HIGHTLIGHT OF THE DAY : Copying 1800 songs to iPod from Jesse and Julia ( a mix of Russian and Dutch songs to add some variety to my musical selection) and finally, FINALLY getting reception on my mobile phone for the first time since leaving home and texting with my best friend – gee I miss them……
BUYS OF THE DAY: The only thing to buy–dinner, which was delicious I might add -600 roubles - $20 AUD
WORD OF THE DAY: - always written phonetically – fgoovzna / delicious – horoshow / good
- Ya neit loobloo greebees – I don’t love mushrooms
Hands up who loves train travel!! If you don’t then this is NOT the trip for you. With 7983km of train track and 164 hour on the train – this would be a pretty long trip if you weren’t prepared for some down time. To give you an idea are the following travel times that we have done ( section 1-3 so far )
Section 1 – Beijing to Ulaan Bataar – 30 hours
Section 2 – Ulaan Baatar to Irktusk – 40 hours
Section 3 – Irktusk to Yekaterinburg – 54 hours
Section 4 – Yekaterinburg to Moscow – 26 hours
Section 5 – Moscow to St Petersburg – 14 hours
With 2 more sections to go, you would think that we would be sick of the train right? But we are all coping quite well and still enjoying the experience and each other as a matter of fact. As mentioned in the last post – it could be a long 3 weeks if you have the proverbial pain in the arse on a trip like this. We have been super lucky.
So what do we do on the train all day? It is amazing how fast time flies. The longer journeys have been night time departures, so by the time you settle in and get organized, it is bed time and 10 hours has passed by the time you wake up the next day. So even though it sounds a long time, there are a lot of sleep-able hours included. We chat, we drink tea, we eat, we chat, we drink tea, we eat, we sleep, we chat, we drink tea, we eat, we sleep, we chat, we drink tea – anyone see a re-occurring pattern here? By the time all that has happened its dinner time and we head to the dining car – to yes eat! We have bought cards, dominoes and a crap board between us and to be honest we have not bought any of that stuff out. We are all readers, so when we go for the compulsory nana nap in the afternoon, we read, some iPods come out, it’s down time and then we all stir and then the same routine happens again. We chat, we drink tea, we eat, we chat, we drink tea, we eat, we sleep, we chat, we drink tea, we eat, we sleep, we chat, we drink tea – what a life.
We are getting quite organized with the food situation on the trains. We always get to a supermarket before we head to the station to buy supplies. Water, snacks, vodka’s, toilet paper and the last 2 sections we have smartened up and bought on our own breakfasts. There has always been a dining car on each section, so if you didn’t want to lug an extra bag of food on the train, meals are served between certain times there – it can be a little costly, and I use this term loosely as a 2 course main meal and a beer will cost you $20 – still not bad in the western world – but costly in the Russian world apparently. My breakfasts have consisted of crusket equivalents, cream cheese ( similar to laughing cow cheese – keeps well with no fridge ) and a few almonds. Lunch is noodle bowls, as there is always hot water available at the end of each carriage and then we splurge on dinner and dine in the dining car. Tea is a big commodity on the trains. I have NEVER been a tea or coffee drinker, but the first train we were on was FREEZING ( an ice box on wheels ) and I had tea to warm up and I haven’t looked back since. At the age of 36, I can now sit down with a book in my hand and sip my tea ( green or earl grey seems to be the fav of the moment ) and just watch the snow covered landscape pass me by. What have I been missing all this time?
I guess the most asked question is what are the toilets like on the train. There is a toilet at the end of each carriage. Depending on the trains, they sometimes differentiate between a men’s and a woman’s toilet but generally they are unisex. There is approx. 36 people to a carriage, so 36 people using the same toilets – I guess when you put it out like that – it doesn’t seem too bad. BUT a public toilet is a public toilet and yes they can get pretty gross by the time the 40 hour journey comes to end. You generally have to roll the bottom of your pants up, as you don’t want anything touching that floor, toilet paper is all gone and usually the hand soap is also gone. All these factors also depend on your cabin steward, as to how receptive they are to the cleanliness of the cabin and toilet in general. The first 2 trains we noticed that they kept one toilet locked, and if you paid money, then this toilet ‘could’ become available ( if you get my drift ). We learnt this lesson, so for this train ( 3rd section ), we loaded up our stewardess with chocolate and found it has not helped one iota. Oh well we put our hat in the ring and didn’t gain anything. I guess at the end of the day, when you gotta go you just gotta go, no matter on the condition of the toilet. We have had a few of our people jump a few carriages to get a better cleaned toilet and we always BYO toilet paper so we are not left ‘ hanging’. The toilets are closed during station stops, for the obvious reason that the waste is deposited directly onto the tracks, so when it is stationary I guess they don’t want a whole pile of s@#t left on the tracks when we pull out. Understandable.
Dress standard for the trains is comfort. No fancy pancy clothes when you are sitting down for long periods. There is probably the largest group of tracky dack travellers in one area at one time on the trains. It is funny as the carriages are all heated, we are all stripped down to t-shirts and the Russians are in shorts ( some in wife beaters ), you would think it was summer in here, but when the train stops and the smokers want to get off it is quite a sight to see people out there in their ‘summer’ garb when it is 2C outside and coming out of their winter there is a lot of very white ‘chicken legs’ prancing around out there!!!!!
The only other thing that differs on the Irktusk to Yekaterinburg train ( now being 100% Russian train ) is the time difference has confused the hell out of us all. All Russian trains, no matter where you are travelling to and from ( Russia has 11 time zones ), as long as you are in Russia on the Russian train network it will always be operating on Moscow time. Well that doesn’t seem so confusing right? Well to give you an idea, we left Irktusk at 7.10pm local time, which is 2.10pm Moscow time. We arrive into Yekaterinburg at 5.15pm local time, which is 8.15pm Irktusk time and is 3.15pm Moscow time. So what the hell time do we run on when we are on the train. We have decided to do the destination time, for time keeping purposes and once we did that we realized we are on the train an additional 6 hours than planned – but we have enough tea and snacks to get us through – so it was no worries – but when we changed our clocks back 3 hours it made our bed time from midnight to 9pm – it really felt like we were travelling in the twilight zone.
Welcome to the world of train travel – and we are having a ball. If you ever had an inkling to do the Trans Mongolian – I would highly rate the experience and urge you to make a booking. I would have loved to have done the whole trip, which is the original journey from Vladivostok to St Petersburg, which is an additional 7 days, but time was an issue for me, and as much as I enjoyed the train could I do an additional week? Hmmmmmm – let me ponder that.
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