Crossing into Asia

We sneaked out of Moscow in the dead of night. Our taxi driver did his best to make sure we didn't get any further by narrowly avoiding a collision and nearly spinning the car. On a 6 lane highway. Sue's nerves were starting to get jangled and these weren't helped as we trudged up the platform in the rain and saw our carriage, which resembled a dimly lit tomb - probably the low point of the trip so far. After briefly contemplating hot-tailing to the airport and flying to Beijing, we gritted our teeth and boarded the train.

 

There didn't seem to be anywhere to store our packs, but eventually we found that the bottom seat lifted and contained a large storage box just big enough for 1 pack and we somehow squeezed the second into an overhead compartment. All the while, the whole world seemed to be bustling past us in the corridor with their worldly possessions in tow. We closed the carriage door behind us and I heaved a sigh of relief, whilst Sue curled straight up on the lower bunk and covered her head with her scarf to shut out the world. In the other half of our cabin (we shared a capacious 6 X 5.5 feet between the 4 of us) was a middle aged Russian women travelling on her own and Andre, a young Russian guy also travelling alone. I self consciously shook hands with them, but neither of them spoke any English - this was shaping up to be a fun couple of days!

 

Amongst all this bedlam, some clean linen arrived and were able to make our bunks reasonably comfortable and turned the lights off shortly after pulling out of Moscow. We somehow drifted into fitful sleep, as the train clattered, creaked and groaned its way eastwards, hoping things would look a little rosier in the morning.

 

We awoke in the morning with a slightly calmer feeling, albeit that the train was rather lacking in facilities for a shower etc. We trundled along through pleasant scenery, mostly of birch and pine forest and the odd villages scattered with small old timber houses with horse-shoe shaped roofs and small plots of land turned over to growing vegetables etc. Occasionally the train would stop for a few minutes, either at a station, or for no apparent reason. We could jump off the train and stretch our lags and haggle with local women selling berries and other local produce from buckets. I think one women thought she was going to sell me the whole bucket and retire on the proceeds!

 

Each carriage was controlled by a 'provodnitsa', in our case a fierce Russian women who didn't speak a word of English. All the guide books say you shouldn't get on their bad side - and watching ours, I could believe it! Eventually, I managed to get 2 glasses and some sachets of coffee from her and we were able to make ourselves some coffee from the samovar at the end of the corridor - I didn't have the courage to try and get some milk from her! We passed the time eating the food we'd brought with us, reading, watching the scenery roll by and I even managed a game of chess with our young fellow passenger. Our train seemed to be made up exclusively of Russians and we didn't find anyone able to speak more than a couple of words of English - so much for this being a well trodden tourist trail!

 

The second night proved a little easier than the first and in the course of the night the train wound its way up and through the Ural Mountains, passing unheralded into Asia. We awoke in the morning to a subtly different landscape as we approached our next stop of Yekaterinburg.

 

If we had been worried about meeting our guide off the train we needn't have. Konstantin was waiting standing no more than a yard from our carriage door with a huge sign emblazoned with our names. A car was waiting for us right outside and we were whisked off to our worryingly named accommodation for the night (the KGB Hostel), to the blaring sounds of Sputnik FM!

 

We arrived at another rusting metal door in the side of a 60s tenement block leading into a dingy stairwell. But to our great relief we stepped out of the grey concrete corridor into an immaculate 2 level, 2 bedroomed apartment. It seemed that we were the only people staying here today with guests in the other room not arriving until 10 pm the next day. We revelled in the relative comfort and privacy.

 

This left us with a couple of days to explore Yekaterinburg and have to say we have been very impressed. It is a city of 1.5M people that has grown steadily. According to our guide, this is due to an 'enlightened industrial policy', but also clearly due to the presence of a lot of metals and minerals which are mined in the area and processed in local factories and the fact that it has become the capital of the Ural Province.

 

Whatever, it has a very laid back and prosperous feel to it, with a nice lake (formed by a damming of the river) and a lot of historical buildings, including an opera house and philharmonia. Its, rather grizzly, main claim to fame is that Nicholas II,the last of the Romanov Tsars, and his family were captured and executed here in 1918 and then rather unceremoniously dumped in a shallow grave in woodland 10 miles outside of the city. Considerable politics seems to have been played out over this in recent years, but in 2006 a beautiful church and museum commemorating him was built on the site of his execution and a whole monastery complex built on the site where the bodies were found. We were taken to both sites, but nobody really seems able to define attitudes to the whole incident - clearly this is something that continues to exercise post-Soviet Russia. A lot of building work continues to go on, including the recently finished gleaming corporate HQ for Gazprom.

 

So, we have passed a very pleasant couple of days here walking the city and trying out some of the local cuisine - including Palmeni and Verenki, which seem to be a Siberian tribute to ravioli, with dozens of different types of fillings including savoury and sweet.

Now we are girding ourselves for another couple of nights on the Trans Siberian, heading eastwards to the town of Krasnoyarsk, where we will spend some time in a Dacha in the Siberian countryside. As usual, here are some pics from this instalment.

A stop on the Trans Siberian

A view from the Trans Siberian window

The site of the execution of Nicholas II, the last of the Tsars

The family of Nicholas II

A street scene - car, tram, Lenin!

And finally - some of the local cuisine to tempt your taste buds!

 

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