Transsibirskaya Magistral - Part II

Part I  -  Part II  -  Part III

Finally!

The Rossiya No.1, with direct service from Vladivostok to Moscow, departing a Friday at 10pm, and arriving the following Thursday at 6pm. A total of 9,289 kilometers, and crossing 7 different time zones.

Fun fact - Vladivostok is closer to Los Angeles than it is to Moscow.



From Vladivostok, the train heads directly north for a good twelve hours, until it reaches Khabarovsk (our first major stop), and from Khabarovsk, the train pretty much runs west all the way to Moscow. So the first couple hundred kilometers of the trip basically follow the two legs of a right triangle, and if you know remember your geometry, you know that a shorter route would be to follow the hypotenuse, or head northwest from the get-go. Problem is, that hypotenuse cuts through China.

HOWEVER, there IS a railway that follows this shorter route through China, but I don’t know if it’s still in use.

The story is – when the railway was first being built, the tsar (Nicholas, I think) was super stingy with funds and insisted his project managers to build it as cheaply as possible. Eventually the question came up of whether to follow the long way AROUND China (and build the railway entirely in Russian territory), or take the shortcut THROUGH China (I’m assuming Russia and China were on friendly terms at this point in time). Of course, the tsar replies with “the shortcut is cheaper, so take the shortcut”, and in the end, the construction of this shortcut through China ended up being MORE EXPENSIVE THAN THE REST OF THE TRANS-SIBERIAN RAILWAY COMBINED. Nice one, Tsar Nicky.

Anyway, to finish the story – it’s the turn of the century or early 20th century and the Japanese are all militarized and feeling imperialistic (in part thanks to their own version of the Monroe Doctrine, courtesy of the USA) and they just kicked Russia’s ass at Port Arthur (first military victory of a non-Western power over a Western nation) and they’re also getting all up in China’s face and have basically taken Manchuria for themselves. So at this point Russia is like, hold up, we can’t have our most important railway, and our only link to Vladivostok - which is already their #1 naval port on the Pacific, and of invaluable strategic importance for the upcoming fights with Japan- we can’t have this railway running through China… it’s too risky. So THAT’S when they finally completed the Trans-Siberian Railway, linking Moscow to Vladivostok, entirely on Russian soil.

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ANYWAY, we’re about twelve hours into the ride, and we have our first major stop at Khabarovsk. Everyday we’d have about six to eight stops. Half of them were really short (5-6 min) and you wouldn’t be let off the train, half of them were not so short (10-15 min), and you could get off the train and just stand outside and stretch and enjoy deep breaths of cold clean Siberian air, and then maybe once a day we’d have a long stop (30-35 min), which is when you’d run to the shops at the station and stock up on water and snacks, and maybe go check out any old locomotives lying around.





Life on the train consisted of a lot of this - lying stretched out on the passenger seat, head against the window, watching the incredible scenery pass by. Being 100% in the zone. And it was such an amazing disconnect from the rest of the world that I didn’t even listen to music for the first five days. Because once you listen to that first song, you’ve made a connection to the outside world, and the magic bubble pops. Granted, music can always enhance any experience, so I wasn’t crazy enough to go the WHOLE way without it. And Jesus Christ did it sound good after five days of silence.

 

Feeling the magic!  Still in the Russian Far East at this point, haven’t even made it into Siberia.

 




Sunset… time for dinner!


I was originally interested in the Trans-Siberian Railway not so much as a way to see Russia (I barely did, and I’m saving that for another trip), but because it offered a novel way to experience space and time (at least when you take it non-stop from one end to the other). Being confined in a small space, yet always moving through space as well, like a tiny dot moving along an almost never-ending line, following it from one side of the world to the other. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around this idea, and I love anything that makes me feel this way. And I thought that, outside of being incredibly badass at meditation, which I am most certainly not, it could be the closest I could get to experience an infinity of space and time. Because the closest thing to infinity is the really big and the really long, and this was one of the biggest spaces and longest rides the world had to offer.

Anyway, first thing I did when I boarded the train was put my watch away, and not look at it until I got to Moscow. I didn’t want to know what time it was at any point during the ride. This didn’t prove to be that difficult because the only other time-telling device in sight was set to Moscow time, and half the time I didn’t know what time zone we were in, so I couldn’t do the conversion. So I synchronized my activities with the rising and setting of the sun.

Looks like dawn outside? Time to get up, take a train shower, make coffee. Watch the sunrise, then have breakfast. Hang out, read, try to talk to Tamara, the 60 year old Russian babushka in my cabin. Getting hungry again? OK, let’s call that lunchtime. Oh, now you’re feeling tired? Naptime. Incredible colors outside? It’s probably magic hour… get the camera out. Then the sun is gone and it’s dinner time. And I’d finally go to sleep whenever I fell asleep.

*[This plan backfired one day when we were going through a narrow valley that didn’t let much sunlight in. I looked outside, it was getting dark, so I assumed it was dinnertime. I had dinner, and then we emerged from the valley, and I looked outside and the sun was waaaaay up in the sky. I was actually happy because it meant I had another late afternoon to enjoy, and a second dinner to look forward to.]

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Russia is MASSIVE! You’d see a huuuuuuuge open landscape like this with not much in it besides some hills and a few trees and lots of shrubs, and an hour later you’d be in the middle of a completely new one, and the following hour in the next, and you’d try to stitch them all together into one complete picture but at that point it could no longer fit inside your head.
  


Another day, another stop.

I think this is Day 3 and we ARE STILL IN THE RUSSIAN FAR EAST. Absolutely ridiculous!! The train keeps moving forward and forward but somehow we cannot escape the massiveness that is Russia’s easternmost region.

[Looking back, I think the train covers less distance in the first half of the trip than the second. Once we reached the Urals, the conductor hit the throttle and we were booking it to Moscow. I’m assuming better rails let us go faster and cover more distance in the same amount of time. Don’t quote me on this though.]




It’s hard to see, but those three mounds in the middle ground of the picture are actually airplane hangars covered with soil and vegetation to presumably make them less visible to American satellites and spy planes during the Cold War

 



Ulan-Ude, capital of the Buryat Republic, an autonomous region near Lake Baikal and the Mongolian border. This is where travelers coming from or traveling to Mongolia and China (on the Trans-Mongolian Railway) would stop to switch lines.

 

Somewhere in the middle of Day 3 I wake up from a nap and look out the window and BAM! It’s Lake Baikal, bigger and bluer than I ever expected.

Lake Baikal is the deepest and one of the clearest lakes in the world. It holds about 20% of all the Earth’s fresh water. If you were to empty Lake Baikal, and then reroute all the world’s major rivers (Amazon, Nile, Mississippi, etc.) so that they’d flow into it and start filling it up again, it would still take more than a year to fill up. However, I think you could fill it up immediately with all the water from all the Great Lakes. Still, THAT’S A LOT OF WATER.


Sorry for the sudden decrease in quality (I’ve learned my lesson, shoot RAW only), but I’m still throwing this photo in the album so you get an idea of how big this lake is. On either side you can see the east and west shores of the lake, and in the middle, nothing but water and more water disappearing over the horizon. The lake continues in that direction for another 500km, so good luck trying to see the north shore while you’re standing over here.

 


Irkutsk! The “Paris of the Far East”, and the eastern end of Siberia. This is a popular stop for travelers not doing the Trans Siberian ride all at once. Here we picked up a group of Australian travelers who provided good company for the rest of the ride, and their New Zealand guide (getting paid to accompany them from Beijing to St. Petersburg…what a job!) ended up in my cabin, and was a great person to swap travel stories with. Also in our cabin was Cong, born from Southern Chinese parents but growing up in Vietnam and later relocating to Australia, now working as a miner and traveling during his forced vacations, who spoke with the thickest outback accent that I’d have to ask for a translation half the time.

 

Below, a typical scene in our cabin.

So the backrests of the seats fold down and they turn into the two bottom bunks. And at the top you can barely see the bottom edge of the top bunks.

Bottle of Bailey’s courtesy of Cong who without much difficulty forced it upon us starting at ten in the morning one day.



Yekaterinburg, where the Romanov family was murdered, where the American U2 pilot was shot down, and our final brief stop before Moscow.





Part I  -  Part II  -  Part III

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