Days 8-11: Train Life

The greatest train journey in the world, as it has been called, began with no fanfare or cheering. It wasn't an especially grand train, that quietly stole out of Moscow in the dead of night. It wasn't especially large, or long, or brightly painted, or in any way significant looking, and the only thing that gave away the vast scale of its journey ahead were the words 'Moskva- Ulanbator' printed on each carriage. Ahead of this train, then, lay over six thousand kilometres of wild Taiga forest and marshy wastelands.

It has also been called the 'Trans-Siberian Express', but 'express' suggests speed, and in fact the great thing about this train was its slowness. When it rolled past tiny fairy-tale villages, there was time to watch the people as they turned over the soil outside their wooden houses, with brightly painted roofs and smoke rising gently from their chimneys away into the forest. There was time to notice purple flowers lining the track, starting to droop in the heat of summer; a hare racing into the undergrowth; dirt tracks snaking away to who-knows-where; a white car held together with parcel tape; abandoned factories with tired pylons resting on rusting pieces of this and that, where trees now flourished from crumbling concrete blocks.

There was time to count eighty-seven wagons full of coal go by the other way; to look at every single soldier in the army of birches that stood by the rails in rows of a million; to watch the sun set over those trees then suddenly rise over open plains. And there was time to be the audience at a thousand miniature plays: the man with his bike but no road to ride it on, the son learning to fish from his father; the little girl perhaps riding a bike for the first time; lonely rail workers in bright vests taking a break, a hundred miles from the nearest station.

So how was life aboard this train? Here is what I wrote in my logbook on the fourth day.

Morning

I'm not too sure how long I've been on this train. It doesn't matter- I am so content I could do the same again. I have a comfortable cabin, music to listen to, interesting company and the world to watch rolling by. I get quite annoyed at my book sometimes for distracting me from this serious business of sitting patiently by the window. Also I love our carriage attendant, who barks at us to get back on the train when it is about to leave the station, who tries not to get out the way when she is working in the corridor, but occasionally she smiles and it feels like I am forgiven for being such a useless foreigner with no Russian or Mongolian. The only limiting factor to my staying here, really, is my lemon, which is almost finished, and without it how will I drink my black tea?

So that is how easy life on board the train is. It is so easy, that sometimes I watch the mile-long freight trains go past and wish that instead of buying a ticket, I had simply waited by the line and jumped into a pile of coal, and suffered my way across Russia like all the proper Siberian explorers did.

Afternoon

After Ulan Ude, it seems that apart from the technicality of the political border, we have entered Mongolia. The electric train is changed for an old diesel and the tracks start to make the proper 'clickety-clack' sound as we pull away from fields and forests, into a new world of open plains and craggy mountains. We also have to stop when there is a cow on the line. I see the eyes light up in the faces of my Mongolian companions- they are nearly home. As for myself, I preferred it when the landscape was dull- I was content then. But now I have the urge to break through the window and run free with the horses beneath this wide, wide sky!