SO. I stumbled bleary-eyed off the train in central Siberia at 9.45am local time, having moved over a three day/four night period through time zones GMT+2 to GMT+8. So it was something like 4.45am in my poor, battered circadian rhythm, concealed in my poor, overstimulated brain.
There was a taxi waiting to transfer me to the hostel by Lake Baikal (vital statistics: biggest freshwater lake in the world, 20% of the world's freshwater, thousands of endemic animals, frozen over by ice 3m thick from December to March when you can drive/sled over it - but not build traintracks and transport coal over it, as they found out one winter recently.) Taxi driver was a cheerful Russian (somewhat of a rarity) with a penchant for racecar-style driving. When we reached 100mph in a 40 zone, we were met the unfamiliar sound of a Russian police siren. The taxi pulled over, documents were produced, an agreement was made, money changed hands, and we were off again.
Lonely Planet's fairly sparse section on the lakeside village of Listvyanka included a complaint that the traditional houses would soon be hit by 'ugly gentrification' - we passed a gaudy, plasticky hotel and a lot of mock-original architecture, but then made a sharp turn into a very 'real' street. My room is at the top of a farmhouse structure, and I know it's 'original' - if not by all other signs - by the outhouse. The outhouse that you access by a ladder. It makes nocturnal peeing much more of an adventure.
So Lonely Planet also told me that 'you haven't genuinely been to Russia if you haven't experienced a Russian banya', and my 'budget accommodation' includes an innocent-looking little corrugated iron hut that turns out to be just that. Tempted inside by promises from a resident Siberian and the presence of willing and similarly aged peers, I ended up in an oven. That's all I could possibly describe it as: an oven.
Gasping and coughing and sat in a pool of my own sweat, I provided ample entertainment for the Siberian who knew that 'stupid English tourists' have only ever experienced British saunas that he eats for breakfast.
'And now,' he announced brightly, 'we hit you with sticks.'
Sticks. Seriously. He had a bucket of birch sticks. And he was going to hit us with them.
'IT'S CLEANSING!' he shouted as the birch connected with my bikini-clad body in hideously boiling repetition. 'You OK?' every now and then.
Unable to lose face, I replied: 'Carry on! More birch!'
I've never been more glad to feel cold water in my life than when that Siberian man pushed me out the Russian banya, post-birches, and pointed me towards a bucket of freezing cold water. So screw you, Lonely Planet. I've 'genuinely' been to Russia.
Thursday, 22 July 2010
The Trans-Siberian Express - a 4 day stint
I've arrived in one piece in the small Siberian town of Listvyanka, via the 'capital of Siberia' Irkutsk (small-ish city, it turns out.) This after four nonstop days living on the Trans-Siberian Express, which is certainly an experience I won't forget soon...
[[HERE I just remembered that I wanted to add in something I did, so forgive my shameless editing. The night before I left Moscow, I sat in front of St Basil's Cathedral in the middle of Red Square, admiring the view in shorts and flip flops. How many people can say they enjoyed a 35C Red Square in flip flops at 4am? Am definitely coming back to mark the same spot in snow-boots come December.]]
Since my train was scheduled to leave Moscow at 1pm, I braved the heat (which soldiered on at 40C) to see Lenin's dead body holed up in the Red Square's mausoleum, something any faithful communist would do.
No, I'm not really a communist, dickhead.
Because it only opens at 10am, I made a run for the Metro with two fine like-minded individuals (Belgian Ruth the dancer and Essex Martin the builder) and we ended up paying a guy outside the mausoleum 300R to let us skip the (astronomical) queue. This was all to be quickly shepherded past poor old Len's waxy formaldehyde-ridden body (left fist clenched because he had a stroke which affected one side of his body) by armed Russian guards, and spat out by the heavily air-conditioned mausoleum out into a graveyard where Stalin lay at rest a stone's throw away from the big guy. Underneath a giant marble Stalin bust. No kidding.
'Is it controversial that Stalin is buried here alongside other, less genocidally inclined politicians?' I asked the Russian guy we paid to get us in, once outside the graveyard and in not so many words.
The guy shrugged. 'Yea. I guess.'
Without the time to be affected by this characteristically Russian display of callous nonchalance, I had to scarper back to the hostel in order to catch the train to Siberia. Goodbye Lenin.
Hello, Trans-Siberian Express.
'Fresh' from the Moscow Metro, I was directed toward a blisteringly hot carriage in the train all those days ago. It would be fair to call the train 'basic' - the toilet gives you a good view of the tracks, the train inexplicably whistles and makes chugging noises which were supposed to have died in the steam era, and the nearest you get to luxury in a sweltering, AC-free carriage is a boiler at the end which spits out hot water for your awaiting tea and noodles. Ah, noodles. I may never eat them again after those four long days where they fulfilled breakfast, lunch, and dinner faithfully, but they served me well.
The train ride started out with the conspicuous presence of children: ten Russian toddlers set free in the carriage by their parents, dressed in nothing more than underpants and sometimes less than that. Throughout the train ride, these toddlers would worm their way into your cabin, chew your books, break their toy cars, and climb up into your laps with outstretched arms and plaintive Russian babytalk.
I took the bottom bunk in my cabin of four, having experienced the nonexistent highs and the very real lows of sleeping in an Eastern European train's top bunk when Interrailing the previous year. The first person to take the bed beside me was a middle-aged Russian man with entirely metal teeth called Serozha (he wrote it down on the back of a CD case for me in Cyrillic.) Like his bunk successor - a nameless young Russian girl who travelled for two days with me to Irkutsk - he spent a lot of time holding the regulation pillow and staring out the window as European Russia, then the Europe-Asia border, then full-on Siberian countryside rolled past the window. Occasionally, they would both leave the compartment out of courtesy and smoke endless cigarettes out the carriage windows; a courtesy which didn't make a whole lot of difference.
As we made our way through Russia, the 38C inside temperature of the train dropped suddenly to 10C and then climbed back up to 20C. At the 10C point, the children all appeared out of their cabins in the morning, transformed from hyperactive underwear-clad kiddies into... similarly hyperactive kiddies, stuffed into snowflake-decorated jumpers and (for the boys - yes, the boys) tights. A good number of the little boys had mullets, which is a style prevalent in Russia, I have come to learn. It was a bitter lesson to come to terms with but the mullet is alive and well from Moscow to Yekaterinburg (where the Romanovs were shot) to Omsk (where everyone was always exiled to) to Lake Baikal. Believe me - I saw them with my own eyes, almost exclusively on the very young (that includes teenagers, however) in each one of those places.
Scenery from the grubby windows of the Trans-Siberian Express is slow to evolve and cheesily breathtaking. The regularity of Soviet-era factories, completely abandoned along with the settlements which were created for the communist dream of factions of self-sustainability, was pretty shocking. Massive structures of production stand, half-destroyed by nature, revealing their insides, becoming dangerous playgrounds or oddly, oxymoronically beautiful eyesores. The settlements that HAVE survived are tiny - ten houses at best, it looks like - and nothing like how they must have once been. They're the landscape scars of Russian history... enough to get anyone a bit pretentiously carried away.
Health and safety is yet to hit the Trans-Siberian, so a trip to the 'dining car' (which really doesn't have the credentials to deserve that name) includes leaping over open spaces of tracks while you manoevre your careful way across carriages. It isn't worth the journey, which is why you hop off at every other stop and buy food from the babushkas.
Babushkas are basically women selling food who congregate on the platforms of the more out-of-the-way mid-Siberian stations, where the train stops to refuel/re-wheel/inspect the buffalo damage from the previous night. These stops usually last about 20 minutes, where you can leap off the train and be confronted with thousands of little moving stalls setting themselves out: pastry, meat-and-potato meals squashed into polystyrene boxes, pots of berries, etc., that have been cooked and/or picked in the houses and gardens of the nearest settlement. These Russians are very different to the slick, slightly-trashy Muscovites in their nine inch heels beside their smug little 5'2" men or the in-the-know St Petersburg University students. Their life remains one making use of the most basic of tools and often the most basic of standards: their houses are, without exception, constructed entirely from wood and corrugated iron.
When you see them concealed in the countryside from the train, you don't quite know whether to call them villas or shanty towns.
Obviously stuck in a country often openly hostile to the idea of vegetarianism, I took advantage of the babushkas' fresh fruit and sometimes their pasties, which were always a guessing game. If they had no change, you got little plastic sachets of coffee for every 5R they couldn't make. 'Potato pasties' proved pretty delicious (Russian peasants don't count their carbs.)
I don't think I'll ever forget watching the kids career up and down the carriages, the visibility of communism and its subsequent decline, the 'white nights' on the train where Siberia shot by in semi-darkness, the babushkas with their ridiculously cheap offerings. For some reason, Belle & Sebastian's 'Sleep the Clock Around' was the one-song soundtrack for my four-day Trans-Siberian journey. Very unlike me, but true. The Express can do stuff like that to you.
[[HERE I just remembered that I wanted to add in something I did, so forgive my shameless editing. The night before I left Moscow, I sat in front of St Basil's Cathedral in the middle of Red Square, admiring the view in shorts and flip flops. How many people can say they enjoyed a 35C Red Square in flip flops at 4am? Am definitely coming back to mark the same spot in snow-boots come December.]]
Since my train was scheduled to leave Moscow at 1pm, I braved the heat (which soldiered on at 40C) to see Lenin's dead body holed up in the Red Square's mausoleum, something any faithful communist would do.
No, I'm not really a communist, dickhead.
Because it only opens at 10am, I made a run for the Metro with two fine like-minded individuals (Belgian Ruth the dancer and Essex Martin the builder) and we ended up paying a guy outside the mausoleum 300R to let us skip the (astronomical) queue. This was all to be quickly shepherded past poor old Len's waxy formaldehyde-ridden body (left fist clenched because he had a stroke which affected one side of his body) by armed Russian guards, and spat out by the heavily air-conditioned mausoleum out into a graveyard where Stalin lay at rest a stone's throw away from the big guy. Underneath a giant marble Stalin bust. No kidding.
'Is it controversial that Stalin is buried here alongside other, less genocidally inclined politicians?' I asked the Russian guy we paid to get us in, once outside the graveyard and in not so many words.
The guy shrugged. 'Yea. I guess.'
Without the time to be affected by this characteristically Russian display of callous nonchalance, I had to scarper back to the hostel in order to catch the train to Siberia. Goodbye Lenin.
Hello, Trans-Siberian Express.
'Fresh' from the Moscow Metro, I was directed toward a blisteringly hot carriage in the train all those days ago. It would be fair to call the train 'basic' - the toilet gives you a good view of the tracks, the train inexplicably whistles and makes chugging noises which were supposed to have died in the steam era, and the nearest you get to luxury in a sweltering, AC-free carriage is a boiler at the end which spits out hot water for your awaiting tea and noodles. Ah, noodles. I may never eat them again after those four long days where they fulfilled breakfast, lunch, and dinner faithfully, but they served me well.
The train ride started out with the conspicuous presence of children: ten Russian toddlers set free in the carriage by their parents, dressed in nothing more than underpants and sometimes less than that. Throughout the train ride, these toddlers would worm their way into your cabin, chew your books, break their toy cars, and climb up into your laps with outstretched arms and plaintive Russian babytalk.
I took the bottom bunk in my cabin of four, having experienced the nonexistent highs and the very real lows of sleeping in an Eastern European train's top bunk when Interrailing the previous year. The first person to take the bed beside me was a middle-aged Russian man with entirely metal teeth called Serozha (he wrote it down on the back of a CD case for me in Cyrillic.) Like his bunk successor - a nameless young Russian girl who travelled for two days with me to Irkutsk - he spent a lot of time holding the regulation pillow and staring out the window as European Russia, then the Europe-Asia border, then full-on Siberian countryside rolled past the window. Occasionally, they would both leave the compartment out of courtesy and smoke endless cigarettes out the carriage windows; a courtesy which didn't make a whole lot of difference.
As we made our way through Russia, the 38C inside temperature of the train dropped suddenly to 10C and then climbed back up to 20C. At the 10C point, the children all appeared out of their cabins in the morning, transformed from hyperactive underwear-clad kiddies into... similarly hyperactive kiddies, stuffed into snowflake-decorated jumpers and (for the boys - yes, the boys) tights. A good number of the little boys had mullets, which is a style prevalent in Russia, I have come to learn. It was a bitter lesson to come to terms with but the mullet is alive and well from Moscow to Yekaterinburg (where the Romanovs were shot) to Omsk (where everyone was always exiled to) to Lake Baikal. Believe me - I saw them with my own eyes, almost exclusively on the very young (that includes teenagers, however) in each one of those places.
Scenery from the grubby windows of the Trans-Siberian Express is slow to evolve and cheesily breathtaking. The regularity of Soviet-era factories, completely abandoned along with the settlements which were created for the communist dream of factions of self-sustainability, was pretty shocking. Massive structures of production stand, half-destroyed by nature, revealing their insides, becoming dangerous playgrounds or oddly, oxymoronically beautiful eyesores. The settlements that HAVE survived are tiny - ten houses at best, it looks like - and nothing like how they must have once been. They're the landscape scars of Russian history... enough to get anyone a bit pretentiously carried away.
Health and safety is yet to hit the Trans-Siberian, so a trip to the 'dining car' (which really doesn't have the credentials to deserve that name) includes leaping over open spaces of tracks while you manoevre your careful way across carriages. It isn't worth the journey, which is why you hop off at every other stop and buy food from the babushkas.
Babushkas are basically women selling food who congregate on the platforms of the more out-of-the-way mid-Siberian stations, where the train stops to refuel/re-wheel/inspect the buffalo damage from the previous night. These stops usually last about 20 minutes, where you can leap off the train and be confronted with thousands of little moving stalls setting themselves out: pastry, meat-and-potato meals squashed into polystyrene boxes, pots of berries, etc., that have been cooked and/or picked in the houses and gardens of the nearest settlement. These Russians are very different to the slick, slightly-trashy Muscovites in their nine inch heels beside their smug little 5'2" men or the in-the-know St Petersburg University students. Their life remains one making use of the most basic of tools and often the most basic of standards: their houses are, without exception, constructed entirely from wood and corrugated iron.
When you see them concealed in the countryside from the train, you don't quite know whether to call them villas or shanty towns.
Obviously stuck in a country often openly hostile to the idea of vegetarianism, I took advantage of the babushkas' fresh fruit and sometimes their pasties, which were always a guessing game. If they had no change, you got little plastic sachets of coffee for every 5R they couldn't make. 'Potato pasties' proved pretty delicious (Russian peasants don't count their carbs.)
I don't think I'll ever forget watching the kids career up and down the carriages, the visibility of communism and its subsequent decline, the 'white nights' on the train where Siberia shot by in semi-darkness, the babushkas with their ridiculously cheap offerings. For some reason, Belle & Sebastian's 'Sleep the Clock Around' was the one-song soundtrack for my four-day Trans-Siberian journey. Very unlike me, but true. The Express can do stuff like that to you.
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