-ahh” status on the silver birch and spruce forests, the wildflowers, and the hamlets. 

The train keeps chugging along. The countryside passes by and I begin to think we’re actually trapped on a model train set. (Damn you, Rod Serling!) We read. We doze. We chat a bit from time to time. We eat. We take an occasional photo. And, of course, we jump off the train at every opportunity. And echoes of Kenny Rogers singing “The Gambler” pop into my head with alarming frequency. In truth, most of the day I’ve had little inkling of the time and, in some respects, that’s made this the most relaxing day of the trip.

Before I sign off, here’s a bedtime story: I told you earlier that over 300 rivers and streams flow into Lake Baikal but only one, the Angara, flows out. The Angara flows north before turning sharply west to meet with the Yenisei before flowing into the East Siberian Sea:

The Buryat, who are the largest group of indigenous people in Siberia, have a legend about this. There is a large stone near the southern end of Lake Baikal called the Shaman Rock and it is a sacred place to the Buryat. In the Buryat legend, Baikal is the father of 330 daughters who were mountain rivers and streams. All but one daughter was happy to be near her father. This daughter was Angara who fell in love with a great warrior river – Yenisei. Angara wanted to marry Yenisei but her father forbade it. One night while Baikal slept, Angara broke free. However, she was too noisy and woke her father. In his anger, he threw a large rock to try to stop her but his actions were in vain and Angara joined the warrior river to the west. The rock remained where it was and can still be seen today.

Good night, all.