Carol's diary Day 5 to Day 10

Day 5, 1st July, Moscow;
Heading back from Red square we decide to try the metro. In the underpass a line of violinists are jauntily belting out Vivaldi to an appreciative audience. Their violin case is rapidly filling with 10 rouble notes. The metro proves difficult. We are looking for line 3 but we can only see signs for lines 1 and 2 and to cap it all, each station has a range of different names. It turns out these signs refer to the platforms so we jump on the next train. We get off after only one stop and have gained little if anything at all. But in the underpass we stumble across another wonderful music moment. An entire rock band has set up its speakers and an enthusiastic crowd is swaying and dancing wildly to the music.
From the apartment the Novyi Arbat darkens from day to night. Neon signs and flashing lights dominate and the new rich, in their large expensive cars built like tanks, parade the wide street.

Day 6, 2nd July Moscow;
Sue, Martin and I walk down Novyi Arbat to attempt the Kremlin again. Today it’s open but a long queue renders it less than inviting. We decide instead to explore the streets nearby, diving into this church and that. Trying to cut through to the river Moskva where later we meet Tom for a river boat trip.
We sit at the back of the boat. A family gets on; mother, father, daughter, son and girlfriend. The girlfriend spends the entire trip posing for the camera as if she were competing on Russia’s Next Top Model. Her arms flung expressively in the air, her eyes flirting with the camera. Mother looks on singularly unimpressed.
We stop at a large white cathedral with a great golden dome and cross over the footbridge with padlocks bearing the names of countless lovers.


Day 7, 3rd July, Moscow;
The tickets that should have arrived with our pick up taxi are due to arrive at noon today. Sasha arrives from the apartment but no one comes from Real Russia and no tickets.

The train leaves Moscow spot on 21.35, and we unpack our bags and make the beds. This will be our home for the next 4 nights. Sue and Martin are in compartment I and Tom and I in compartment II. The two compartments share a shower between them. Unlock door, lock doors to both compartments and turn on a cold hose. Mirrors on either side of the sink reveal that this is going to be as good as I’m going to look for the next 4 days. It’s downhill from now on.

Cabin sorted, bags stashed away, food bags, replenished in possibly the most expensive supermarket in Moscow, now reorganised and pushed under the seat and Tom and I set off to investigate the restaurant car. It turns out to be miles away. 4 doors to open and close at the beginning and end of each carriage. The restaurant car is run by a Russian called Victor with a big moustache, blue eyes and a worried expression, in contrast to his cheekily turned up nose. His crisp white shirt is tucked into rather baggy black trousers. He brings us beer and plates of omelette generously sprinkled with dill. Some of the other passengers from our carriage have also made their way along there. A Norwegian couple, and a young English man called James who would make a good candidate for the Apprentice, and Horkan from Sweden with whom he shares his compartment. A sudden loud jolt and all the bottles on the back table fall over, some break. The train comes to a screeching stop and Victor, looking very worried now, makes a gesture with his hand drawn back quickly against his throat. Someone has jumped? Someone has been run over? we wonder. An animal?
The train stands still for only a few minutes then moves off again.
It can’t have been a person can it?
Victor is quietly replacing the bottles on the table. He has the look of someone who has seen it all before.
We bring a plate of omelette and a cold beer back for Martin and Sue who have settled in for the night and next door we set up the computer to watch Heartlands about a man from Sheffield travelling through the Pennines to Blackpool on a scooter. A sweet film, I love to hear the accents and spot places that I recognise. Film over, we sit for a while in the dark sipping whisky, looking out of the window. We are in our own road movie and it’s so exciting. By the time we clamber into our firm bunks it’s 2.45 and nearly light again

Day 8. 5th July;
The bed is pretty hard and the pillows impossibly large. Good for Tom’s giant shoulders but Sue has had a difficult night. We doze our way through the morning. Reading and sleeping, looking out of the window. Time and the countryside whiz by.
The first stop is in Danilov to change the locomotive. The platform is filled with brightly dressed Babushkas selling food, men push along trolleys laden with Russian tat; china vases, ornate vodka glasses and the most hideous cuddly toys. We buy oranges and strawberries and meat patties with potatoes and a couple of deep fried doughnuts. And as we pull out of the station we eat our lunch.
I discover that the toilet in the next compartment to ours functions with rather less odour. A foot pedal dumps the contents of the metal bowl onto the track and a good squirt of water washes the bowl. A hand made red wire brush hangs at one side to aid the whole proceedings. A note in the handbook suggests keeping well clear when pressing the foot pedal. Under certain conditions it is prone to backfiring…
Our toilet seems to be rather waterless. Tom admits that when he last pushed the foot pedal a large metal bolt fell off. This could explain everything.
I spend the afternoon perusing the Trans Siberian handbook that Tom has brought along. Sadly now out of print, it’s full of interesting bits of information, from how to work out our speed to descriptions of each village along the route. Am I becoming a Train Nerd? I wonder.
The stations we pass through are painted a bright sea-side jade green and a lighter shade of green, with the occasional two tone blue. The buildings, the poles, the pipes, this colour scheme has been consistent since Belarus. Thousands of miles of standard railway seaside green paint.
At some point in the afternoon the air conditioning is turned on. The carriage cools down blissfully. Cooler, and then cooler still, till we all start to shiver and wrap up in fleeces and blankets. The Chinese guards stand in the corridor and laugh, then the air conditioning goes off again.




Day 9, 5th July;
Day 8 or it could be day 9. Tom doesn’t even know where his trousers are…Here we are on train number 4, in compartment II baggage stowed, beds made, trying to keep it shipshape. The rails are no longer welded so the train goes clickety clack, clickety clack. Every now and again it slows and all the carriages whack into each other with a loud jolt. A slight bend and it j-j-j-j-j-udders. A long stansa of bumpy swoosh, followed by a sideways shake, the music and rhythm of the great train. Our compartment has a fierce fan which circles and turns its head towards every corner but at night we prefer to lie in the still heavy heat, lulled to sleep by the movement of the train. In the night as we slept, we wound our way through the Urals, down to the West Siberian plain and into Asia. The countryside has gone from forests of birch and pine and black poplar, through the gentle edge of the Urals and opened out now to the taiga of the Tyumenskaya Oblast, flat marshy ground covered with grasses and wild flowers. Wooden houses with iron roofs, expanses of water and trees, and on either side of the tracks, forming long parallel lines, wooden telegraph poles carrying electricity to the villages along the route. Now we are in Siberia, the land of exile for hundreds of thousands of people forced to leave their homes and families forever. The train forges on unceremoniously, on and on, over the river Irtysh and stopping briefly at Omsk. When the train stops in a station it is usually surrounded by Baboushkas with bags selling potatoes and chicken fresh vegetables and wild strawberries, breads and fried potato doughnuts and beetroot and fish salads. At Omsk the platform is empty and the passengers hop off and stroll along the side of the train, wary of its departure. Tom is delighted to discover that the locomotive Us2-175 is made by Skoda in 1983 at the Lenin locomotive works in Pilbzenb. More worrying is the fact that I am writing it down. The number 1, Moscow to Vladivostok train pulls into the station a few minutes behind us. Soon our train starts to steam and whoosh and the Chinese guards standing patiently at each carriage gesticulate that it’s time to climb back on. I hop up the nearest steps and walk through the endless corridors till I reach the familiar glossy brown veneer of carriage number 9. The guard looks relieved at my arrival and so does Tom. It’s quite an achievement to get everyone back on board, all accounted for. With another whoosh the train slowly pulls forward into the Baraba Steppe. The line between here and Novosibirsk, the capital of Western Siberia has the largest amount of freight traffic in the world.

Our Chinese guards are very cheery. When we first got on at Moscow one of them took our passports and tickets and tried unsuccessfully to find us on his own list. “We’re going to Irkutsk,” Tom explained, “then Mongolia. But later…first Irkutsk.” This explanation didn’t seem to help. The ticket was confusingly all together in a wad of paper. The guard continued to look blankly through the pages of ticket and at his list.
Tom tried again, “We’re British, English.”
“Ah Yinglish! Yirkutsk, Yinglish!” The guards face beamed. “Yinglish!”
Now every time he sees us he smiles broadly and says, “Yirkutsk, Yinglish!”
I asked him how to say Thankyou in Mandarin as he filled up my cup from the boiling samovar.
“How!” he said with an upwards intonation.
“How!” I repeated with the same rising tone.
I use this expression repeatedly, only later realising it is completely wrong.

Day 10, 6th July;
The night is full of loud jerks. In the top bunk I have a vision of the train stopping suddenly and me falling off into a broken heap. It’s hot and we leave the fan on. On the top bunk I’m at the same level as the fan and as it circles onto me it feels like I’m lying on an aerodrome. At some point in the night I switch it off, relieved at the quiet, which soon turns to an oppressive, sticky stillness. People emerge slowly in the morning, everyone has settled into a relaxed rhythm, nothing very much, followed by nothing very much. And its delightful. A longer stop in a town around lunchtime and I buy potato dumplings and pork patties and chicken and a smoked cheese plait and strong cold beer, enough for two meals.
Earlier we asked the tall Chinese guard to turn the air conditioning on again. It turns out this is only possible when the train is at standstill, a strange design fault. It comes on again after the last town and the carriage gradually cools, though some water crisis occurs at between the two 1st class carriages with water pouring everywhere. James is gesticulating wildly about the electricity going off and Claire and Jacqueline from Geneva tell me that the water in the toilet runs if you pump it with your foot several times.