K263, Russia!

(Please back date to 2/14/13)


Happy Valentine’s Day! I walked from the hostel with my luggage (a large, black, North Face duffel bag that I can wear as a backpack, and a small black backpack that I use for my camera, and a Swedish blue and yellow Ikea shopping bag embroidered with the Chinese symbol for new year that I use to keep my train stuffs in: food, wetknaps, vitamins, coffee, etc.) to Sasher’s for one last meal of Russian goulash and a pint of Chinggis Khan Beer and to buy a loaf of bread for the train ride. This is the one train leg of the Trans-Siberian that has no dining car so 36 hours of food must be brought along with you.

Then I walked the 3km from Sasher’s to the train station (or воксал, voksal, a word appropriated into Russian after the famous Vauxhall Station in London) where I met up with another two Aussie travelers I had met the last night at the hostel. Shaun and Karen, a couple from Brisbane, had just gotten into UB after a week long adventure through Tajilk NP by dogsled. They had been traveling the world for over two years after selling off some decent property investments in Australia. The three of us sat down and rested, waiting for the train in a small cafeteria-style restaurant in the station waiting hall. We ate a few Mongolian meat pies while at the next table over, a very drunk Mongolian man made gestures at Shaun with his hands, swaying in his seat, to indicate something like, “you, me, outside, let’s fight, eh?” Shaun is a big Aussie and just shook his head to indicate that he didn’t want to and then went back to eating dumplings. The drunken Mongolian also looked in my direction and I politely declined the offer.

Ulaanbaatar - Irkutsk

We hopped the train thirty minutes or so before departure. This train is a little older looking than the last train I took out of Beijing: no imbedded television monitors, no electrical outlets, no automatic samovar (just a steam kettle - but it works) and no compartment to myself. My cabin mates are two Mongolian guys in their twenties, transporting boxes of Mongolian goods to Irkutsk. They have a case of Arkhi, Mongolian vodka, and various boxes of Mongolian dry goods. They don’t speak English so conversation isn’t really happening. But in any case it was late and we all slept pretty quickly.

The train rolled to a stop around 5AM, in a small station near the Russian border called Suche Bator and we sat here at this station until about 11AM. I woke up around 7 and, realizing the train had stopped, understood that the doors to the bathroom would be locked. I put on my coat and hat, and stepped off the train onto the platform. The light was just coming up over the snowy hills and I looked around the deserted station and then back at the train. It was just my car, isolated, sitting on the tracks by itself without any other cars, or an engine, nearby. You could see the steam bellowing from the stack above the door. Puzzled, I walked to the bathroom on the platform and brushed my teeth. I came back to the platform and found other puzzled passengers (foreign ones) looking around as well as if to say, “Where did the rest of our train go?” I took some photos and then went back aboard and patiently waited in the warmth of my cabin.

Our lonely train car

Around 10, an immigration officer came aboard to collect our passports and customs papers while the three of us stepped out of our cabins so that another official, in camouflage, could take a look around. This one was more thorough but all was well. We got our passports back thirty minutes later, reconnected with an engine car, and rolled out of the station steaming towards Russia. We’re north of the Mongolian Steppe now. No more flat, rolling grasslands. We’ve entered the very southern portion of the Siberian Taiga, the largest evergreen forest in the world. Plains are slowly giving way to hills and frozen lakes, lined with huge, beautiful pine trees.

We eventually rolled across the border and slowed to a stop in a place called Naushki, another border station. Our car was again jolted into isolation and an entourage of military members came aboard and asked, in Russian, for everyone to return and remain in their compartments, and one by one they checked passports. In my compartment, third from the front, I was first approached by a Russian man in a police uniform donning a fur hat, Russian style. He asked the others if they were Mongolian, they said they were, then he asked me for my passport. He looked at me with a humorless expression, eyelids half covering his eyes, and flipped through each page repeating with a thick Russian accent, “veeza, veeza, veeza...” slowly trailing off until he found my visa. Satisfied, he moved on. Next, a large blonde woman with heavy blue eye makeup walked into the compartment and collected our passports. One by one she flipped open to the picture page, looked at us and back at the passport, then entered in some information in her digital notepad before stamping and returning it. This is the first time that all of the immigration process was taken care of onboard.

She moved on and a small, mousy woman in military overalls asked us to step out of the compartment while she poked around the seats and hopped up into the upper storage compartments. After a minute of poking around she left and we returned to our seats. Following her was a slow, fat man, a customs officer, who poked his head in and asked the Mongolians (who apparently do speak Russian) some questions. Then he made them open all of their bags and boxes, remove every item they owned while answering very thorough questions. They had to ruin their carefully taped boxes in the process. After he was satisfied with my Mongolian cabin mates, he turned to me, asked to take a look into my food bag, and, quickly satisfied, left to move on to the next cabin. Last to drop in was a man in a blue camouflage uniform with high, black boots, again asked us to step out, and led a dog in to sniff about the compartment. The dog was thorough but he too found nothing. The Russian officer gave us a, “spacebo”, and then we returned once again to our seats. After about another hour or so of this, the immigration officials were finally satisfied with the train car and we were able to get off and walk around the tracks and up to the small station. The Russians were not kidding around.

My compartment aboard K263

Naushki Station, border town in Russia

We first went to use the bathroom. We found the public restroom at the end of the platform and between the entrances to the men’s and women’s sides was a small office with a sliding window where a plump, Russian woman sat waiting to collect money. The privilege of using the restroom is worth 10 rubles (or about 30 cents) - 10 more than I had in my pocket. So I and three of the Aussies with me (the original four Aussies from the first train were on this train as well in addition to Shaun and Karen) wandered around the station looking for an ATM. We were directed into a waiting hall filled with soldiers. There was at least a hundred young recruits, probably awaiting a train to take them to some base, or home. They were decked out in uniform fur boots, green pants and jackets, and brown fur hats and each had a large, canvas rucksack. They all stared at us as we walked in towards the ATM. Luckily, we obtained rubles. The Aussies returned to the woman to pay her for the toilet, she smiled and refused them, explaining she couldn’t break the large bills the ATM gave them. I relieved myself behind a train.

We eventually got rolling again. What I hadn’t realized when I booked the tickets for the train is that this leg of the journey goes along one of the most beautiful stretches of Siberian taiga and the banks of Lake Baikal and is generally considered by travelers as the most attractive section of the trip. And we were going to pass all of this through the night. We left the Russian border in late afternoon, it was soon dark, and we won’t pull into the station in Irkutsk until about 7AM. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. Irkutsk tomorrow and then Lake Baikal soon afterward.