Tidbits From the World

I decided to divide the article about the Trans-Siberian Railway into three or four articles. The Trans-Siberian railway is a general term for many train routes that link Moscow to the Russian Far East provinces. Currently, there are three main Trans-Siberian routes that depart from Moscow: the Trans-Siberian that goes from Moscow to Vladivostok, from this route it is possible to reach North Korea, and possibly one day South Korea as well; the Trans-Manchurian that goes from Moscow to Beijing, via Vladivostok; and the Trans-Mongolian that goes to Beijing from Moscow via Mongolia. I took that last route. The total distance from Moscow to Beijing by the Trans-Mongolian railway is 7855km. The journey takes six days to complete.

Here is the map of my journey. The part between St.-Petersburg and Moscow is not included in the Trans-Monglian railway. The departure city is Moscow. It takes four days to get to Mongolia; one day to get to Erlian, the entrance point to China and, from there, some eighteen hours to arrive to Beijing. I do not recommend reading this article to people who are planning on taking the Trans-Siberian railway soon, as it’s reading will spoil your very goal in travelling: discovering something new. Only people who already took this train or people who do not plan on taking it should read it. The only tip I could give to someone planning to take the Trans-Siberian railway is to buy the ticket in Moscow, as you will get a much better price than the ones shown on the Internet.

I left St-Petersburg in the height of the South Ossetia war between Russia and Georgia in the breakaway republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The situation was somewhat tense inside Russia during that time. On television, there were countinuous broadcasts from the war, and when firecrackers were exploding on the street, some people would joke “maybe the Georgians arrived in St-Petersburg!”. But what if it had been so?

The train to Moscow departed late at night, at 1:55am. Boris accompanied me to the train station, where we bid farewell. He took the last metro back home.

In the train, I met a separatist Georgian who was going back home to “get his AK-47 and battle against the Georgian occupying forces”. He offered me some vodka. He seemed very resolute. He told me how much he hated Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president. He wanted to kill as many Georgian soldiers as possible. He talked for quite a long time. But my level in Russian was not good enough to understand everything that he said or to say anything that I wanted to. Then, I was very tired and I went to sleep. Before going back to my cabin, I said to him “успеха!” (I wish you success) to which he responded “don’t worry for me, everything will be allright”. I wonder where he is now. During that war, 215 people were killed in the Russian, Abkhasian and South Ossetian side and 285 wounded. In the Georgian side, 183 were killed and 1964 were wounded.

I arrived in the early morning in Moscow. My train to Beijing was leaving in the evening. So I took advantage of the situation to go to the Red Square and see Lenin’s mausoleum.

The queue was very long. That day, I was among the last group to have the chance to see Lenin.

Here are my impressions that I wrote hours after visiting the mausoleum:

“Yesterday, I visited Lenin’s mausoleum. For years I had been dreaming of going inside, and yesterday, I could finally make this dream true, as I was finding myself in Moscow in a Tuesday evening, one of the four days of the week where the mausoleum is open to tourists. As soon as I arrived in Moscow, I headed to the Red Square, by taking the subway to the station Охотный Ряд. Once in the Red Square, I headed directly to the mausoleum. I was delighted to see that there was no queue in front of the mausoleum. I thought that I would not have to wait and that I could enter directly. But unfortunately, I was wrong. A policeman told me that I had to go around a red building and wait in line there. I went there, and the line was very long. As the time was passing by, we were getting closer to 1p.m., the time when the mausoleum closes, one police officer kept saying to the people waiting in line that it was useless to wait, because they would close soon. Some people quit, while some others, passionate hardliners, who wanted to see Vladimir Lenin more than anything else, remained. At 12:50, the policemen finally opened the gate and let us in. We went to the checkpoint that was quite far away, but right in front of us. An Italian man in front of me was carrying a camera, which is prohibited inside the mausoleum. At the checkpoint, he was instructed to put it in a storage room right across the mausoleum. I went there, because I was also carrying a camera. The price was 40 roubles, but the Italian only had euros. He could not pay, so he had to leave. I went through the checkpoint and the metal detector, then I could enter the mausoleum. What an atmosphere there was inside! The lights were all red and dimmed, it was very dark. There was one main hall to go through. The hall made turns in many places and there was one stair to come down from. At each corner of the hall, there was one policeman who would give instructions to us. For instance, if we were talking, he would instruct us to stop talking and if we were wearing a hat, he would instruct us to remove it. In the end, I arrived to the main room, the one with Lenin’s body!  How excited I was! In that room, not only were there red dimmed lights, but also some white lights, which resulted in a very nice effect. Lenin’s corpse looked a little bit like a waxman. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a necktie. He was short enough, he had no hair and no beard, one could see his fingers and fingernails. His legs and feet were hidden under a sheet with flowers, like in a bed. A policeman told me to go on, because I had been watching the body for too long. Then, I went out of the mausoleum.”

From there, I went to the international train station and I waited for my train to arrive. The departure time was 9:55p.m. so I had more than three hours to kill.

The train arrived on time. Notice that in Moscow (and in St-Petersburg as well) the sun sets very late in the summer. While the train was coming, on the platform, I noticed to my great disapointment that most travellers were European tourists. Obviously not many Russians would like to go to Beijing by train, when it is much cheaper, faster and more comfortable to go by plane. The Trans-Siberian railway has become no more than a tourist attraction.

My first direct contact with China: this Chinese wagon, where I was going to spend the next six days. The first language, from the top down, is Russian, the second one, Chinese and the third one, Mongolian written in Cyrillic alphabet (Russian letters). So, here we are! We are all set, the journey can start now!

Day 2 of the journey from Saint-Petersburg to Beijing. The Trans-Mongolian railway train arrived at the platform. It is now time to board.

“Yingwoche” (hard sleeper). This word is Chinese, but is written using the romanization system introduced by Mao’s government in 1958, which is called “pinyin”. This writing system was originally meant as the first step to phase out all the Chinese characters, but in the end, the government changed its plan and pinyin only became a system used to mark the pronounciation of the characters to help Chinese children and foreigners to learn Chinese. In China and in some other countries as well, railroad cars are divided into four categories, which are (from the most expensive to the cheapest): soft sleeper, hard sleeper, soft seat, hard seat. The difference not only consist in the softness (or hardness) of the padding, but also in the size of the cabin or the number of seats in a car. For the Trans-Siberian railway, there are only sleepers.

Here is a picture from the interior of the car.

And here is the schedule of the stop-overs. To see a bigger picture, so you can consult the schedule and see the cities where the Trans-Mongolian stops, click here.

While I was seated in my cabin, and the train had just gotten off, the workers in the train went cabin to cabin to check the passports and ask for the country of origin of each traveller. I heard someone shouting many times “Uruguay! Uruguay!” to the worker, who apparently had never heard of that country before. All workers in the train were Chinese, and in the Chinese language, the names of nearly all countries do not sound the same as their standard international form. For instance, “Uruguay” is pronounced, in Chinese “Wulagui” (乌拉圭). Maybe that traveller was the first, or among the first, person from Uruguay to take this train. Later, during a stop-over, as I was standing outside taking picture, this man went to me and asked me “¿Vos hablas español?”, with a Uruguayan accent (which is almost identical to the Argentine one). He took me for a South American, perhaps a Uruguayan, an Argentine, a Chilean or a Brazilian. His name is Gustavo, he was travelling with his sister, Sylvia, who emigrated to Belgium during the era of the military dictatorship in Uruguay. Gustavo and I had various times, some uruguayan mate.

Gustavo introduced me to his cabin mate, Viktor, a Ukrainian who works in a mine in Mongolia. He could only speak Ukrainian and Russian, while Gustavo and Sylvia could only speak Spanish and French. I tried the best I could to translate his Russian to Spanish, but it was very difficult for me who only speaks a little Russian. Later on, a guy from Ecuador, Fransk, a medicine student at Moscow University, who was going to resume his studies in Mongolia with his Mongolian girlfriend that he met in Moscow, replaced me to do the translating. Viktor served us a lot of vodka. I drank so much that night, that I got sick the following day. But I recovered after a couple of hours. Afterwards, I refused to drink more than one or too shooters of vodka!

A night-time stop-over.

In the daytime, there were many stands where one could buy food and water bottles.

A Croatian tourist is taking a picture of an old Russian woman.

At night, it was party time! People screaming and laughing, singing and drinking, and taking pictures of themselves getting wasted. Just another typical party, but this one in a long distance train.

A Croatian and an Englishman are playfighting outside the cabin.

After the party, I met this worker. He wanted something, but I could not understand him. With his hands, he tried to communicate with me. He wanted to see foreign currencies. He is a collector. I brought him some Canadian coins, and also some coins from South America. And he kept them…

Then, he showed me this bill… A North Korean 100 won bill from the year 1978, with Kim Il-Sung on it, in mint condition! I could not believe my eyes. This bill is so rare. And he gave it to me! How many Westerners can brag about having in their possession a North Korean bill from 1978? (North Korea is a country closed to Foreigners, especially to Westerners).

I felt that I owed him something. The coins that I had given him did not even closely match the value of the North Korean bill. So I went back to my cabin and I took the bill that I cared most about: a two canadian dollars bill in good condition. I had been keeping it since 1996, when this bill was being phased out by coins. The person on the bill is Her Majesty the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, Canada’s head of state.

I went to the restaurant car. This little meal cost me around $15. I then realized that I would have to settle for the noodles sold for $1 at the stands in the stations where the train was making stop-overs.

At some station, a worker is replacing or filling up the water system of another train.

This worker seems to be lacking motivation!

Only one window out of every two could be opened. Sometimes, many people were gathered at a window to look outside.

A Swedish couple. The woman is of Somalian origin. It was the first time I met a Somalian person, or someone with Somalian ties. I had many questions to ask her about her country of origin. She was surprised to see a foreigner being interested in her country. She was impressed when I mentioned the name of Siad Barre, Somalia’s last president, since 1991 (date when the coup d’État took place and the civil war started).

After I could sleep three nights alone, this man came to my cabin. He is Zhang Xingping. He had been working in Russia and was going back home in China. He was carrying huge Russian-Chinese dictionaries. He was very nice, but I would have preferred to be alone in my cabin!

And then, I met another person. This man was described by Xingping as a “очень плохо челавек” [sic] (a very bad person). He presented himself as Zhiming Shashou (致命杀手). Only later did I find out the actual meaning of this name. It means “deadly killer”. Furthermore, he is some sort of an international polygamous: he has a wife and children in Russia and in China, and they don’t know about the existence of each other. I met the same kind of person in Peru. He was a very unpleasant person, and fortunately, he was not the one assigned to my cabin.

Russia stretches over two continents; from the Gulf of Finland to the Bering Strait. With a territory containing 1/7 of the world total inhabitable area, it is the largest country on Earth. No wonder that, after four days travelling, we haven’t reached Mongolia or China yet.

5345 kilometers have been travelled from Moscow already… we have 2510 kilometers yet to go!

Apparently, it is 4:37pm in Нижнеудинск (Nujneudinsk) and the sun is already setting… (remember that in Moscow, at 9:55pm, the sun was still not completely set in the first day of our journey (see the first article)). In fact, the time displayed here is not the actual local time, but Moscow time. There is a four-hour time difference between Moscow and Нижнеудинск, therefore the actual local time was 8:37pm. But only Moscow time is displayed in all of Russia’s train stations, regardless of its geographical position. One of the difficulties encountered by the travelers in the Trans-Siberian railway, was the total loss of the sense of time. The sun was rising when our clocks showed us that it was 2 o’clock in the morning and was setting early in the afternoon, as we were heading eastwards. In Mongolia, that problem disappeared, because the official time was that of the capital city and also the local time, and it was displayed everywhere.

During that early night, the Equatorian Fransk replaced me to translate Viktor’s words.

In the morning, we arrived at one of the greatest tourist attractions in the Trans-Siberian railway: lake baikal, a huge lake located in Russia’s Far East; and the world’s purest lake, according to Viktor.

Because he trusted the purity of this lake, Viktor did not hesitate to buy some smoked fish at the next station.

…which he boned and shared with us.

Here are some pictures taken around the lake.

Workers at some station.

Снежана (Snejana), a Ukrainian lady with Mongolian origins, was added to the passengers. She was going to do some business in Ulaan-Baatar.

Customs! Here we are. We are leaving Russia and entering Mongolia.

While the authorities were dealing with the passports, we had some time to visit that last Russian city of our journey. There was one shop where we could buy some food.

The store from inside.

Three hours were planned for the stop-over at the customs. The Russian locomotive was detached from the train and replaced by a Mongolian one.

A Croatian tourist shows me his tattoo on his back.