Trans Siberian Travel report, Part 2

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Departure from Beijing

Unfortunately the time to leave Beijing had come. On these two pictures you can see the VIVA group waiting in Beijing station.

Quite amazing are the Polish loaded with shopping goods. Due to a treaty between China & Poland it's possible for Polish citizens to buy a very cheap train ticket to Beijing & back and you have to see it to believe how much luggage they can stow away in one train compartment.

De trein

As I mentioned before; I didn't take the Tans Siberian but the Trans Manchurian express. I had to because the Trans Siberian passes above China to the North & heads for the coast from where you can take a boat to Japan. From Chita onwards the routes are the same for both trains (my travel agency also advertised with the name Trans Siberian but in the detailed information they corrected themselves). One train carrige consists of 9 compartments, which take 36 people in total. Per carriage there are no less then 2 conductors (called provodniks).

There is another route from Beijing to Moscow called the Trans Mongolia express that crosses the length & breath of Mongolia (which will not come as a surprise). The picture you see here is not of this train; I took it from the train somewhere in the depth of Siberia. It's a nice thing that this picture gets downloaded very often.

A stop at a station in the North of China; the atmosphere is more serene then Beijing.

Border crossing China/Russia

The border crossing between China & Russia wasn't too difficult, the only formality was to fill in a form and that was it. Interesting is that the rail tracks are a different size in China & Russia; so they lift the carriages & drop them again on a different underframe. (The same thing happened at the Polish border) Some smartass found it necessary to hide some Hashish in the toilet, which caused a lot of delay. (In a way it was clever enough, as the owner couldn't be traced)

The first stop after the border crossing China/Russia; a few cows are "grazing" around. A funny sight for a country boy like myself: you would imagine cows are supposed to graze in a barbed wire enclosed meadow, not on a station.

4 days in the train through Siberia
What is really striking in Russia is the shadow business (black market). In the evening the cook passes with a little basket full of Russian Champagne, caviar and other luxury goods which he tries to sell for $$$ (Dollars are much in demand). This is all the more surprising as this same cook uses low-grade products for preparing the meals.
In small stations you often see an assembly on the platform and if you go and look what's happening it often turns out that somebody is selling something. In Moscow too I saw a lot of corruption, but I'll get to that later.

A small minus is the criminality in the train; a lot of things got stolen, after hearing a lot of sad stories we agreed with the compartment next to us that somebody would remain there at all times, specially if we had a stop somewhere.

I was talking to a Russian man who was driving to the airport on the morning of the coup. He saw lots of tanks around but at that point; he didn't know what was happening. He left by plane to a little town in the middle of nowhere and only found out what had happened in Moscow two days later. While we found out the same morning from an extra news edition.

The view was wonderful, huge birch forests in a hilly landscape, full of different colors because autumn had set in. The little villages with their wooden houses look very charming, although it must not be so pleasant here in winter.

Parties
The nice thing about this journey is that after a few days the whole train becomes one big family, you talk with a lot of different people, with a lot of different nationalities, you drink a cup of coffee with them and they come and drink coffee with you. This homely atmosphere is even stronger because everybody chooses comfortable clothes to travel & runs around in pajama's and track suites.
The parties are very nice (I drank more alcohol in six days then the previous six months) because of the different nationalities these parties have something "extra". At one point we were 10 persons in our compartment from 5 different countries: China, Russia, UK, Germany and Holland. The German was carrying a guitar and didn't play too badly but when the Russians took over the instrument they made it sound fantastic, the whole carriage trouped into our compartment to listen. Later it turned out that this Russian man played in a band in Moscow, so that's why he played so well.
So these were very nice evenings that started with Chinese beer and ended with Korean vodka and all the in between!

You're 4 people to a compartment, I was sharing with 3 persons from the VIVA group, and they were nice company. As you are forced to spend six days together in the closed confinement of the little compartment the company is quite important. Later I started talking to a Dutch girl who had traveled around China on her own for 2 months and had a good time, but now she was stuck with 3 English guys that had beer for breakfast so that wasn't all that nice.

Famous neighbor

In the compartment next to ours we met a soccer player ex Spartak but now in his old age playing with a Chinese team. This figure was a celebrity for all Chinese on the train. When the Russian next to us started playing his guitar (he was courting a VIVA girl) all Chinese came to watch.

Restaurant car

Food in the train: until the Chinese border the restaurant car was Chinese and the food was perfect. From the Russian border onwards they changed it for a Russian one. Well, everybody has heard stories about the food situation in Russia and according to our Western standards it was pretty poor, but even a poor meal can taste OK once you leave your Western ideas behind, then you end up with a homely meal. This homeliness is in part because everybody joins everybody else as every table has 4 places.
If you convert the cost of the meal into Western currency it's quite a joke: soup, salad, a piece of meat, potatoes and vegetables cost the equivalent of 0,75$. Another luxury is that every carriage has it's own samovar (hot water kettle), so you can always make yourself an instant soup, coffee or cup of tea. On every stop you can buy something in the local station sometimes the only way to define it is something edible. But don't let that spoil the fun.

A wonderful sight was riding along the Baikal Lake for over 4 hours. It's a "small" lake but still bigger then Holland. Very impressive indeed.... My travel guide mentioned that the lake reaches a depth of over 2000m; that's VERY deep!

Part 3