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| Me, Bold and Johanna in our cabin |
| My carriage all the way to Ulaanbaatar |
| Lenin, Omsk Station |
| 11pm. 28 June. I get a ride to Yaroslavl Station in Moscow. There has been a huge thunderstorm causing flash flooding on the roads. My driver doesn't seem to care. We run red lights, pull u-turns on dual carriageways arriving at the station 45 minutes early. I wonder what the rush is. When I reach the platform I see why. Train loads of kid soldiers are being sent south to Chechnya. Guards stand around nervously fidgeting with their machine guns. And on the plataform for the trans-siberian train; absolute mayhem. Huge queues of Russians arguing furiously with Mongolian traders whose carts were laden with baggage the size of your average dacha. So my driver, taking no prisoners, barges his way thru' enabling me to clamber onto the train and into my berth. Forget any images you might have of the "Trans-Siberian Express", all wood panelling and comfy chairs. This was a working train. A vital trade route for the cities of Siberia. Because of the volume of commerce being carried out, the carpets had been removed, leaving functional formica. Sharing my cabin was an Australian girl, Johanna, on her way to college in Mongolia, adn getting on a couple of hours later at Danilov, a Mongolian trader called Bold. The train left Moscow around midnight, and crossed the Volga a few hours later. In the morning refreshed by the hot, black Russian tea the provodnitsas brought round we arrived in Kirov, the first major stop after Moscow. Here we got to witness the traders in action for the first time. The station was packed. A huge crowd of people were waiting for our train to arrive, Some had come to sell fresh food to the passengers. But most had come to buy not to sell. The range and number of goods for sale was incredible: t-shirts, table lamps, flasks, tupperware, motorcycle parts, rugs, bales of cloth, boots and adidas sportsware. We only stopped in Kirov for 10 minutes, so trade was "brisk". Soon we were 1000km from Moscow. Passing thru' the Autonomous Republic of Urdmurtia me and Johanna decided to check out the restaurant car. Here we met the handful of other westerners on the train, bought some beers and played cards. The food available was "limited" and for us veggies consisted of dry black bread and cheese. .Luckily when we stopped at Perm I managed to buy some savoury potato donuts on the platform. As we started to climb into the Urals it began to get dark. It never got truely dark however. Even at midnight we had a kind of twilight because we were so far North. This coupled with crossing a time zone everyday really screwed up my body clock. In the restaurant car, Ole (a musician from Sweden) had brought his guitar, we had been joined by the Mongolian traders, and many bottles of vodka arrived, and you know the ettiquette in Russia with open vodka bottles.... So, more and more drunk , the singing got more and more raucous and eventually climaxed with teaching the Mongolians the actions to "YMCA" by The Village People (an idea for which I am truely, truely sorry!). I somehow staggered back to my cabin, amazingly negotiating the gaps between carriages, though it took the intervention of some Mongolian children to convince that the door I was desperately trying to open didn't lead to my carriage but was in fact the end of the train.... |