Chapter 4 - Three days on a train to Siberia

In 2018, we embarked on an ambitious journey to go from Europe to Asia mostly by land. It was a fantastic trip, and I shared the highlights of this trip on a now-defunct blog. I'm republishing these travel stories here, for myself, to share with family and friends, and hopefully to inspire some strangers.

This article was originally written and published on September 1, 2018

Read Chapter 3 - Five days in Moscow here

Getting ready for the trip: tickets and groceries

We bought our tickets a long time ago online, on the RZD website, the Russian train operator. It was easy and convenient, and you can get your tickets reimbursed up to 4 hours before departure for a small fee. We had e-tickets, and only needed the tickets as well as our passport to board the train. We got 2nd class tickets called “Kupe” in Russia, which is a reserved bunk bed in a 4-person cabin. The absolute reference for any train travel, should you want to go on a similar adventure, is this website from the man in seat 61.

We went grocery shopping the day before we took the train. We weren’t sure that the restaurant wagon food would be veggie friendly or really cheap by Russian standards. So we got ourselves some bread, peanut butter, bananas, apples, cheese, cans of tin beans and sweetcorn, some tortilla wraps, toilet paper, cleaning wipes, a bottle of cranberry vodka, and some plastic cutlery. In the morning, we packed up and headed to Moscow Kazansky station.

First impressions: it’s hot and cramped

We almost embarked on the wrong train. The amount of English understood or spoken around us dropped to zero. I don’t think I have ever been in a situation where I cannot speak or understand anything. Lots of pointing and signing, and some help from Google translate. We seem to be the only foreigners, or at least non-Russian speakers on the train. Our Prodvonik (the carriage attendant, “prodvonika“ if it’s a woman) collects our tickets and checks our passports.

The train is wooden and beautiful. The room seems cramped but actually contains a reasonable amount of space, we are able to comfortably store all of our luggage. We have the two top bunks. The Prodvonika gave us clean bed sheets and towels, all wrapped in plastic. Each bed has a mattress, a duvet, and a pillow. I feel really excited, like a kid. I have always enjoyed boats and trains, there is a feeling of adventure in the air.

We are sharing our compartment with a quiet man. Later in the night, a young 17-year-old joined us. Once again, I’m quite impressed by everyone’s organization. The carriage is neat and orderly. Some people travel with young kids and they play calmly in the corridor. Everyone brought food and drinks. There is a samovar at one end of the carriage, a sort of steampunk Russian device that produces boiling water that is safe to drink and is ideal for the train staples of tea, coffee, and instant noodles.

In the evening, we decide to explore the train, find the restaurant carriage and check out their menu. The menu contains English translations, a reasonable amount of veggie items, and even a vegetarian menu. We order 2 beers, and the second I have my first sip, a drunk Russian sat down next to us ( there were 5 people in the whole carriage). I do not like drunk people. He was really keen to speak to us.

“ I am Russia”, holding his forehead with his hand, thinking really hard …. “Rassiya”. Then shake my hand almost breaking it, and hold Beejal hand gently and give it a kiss. This “conversation” was repeated until we left half an hour later. We cheered, almost breaking the glass, he spoke to us in Russian, I answer in English, and he shows me his phone with pictures of his family. “Family! My Family!”, it was indeed his family. He tried to ask us some questions about where we were from, “This is Russia!”, where we were going, “Russia!”, and how come we are an Anglo-French couple, “This is ….”, “I am Russia”. He was ready to have another beer but we were not, and we went to bed.

The morning of the second day – 18 hours and 1225km from Moscow

According to my complex calculations, we are 1225km away from Moscow, 2 time zones away in some cities I do not know, in Russia. It’s definitely weird to experience progressive jet lag. The landscape is monotonous, we are still crossing the Western Russian plains. I slept really well, the train rocking me to sleep, with the help of my faithful eye mask and earplugs.

I love trains, it is such a romantic way to travel. It’s calming, you can be lost in your thoughts, you read a book, you chat, you have one-word conversations with Russians. I have not been bored yet. In the UK, I would be on my phone reading social media, Wikipedia, or the news, but here I have to disconnect, there is no wifi on the train and I don’t have a SIM card. It’s actually quite rare for me to be for 3 days in my own head and disconnected from the online world. It’s pleasant and meditative.

We stopped in quite a few places today, including Yekaterinburg (we considered stopping there but we only had 30 days of entry in the country). Most stations we stopped at looked exactly as you would imagine some Russian cities to look like: derelict and falling apart. To be fair, train stations are rarely the best profile of a city, but the vast expanses we crossed seemed for the most part abandoned.

We did crosswords, sudoku, killer sudoku, and a variety of other puzzles Beejal brought with us, read books (I’m reading Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall), and chilled out. We may have decided to enjoy some vodka in the evening.

Third day: 42 h and 2724 km from Moscow.

We can feel the jet lag, or rather train lag. It’s strange. I have kept my faithful decathlon watch to Moscow time, as the train runs on Moscow time, but my phone is currently 4 hours in advance, to what I guess is local time. It’s currently 9:17 (Moscow time) but 13:17 local time. When you take a plane, you just set your watch to your arrival time, the plane just stops once, and you deal with the jet lag. Here, we are going eastwards and we are continuously crossing time zones. I use the timetable on the train to understand where we are.

Woke up at 6:30 Moscow time but apparently, it was 10:30 local time. Had a coffee, some kind of elaborate baby wipes clean up, and then read my book, had some rye bread + peanut butter + banana breakfast. Then I read a bit more, listened to some music and I’m now writing this article. I’m pretty sure I overheard some non-Russian people, and I was way more excited than I thought I would be when I realized they may be Spanish!

The rest of the day was some sort of limbo. Not bored, just feeling in need of a shower. We should arrive tomorrow morning around 6:38 local time (our current time zone) or 2:38 Moscow time.

Last night on the train and arriving in Krasnoyarsk

I was quite excited about arriving and I struggled to go to bed. But we checked the timetable, and some savant calculations confirmed we had a good time, and we could set up the alarm and rest.

I obviously woke up quite a few times checking my watch and then my phone, but all was fine. An hour before the arrival time (5:30 local time then), the prodvonista came to wake me up gently, I got myself ready and woke up Beejal. Then I just stood up in the carriage looking at the view.

Finally, we could see some landscape! Since we left Moscow, the landscape has been pretty monotonous. The Russian plain is, as the name would suggest, pretty flat, and since we are going eastwards, and staying more or less at the same altitude, the landscape, climate, and geography mostly stayed the same. We crossed the Urals mountains in the first days, entering Asia, but then the landscape got flat once again.

At last, we could see some hills, the big city of Krasnoyarsk appearing on the horizon, and a non-flat landscape! We crossed the suburb of this big industrial and slightly intimidating city, and we could still see what looked like Stolby rock formations in the background. Finally, we are in Siberia.