Travel Guides: All Countries / Europe / Russia
 |  | Travel Reviews : Russia |
|
| | | | Across Russia with love and vodka
It is the greatest train ride in the world and one that conjures up images of Cold War suspense, bulbous-domed churches in the middle of nowhere, endless vodka and frozen, snowy wastes.
The Trans-Siberian railway runs for nearly 10,000km across the world's biggest nation. It winds through taiga forest and steppes of grassland as vast as seas, across rivers a mile wide, past villages clustering round it as if it were a lifeline, and through cities that in Soviet days were closed to foreigners and erased from official maps.
Riding the Trans-Siberian is hardly glamorous a la the Orient Express. Depending on your budget, you can elect to while away the hours in a cabin built for two, at a luxury price, a four-berth cabin, or a 52-bed sleeping carriage (which will certainly give you the full-on Russian Experience).
The Trans-Siberian Express does not exist in name. Rather, it's a collective term for the hundreds of services that make up the route from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast, over 9,600km and seven days' ride away.
It starts from stations in the east of Moscow - trains heading down the Volga River to the Tatar capital Kazan leave from Kazansky station, while the trains that pass through Nizhny Novgorod leave from Yaroslavl.
The Trans-Siberian service we take is to Kazan, a 13-hour ride through the Russian night, and our choice of cabin is kupe, the four-berth option. Our cabinmates glare at us unwelcomingly at first, but we later realise this is standard Russian hospitality.
Within half an hour, Farit and Boris are sharing their bottle of vodka, toasting to international friendship and soundly whipping us in chess as the train rattles through the Russian night.
They are the first cabinmates on a month-long journey which takes us from the Moscow suburbs to Russian Far East cities, which are closer to Tokyo - or even San Francisco - than they are Russia's capital.
Travel guide: Russia
Not so silent nights in St Petersburg
For the Christmas Holidays I went to St. Petersburg, together with a friend.
We travelled with Saga holidays. We started out from Manchester Airport with a delay of about an hour, which in turn led us to miss our connection flight in Frankfurt. No matter, the ground staff in Frankfurt showed us into a very comfortable lounge and plied us with coffee, tea and other beverages until the time came for us to board our flight to St Petersburg.
We arrived very late, around 12.30 am local time. Nevertheless, the hotel restaurant staff served us a special prepared meal fit for a king. Our rooms were large, beautifully furnished and clean. I noticed all kind of goodies, laid out on a small table and every night when the staff came to turn down the bed, a chocolate sat on the bedside table. Such a lovely little gesture.
Our visit to the Hermitage (previously the Winter Palace) was a revelation, full of richness and beauty. Beautiful paintings adorned all the ceilings, doors and walls. Most floors had inlaid wood of many colours. I was mesmerised at the beauty and artwork of the Faberge eggs.
The amber room, too, is something to remember forever. Different colour amber pieces cover the walls from floor to ceiling.
Our visit to the St Peter and St Paul Cathedral is engraved into my memory.
The sun shone on Christmas day and a visit to Catherine's Palace and Park for a sleigh ride was on the agenda. Everywhere looked fresh and glistening in the sunshine. However, even with only a little wind, it was bitterly cold.
With three horses in front of every sleigh, we were soon on our way, through the woods. Just like in the film Dr Zhivago with all the trees covered in snow, it truly was a treat not to miss.
On our return, a large table set out baring a giant steaming urn with coffee, very hot pies, (delicious), and for every one a tot of the vodka.
Travel guide: Russia
Journey into the great beyond
From the Mail on Sunday
The waitress in the dining car is as fiercely cheerless as a blizzard and just as lovely. She brusquely slaps the menu on the table. Outside, the landscape between our last stop, Vyatka, and our next, Balyezino, is radiant in the summer sunshine; in here, there is a pronounced chill.
'Salad?' I enquire, already suspecting that this may be a rhetorical question. Salad is off, apparently. 'Nyet salad.' Other diners are chomping on tomato and cucumber starters, but I let it pass. There's a long way to go, and it would be a bad idea to offend the caterers this early in the piece.
'How about the fish?' 'Nyet fish.' She is similarly, loftily - indeed, rather magnificently - dismissive of enquiries after beef, chicken or soup. Eventually, she jabs a pencil to indicate that she might, if pushed, be prepared to serve me omelette with sausage. When it arrives, it's as atrocious as might be expected - the thought of what Russians would consider bad food is a truly horrifying one - but my journey now has a purpose.
The train for the first leg of my journey to Beijing left Moscow's Yaroslavski station last night, and has almost three days to go to Irkutsk, its terminus and my first stopover. I have about 70 hours to get a smile out of Ms Nyet-Salad. I thank her profusely and leave an immense tip. She doesn't flinch.
You can fly from Moscow - an ostensibly capitalist city that is still taking to the free market like a goat to roller-blading - to Beijing - a Communist citadel being triumphally reinvented as a neon-spangled consumerist Babylon, the Great Mall of China - in eight or nine hours.
However, the distance between the two deserves better than being ignored from on high. The 4,887 miles of the Trans-Mongolian route contains forests and deserts, factories and farms, cities and villages, Nike super-stores and statues of Lenin, two border crossings involving searches, and hours of mysterious waiting, and one change of wheels (China's rails are narrower than those of Russia and Mongolia: at Erlyan, just inside the People's Republic, the train is jacked up while new bogies are attached).
The passengers are equally diverse - Russian soldiers, Mongolian bootleggers, Chinese diplomats, Uzbek and Kazakh traders, Australian and British backpackers, and platoons of German tourists (who have block-booked the restaurant car).
As the big blue train leaves Moscow, there is only one other person in my four-berth second-class compartment. Valentin is from Omsk, and while his negligible English and my non-existent Russian make conversation impossible, we find common ground with a timetable printed in English and Russian.
As I swap instant coffee for some of his excellent home-made biscuits, we review the name changes the towns ahead of us have undergone: Vyatka, previously named for Stalin-henchman-turned-Stalin-victim Sergei Kirov; Yekaterin-burg, the end of the line for Russia's royal family, for years called Sverdlovsk after Yacob Sverdlov, the Communist official who organised the Romanovs' murder; Perm, once known as Molotov.
The train, unlike almost everything else in Russia, is clean, comfortable, efficient and, Ms Nyet-Salad aside, run by cheerful and friendly people. The smartly uniformed female attendants vacuum and polish the carriage twice daily and perform heroics in keeping the lavatories bearable (sadly, standards slip dramatically when, after Irkutsk, the carriages are crewed by men).
Travel guide: Russia
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | Stock up for the journey
Each carriage has a pair of toilets and is fussed over by provodnitsas (carriage attendants) who keep the hot water samovar topped up, vacuum the corridors and are stocked with pot noodles, beer and chocolate for anyone foolish enough to have forgotten to bring food with them.
Each train also has a restaurant car, which often does not want to serve foreigners. Even when they do, they often don't have anything to serve - which nine times out of 10 is a blessing.
What the train lacks in formal dining, it makes up for on the social aspect. Russians are impressed at anyone prepared to visit their country and are generous to a fault.
During the course of our month-long trip, we take eight separate trips. The longest of them, from the Buddhist city of Ulan Ude through to the raffishly charming Khabarovsk, takes 52 hours.
Our cabinmates, from the two teenage boys heading to find work in Yekatarinburg to the geothermal energy lecturer returning home to Vladivostok, are unfailingly polite and generous. Even the old man who arrives in the middle of the night with a vodka bottle poking out of his coat pocket turns out to be harmless and a chess tutor of some renown.
The tales of tourists being knocked out with sleeping gas and having their valuables stolen by gangs of thieves is rubbish. While it would be stupid to leave your belongings in plain sight, it's no worse than any other train in the world.
Russia's scenery can be one of beautiful monotony - huge swathes of grassland and low rolling hills, interspersed with clumps of forest and the derelict remains of old Soviet factories and abandoned towns. It's a sometimes surreal, ghostly view, a glimpse into the remains of a long-crumbled empire.
Russian cities are noisy, dirty and often concrete-filled, but Russia does have areas of aching beauty. Lake Baikal, the biggest lake in the world, is regarded as the Pearl of Siberia, a unique environment where the glacial water is so clean and clear that you can drop a coin and still see it tumbling to the depths 40 metres below.
In the European area of Russia, the hills, covered in wheat and with massive combine harvesters rolling in the distance, look like something from old Soviet propaganda films.
And despite their often chaotic air, every Russian city - from the New York-on-speed chaos of Moscow to the edge-of-the-world charm of Khabarovsk - has something to reward the adventurous traveller.
- Feeling inspired? Book a flight or package.
The likely Ladas
Our next treat was a visit to the ballet where we saw Don Quixote. To our amazement, most people walked out as soon as the curtain fell after the first act. All returned when the bell rang and sat in different seats. After two more intervals - each time with different neighbours - suddenly more people entered, standing all against the walls. Presumably, they came in free of charge. However, the performance was outstanding.
You have to visit St Petersburg to believe the traffic chaos. With five million people in one city and most now owning a car, often old or very old Ladas, the traffic is slow, to say the least. Others, without a car, use the Metro. Thousands of people stream on daily basis down the stairs of the Metro, on their way to work.
Many people still live in the tenements, sharing a kitchen with five or six families. Those buildings look cheerless and drab.
One old woman, sweeping snow, held up three fingers and said, "roubles", she then offered me the shovel to clear my path. I declined, but offered her the roubles.
All the people working in the palaces and musea seem very proud of their heritage. Each offered help and advice.
Distrust still lives on in the older people, but the younger generation live with a lighter heart. The children I met in various palaces, where they were on school visits, are very well behaved and polite, dressed nicely and warm.
St Petersburg is truly a city of contrasts. The impression it made on me will last a lifetime.
- Have you got a travel story? We will publish it on p174 on Fridays and on teletextholidays.co.uk. The best one each month wins a £20 book voucher. Send your story to: Travel Desk, Teletext, Building 10, Chiswick Park, Chiswick High Road, London, W4 5TS. Or you can e-mail it to us at: traveldesk@teletext.co.uk — please don't forget to include your name and full address.
A samovar for shaving
They serve tea on request, in glasses cradled by silver holders which are relics of a bygone era: the engraving on the side depicts rockets and satellites being launched from a Kremlin perched on top of the world. A samovar at one end of the corridor provides boiling water for coffee, soup, noodles and shaving.
Siberia - the wasteland to which generations of dissident Russians were exiled - is synonymous with desolation. But at this time of year it looks surprisingly benign: the open spaces are never so empty as to be intimidating, the forests never dense enough to be oppressive.
From Moscow to Irkutsk, it's a bit like looking out of a train window at Berkshire for four days (there are doubtless British rail commuters who know the feeling). The train stops every three or four hours, 10 to 15 minutes at a time - long enough to disembark and browse the impromptu super-markets that await at each station.
A minor industry serves long-distance rail passengers with food (dried fish, fresh vegetables, instant noodles, imported confectionery bearing sell-by dates that elapsed in the first Reagan administration), drink (hideous local soft drinks, excellent local beers, vodkas ranging from export-quality nectar to gruesome window-cleaning moonshine) flowers and immense stuffed toys.
These markets are how most local travellers feed themselves, sparing the expense of the dining car and the tender mercies of Ms Nyet-Salad. Our relationship does not improve as we proceed. This becomes a particular concern after the third day when Valentin departs at Omsk.
He is replaced by a trio of middle-aged Russian men who, while affable enough, are around a week the wrong side of an annual bath, and wish to use the compartment as a venue for their card school.
I make myself as presentable as one can in a tiny, moving bathroom, rehearse a couple of pleasantries from my Russian phrasebook, and present myself to Ms Nyet-Salad. She sits me down without a word, reappears 20 minutes later with omelette with sausage, furiously and unfathomably pulls closed the curtain on the window next to me, and storms off. I tip her twice the cost of the meal.
I spend most of the rest of the ride to Irkutsk in the corridor, watching Siberia go by. The outbreaks of civilisation are grotesque industrial ruins of cities looking like they've just been visited by an enemy air force, or quaint and colourful wooden villages which suggest Switzerland rebuilt on a severe budget.
Siberia is a great place to indulge in the voyeurism that is the principal joy of rail travel, those endless blink-long glimpses of places you will never see again, into lives you can only imagine: soot-blackened railway workers who wave on the approach to Krasnoyarsk, sunbathers by a trickling river that curls around a hamlet near Ilanskaya, intriguingly frequent lone voyagers on motorcycle or foot, yomping across formidable tracts of nowhere between human settlements.
As the rails rattle below, I plot my next assault on the ironclad defences of Ms Nyet-Salad. At lunch (omelette with sausage) on the second-to-last day, I perceived a slight softening.
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | Fried eggs with rice
Upon a particularly raucous guffaw from the Germans I rolled my eyes in mock despair and caught, on the glacially lovely face of Ms Nyet-Salad, what looked like an answering smirk.
My hopes for my last supper are, therefore, high, but they do not maintain altitude long. Tonight, even omelette with sausage is nyet; I dine on two mercilessly fried eggs draped over a glutinous heap of rice, and Ms Nyet-Salad's demeanour makes it clear that whatever might have transpired between us at lunch was an indiscretion of which she has no wish to be reminded. It's over.
My last brilliant idea, of turning up for breakfast on the final day and presenting her with a huge bouquet of flowers and an enormous toy elephant, is abandoned when the platform traders at Zima, the last longish stop before bedtime, have nothing for sale but radishes, chicken and a ferocious vodka which eases by the final hours in an agreeable stupor.
After a couple of days idling in Listvyanka, a village on the shores of Lake Baykal, I return to Irkutsk for the train to Ulan Bator. It has come from Moscow and is largely populated by Mongolians going home with what looks like Russia's annual output of portable tat.
Every compartment is piled with beach balls, costume jewellery, hairspray, deodorant, shoes, watches and Teletubbies bought cheap in Russia, to be sold in Mongolia or en route.
When the train stops at Slyudyanka and Ulan Ude, bidding for polyester dresses hung out of the windows is spirited to the point of occasional scuffles. For most of the 12 or so hours it takes for the train to roll to the Russian border post at Naushki, the corridors thunder with Mongolians swapping merchandise.
A gross of chocolate bars goes for ten cartons of eggs, a crate of beer for a box of shampoos - so that when the inspectors board, none is exceeding the personal limit permitted for one item.
I don't catch the name of the middle-aged woman sharing my compartment - Mongolian sounds like several violin strings snapping at once - but I can tell she's worried. Having failed to offload enough of her enormous shipment of cigarettes, she sets about maximising the storage possibilities of the compartment, unbolting a ceiling panel, prising open heating vents, cramming all available space with her cargo. Clearly she's done this before.
At Naushki, Russian customs officials make their way down the carriage. In a train full of dedicated smugglers, the Russian customs guards search me. My second stopover is in Mongolia's pretty but dishevelled capital, Ulan Bator, notable for its friendly people, cheap shopping and murderous traffic.
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | Abba impersonators
In the evening, I play it safe, sitting on my hotel balcony and watching a German troupe of Abba impersonators play to a crowd of 50 in the park opposite. When the train for the final leg of my journey rolls out of town, it is apparent that Ulan Bator marks the point at which the luxuriant green emptiness of Mongolia's north begins to give way to the harsh yellow emptiness of Mongolia's south.
The Gobi Desert's visual repertoire of sand strewn with camel carcasses and occasional encampment of the circular tents, or gers, of Mongolia's nomads, is interrupted by rugged breeze-block towns - Choyr, Ayrag, Saynshand - that look like they were built by people who don't expect many visitors.
Nevertheless, the platforms fill with hopeful traders as the train pulls in. My first view of China is as crowded and busy as my last of Mongolia was lifeless and quiet. Between the industrial cities of Datong and Zhangjiakou, there isn't a flat surface that isn't being farmed.
Even where the Great Wall crests the forested hills around Badaling and Qinglongqiao, there is scarcely a vista not filled by someone repairing, building, cleaning or on their way somewhere in a hurry.
After ten days indulging in one of the world's best arguments for taking the scenic route, I'm almost feeling guilty by the time we arrive, dead on time, in Beijing. Almost.
Travel facts: Regent Holidays (0117 921 1711) offers an 11-day itinerary on the Trans-Mongolian railway.
|
|
|
|
|
| | Available rental properties in Russia |
|
|
|
|
