12 Feb 2009 The Traveler Series: Trans Siberian Part One – Utter Mayhem!

The Traveler Series today features David Rogers’s Trains-Siberian chronicles.

David Rogers loves traveling, and loves writing about it. He’s been blogging for quite some time now, on his “Last train to Lhasa“, a travel blog where he talks about his trips to Scandinavia, Russia and Asia. Here’s the first of two parts of his chronicles of the Trans-Siberian trip he took in 2007.

December 21st, 2007 – I arrived at the Moscow train station at about 8.30pm to meet my two Aussie friends, the ones I met in Tallinn. After an endless queue to get my train tickets (I booked over the internet) we went to the platform and watched our train being shunted in backwards.

We soon made ourselves comfortable and as the train moved off, we cracked open the Vodka in our compartment. I was at the Russian end of the train and Nick and Chez were in the Chinese end, sharing their compartment with Kiwi Henny and Polish Mihail who I had met in the wonderful Hostel Comrade.

I was sharing my compartment with three Russians who got off the next morning. It was not long before a rough looking Russian called Alan from the next compartment made himself known to us. Alan had just finished a fourteen year prison sentence for knifing someone to death and was returning to his home town, Magadan in Eastern Russia.

Myself and Nick got dragged into his compartment for some more Vodka and to share his food which consisted of some bread, some cheese and some sort of feathered beast’s leg which had no doubt been dispatched to the great hen house in the sky by his own fair hands.

It wasn’t long before Alan was Vodka’d up and started to get pretty scary. Whilst ( was passing through the bar car, he demanded I drink Vodka with him. He had grabbed my coat in a vice like grip and would not let go for love nor money.

The scary and starey eyed bar man had no interest in helping me out and found the scenario to his great amusement.

Not wanting to offend the crazy bastard due to safety concerns, I ended up having three shots with him before managing to escape to the safety of my friend’s compartment.

Alan was persistent though. No matter how many ways we tried to lock the door, he managed to get in. He made several attempt to kiss my neck which is Russian tradition after Vodka apparently. He gave up in the end and went on the rampage elsewhere. Crazy Alan was not fucking about, he went on a forty eight hour Vodka binge and finally crashed out for twenty four hours and looked rather sheepish for the remainder of the journey.

We spent the first night in the bar with some more Westerners – six Swedes, an Englishman with a very posh upper class accent, an Irish guy called John and a Russian who claimed to have murdered two Chechnans – he was not very fond of Chechnans apparently. He was another that I though best not to offend in anyway, despite my lack of Chechnan characteristics.

The night was finished off with a snowball fight at a station we stopped at and then to Linnea, the Swedish girl’s first class cabin for a lot of drunken nonsense ranting.

There was snow lying deep in the countryside after leaving Moscow and for the rest of the journey. The days were spent looking out of the window at the frozen rivers and the snow covered pine trees. Transversing several time zones over land leaves you somewhat dazed and confused.

The whole journey is scheduled on Moscow time so you never really have any idea what time it is locally, how much daylight is left or what time you have got up or gone to bed or woken up. The days seem to meld together and stops are welcome so we could buy beer and food from the platform traders and get our feet on some solid ground. By day three we were starting to go pretty crazy.

The last full day I was on a bit of a downer because I had realised I would arrive in Irkutsk at 4am and had nowhere booked to stay which did not sound good to me. The main reason I was a going to Irkutsk was to obtain a Mongolian visa. I was as nervous as a whore in a church, to put it mildly.

A friendly Belarusian guy called Serge had a chat with the starey eyed bar man and it turned out I could stay on the train until Ulan Ube and get off the train at 1pm the next day (local time). The only problem with this was my ticket was only to Irkutsk so it would mean moving out of my cabin, saying farewell to the Russian carriage attendant and moving into a spare bed in the Chinese end of the train with Irish John and Sergio, which was not problem for them.

I had spent three days in the Chinese section of the train with my friends so I assumed the Chinese guys thought I was on that carriage anyway. They were pretty chilled out and probably didn’t care much that I was jumping the train ticketless.

This afternoon the train pulled into Ulan Ube and I said a sad farewell to my new friends and hailed a beat up old Lada to take me to the hotel. The taxi driver was another crazy guy who was not going to let the snow and the ice on the road put him off flooring the accelerator. I made the ten minute drive in one piece and he gave me his number in case I wanted to hire him again. I think I will probably not.

I am in a rather nice hotel which is not cheap so I may move to a flea pit tomorrow but having a decent shower after four days of train skankiness is worth it.

This afternoon I hung out in the town square practicing my Russian by chatting to the locals. I think I am the only foreigner in this small chilled town and all think I am crazy for coming to Siberia at this time of the year.

The square has a vast, sinister bust of Lenin’s head made of black granite (biggest in the world I believe) with icicles hanging from his nose and all around people are making huge ice sculptures of bridges and palaces, presumably for Christmas. It is -20c outside so any trips out have to be kept fairly short and to the point in order to avoid hyperthermia.

It is Saturday today (I think) and I am stuck here until Monday when the Mongolian consulate opens but there are worst places to be stuck. Hopefully this visa process will be smooth but if anything goes wrong I will get the Beijing train that does not go through Mongolia as my Russian visa expires soon and I don’t fancy much spending Christmas in a gulag. As it stands it looks like I will be spending Mongolia in Christmas which could be good!