So it was that we pulled into UB, inspired by the unfathomably gorgeous scenery for the three hours of daylight we’d had coming into town, but embittered by that miserable train ride. It was Nadaam, day of the national festival, so we had little time to get going. Breakfast at the guesthouse consisted of bread, jam, butter and coffee, not exactly the most important meal of day in Mongolia apparently. The walk to the main stadium for the opening ceremonies, we were told, took 15 minutes. Nearly as hour later, we dragged our sweaty asses onto the festival ground. According to our tickets, we had assigned seats. To how many people they assigned these seats is unclear. There were about twice as many people in the stands as could comfortably fit. It looked like an Indian train car. A jolly big Mongolian in traditional dress elbowed out enough room for me to sit, with Sun in my lap. Close enough.
There were dancers, the President of the country, the “Mongolian Michael Jackson” and Mongol hordes, hundreds of soldiers in nomadic dress. That part was really cool. You can feel the legacy of Chinggis Khan in every Mongolian, and see actual Mongol hordes armed and ready, it was awesome. Chinggis himself appeared, in thespian form of course. But he’s on all the money, too, and in statute form in the main square. Mongolians are still nomadic, many of them, and even city dwellers may spend the summer in a ger on the grasslands. Their lifestyle has change little and they still have great admiration for the greatest of their number to ever walk the earth.
We ate khuushuur, which is fried dough filled with meat, except that we found a vegan one. As Buddhism recovers from Communist suppression – a process only 20 years in the making – vegetarianism is gaining a following. Western influence is also contributing. Mongolia has received a significant amount of investment, particularly in the mining sector, and there are worries that this, too, will corrupt the nation.
We drank kvas – they got it from the Russians and seem to really like it. We drank airag – the local fermented mare’s milk. We drank Chinggis beer, which is pretty good. And then we went back to the hotel. A thunderstorm blew in rather quickly, and so we had to wait an hour and a half to get dinner. Everything was flooded. It took forever to go even one block, it was so hard to find dry spots to zig zag a path. It actually took a few days for the streetlakes to dry out – surprised we didn’t see people getting around on horseback to solve the problem. Mongolia is definitely an experience.
After a couple of days in town at the festival, we headed for the countryside. Most people, if they’re not going for Nadaam, go to Mongolia specifically for the countryside. It is vast, endless rolling grassland, dotted with sheep, horses, goats and gers. We saw a few sites, like the Erdene Zuu monastery, but on the whole the highlight was simply being out there. The views were amazing, as were the stars at night. We slept in tourist gers, which were comfortable and cozy. We had an excellent guide and a serious vehicle. We could not have asked for more, really.
After we expressed an interest in trying more airag, our guide Gana took us to find some. How it works is this. You drive around looking for horses. If you see lots of foals, you stop in at the ger. This is what people do – they just drop in randomly on strangers. It’s part of the culture. So we stopped by this family and were treated to some airag from the bucket. It’s thin drinking yoghurt, very mildly alcoholic, and you’ll be full long before you’re even remotely tipsy. Three mugs each and we were bloated and ready to crash out. So that’s what we did. After all the intense traveling, it was nice to have very little to do.
We returned to the city and the next morning we dragged our bags to the station for the last leg of the journey, a 31 hour ride to Beijing. Everybody was dragging their bags, along with extra bags full of food and water. For once, our load seemed normal. We were fearful, though, as this was another Mongolian train. We were booked in 1st class, however, and this gave us hope.
It rocked. The cabins were brilliant, probably the best we’ve ever seen. The beds were stacked, so that the other side of the room had two things. The first was a chair – okay it was dusty and mildewy a bit and made me cough – but we had a proper chair to sit in. There was also a bathroom. It was shared between two cabins – close enough to private. With toilet paper, a shower, more amenities and less stench than most train bathrooms, this was luxury at its finest. The car was quiet – it was actually mostly tourists – and we settled in for a peaceful ride.
It was not without its glitches. The cabin with which we shared the bathroom was occupied by a sick lady, and I got that cold for a while. The border wait was long and boring again. But the Gobi Desert was awesome. There were random camels and fly-blown villages and endless stretches of nothing.
The next morning we awoke to China. We were out of the desert and everything looked, well, like China. That means grey and polluted. It means Communist apartment blocks and ramshackle mud villages. We could no longer read any of the signs – Mongolians use Cyrillic so we could still decipher signs there.
We rolled through some beautiful mountains and gorges on our way to Beijing, but we could hardly see any of it through the haze. There were no stops of consequence either, so we were glad to have a well-appointed cabin and a stockpile of instant noodles. When we pulled into Beijing, it was show time.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
The Ride to Mongolia
We were standing at the top of the stairs, looking out over the entire platform where our train to Ulanbaatar was waiting, and we knew already it was going to be a problem.
Already the orderly shopping and smoking of normal Russian train stops had been replaced by chaos, people pushing, crowding and hawking. There is an energy to the third world that can be quite stimulating and attractive, but sometimes it is mostly just a mess and a hassle. With giant bags and a long journey ahead of us, mess and hassle were not want we wanted. Not that we had any choice in the matter.
We got into the carriage and went to our cabin, 2nd class, shared accommodations. For this run, 1st class was already sold out: because of the visa problems we hadn’t been able to book early. But second class isn’t usually a big deal on these trains anyway. Except this time.
It was a total joke. The sheets were crumpled in a ball on the bed. The table was filthy with garbage, dirty dishes and random sticky spots. Bags were everywhere – in our baggage spots even. We have big bags ourselves, no room to share space, so we can’t accommodate anybody else’s luggage. And especially not when going across a border. It was an absolute disaster – the more expletives you add to that the closer you’ll come to how we felt.
We were mad. The owner of the bags was, predictably, AWOL. We moved all the bags into the corridor. Not our problem. We moved the open jar of pickles into the corridor as well. You read that correctly – an open jar of pickles, sitting on the floor in the middle of the compartment. Bobbing in the brine and everything. Your guess is as good as mine, but the jar was also summarily removed. Cleaning the place was an extensive procedure, and naturally the cabin crew were nowhere to be seen. We’d spotted them taking bribes as we got on the train, so we didn’t have a lot of faith in them from the outset.
We were just sitting down after getting rid of the old sheets, getting fresh ones and scrubbing down our table – not our jobs but waiting for the attendants was clearly going to be futile – when this fat Mongolian shows up. (In fairness, there are a lot of big, stocky Mongolians). He immediately starts screaming and grunting – Mongolian can be pretty coarse to the ear. We just look at him, standing there in our doorway acting like an idiot. We were in no mood for this crap, but our cabinmate was a trilingual Mongolian and we let him do the talking. The fat Mongolian makes a throat-slash gesture.
Welcome to Mongolia – we’re not even there yet and they’re trying to kill us. Our cabinmate was trying to calm the guy down. The guy actually thought he was entitled to use our space for his stuff. Screw that.
Don’t worry, though, it got better. This journey was the gift that kept giving, for the full 18 hours. We barely had a moment of peace. We it came, we were able to enjoy the scenery as it became increasingly beautiful heading south towards the border, with forests thinning out into rivers and steppe. Those peaceful moments were sparse, what with the cavalcade of mental midgets coming by our cabin, in addition to our grunting, belligerent friend.
There was another guy, another trader with multiple bags of goods. We’ll call him Dumbass, so as to distinguish him from Fatass. He was trying to spread all his possessions all over the carriage to avoid paying customs. Yes, that’s what I want when crossing a border: some guy saying “Here, just hold onto this bag for me ‘til we get to the other side.” Our cabinmate, good guy, was perhaps a bit naïve or maybe just intimidated, and took some bags, as did most of the other Mongolians on the train, to the chagrin of the foreigners who were stuck with these bags. Not on our side of the cabin, mind you, no way.
The Russian border police, for their part, were having none of it. I was in the process of hauling giant bags out of our cabin and back into the hallway when they boarded, with Dumbass coming down the hallway to stress out about it. They had him pegged immediately – they knew it had nothing to do with us. They told Dumbass off. The bags were removed and sent down the hall to live with him for the crossing. He freaked and panicked. Normally, such histrionics would fall into the “not our problem, don’t care” file, but he did get our attention when after one tongue-lashing from a border guard he threw a big red suitcase flying down the hall, crashing by our door and spilling its contents all over the corridor.
Border crossed – after six hours I should note, most of which were under conditions of zero access to the toilet. We kept a sentry on duty while I made a beer run. If I had known we were about to lose access to our bathroom I probably wouldn’t have made a beer run but we were bored and knew it would take six hours. Fatass came by. One hour of me sitting around doing nothing, and he just happens to come by in the five minutes that I was gone? So Sunshine is sitting there by herself and he grunts whatever stupid thing he wanted to grunt, the coward not man enough to come by until he saw me walking to the store. Unreal.
With the border crossed, we rolled through the night towards Ulanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. I would have preferred to look out the window at the new country but it was night. Good time for some shut-eye, right? Maybe a little peace and quiet after all that stupidity? No, not quite.
There are two locks on these train doors, a mechanical lock where the handle is and another blunt lock that simply blocks the door from being opened more than a crack. We learned that the handle lock didn’t work when a random lady opened the door as we were sitting around reading. What? I went outside, Sunshine locked me out and sure enough I powered the door open. It had been tampered with, broken, whatever. One lock down. The other one didn’t work either. We found that out when Dumbass burst through in the middle of the night. What the hell?
He passed out within seconds of breaking in. He was drunk as hell, no doubt, the smell confirmed that. The cabin attendants, as they’d been the entire trip, were worthless. They were in on whatever was going on at the border – and if this guy was paying them then one can imagine how much help they were going to be. I did try to get their help on the matter of the passed out drunken a-hole in our room. They just laughed. Not sure what you do. The train was full or we would have moved to a different car a long time ago. You could do something to the guy, but if he wakes up you’re kind of screwed because he has a bunch of friends down the hall.
Later, we found out how this worked. His ticket was only to Sukhbaatar, on the border. He’d paid the conductors for the bed, and they’d already tampered with the locks. It was our bad luck that the free bed was in our cabin. The conductors were getting paid to let a drunken loser break into our room and pass out. We were entirely on our own, in a brand new country, rolling through the countryside with no towns of any sort, and no hope other than that things wouldn’t get even worse than they already were.
There is some humour in it, I guess. Like when Drinky McIdiot rolled off the bed onto the floor and stayed there. Our polite Mongolian cabinmate attempted to poke and prod the guy awake because he had fallen on our cabinmate’s bag, but to no avail. We tried to chill out and relax, but it really wasn’t something that was going to happen. We could not get off that train fast enough.
Already the orderly shopping and smoking of normal Russian train stops had been replaced by chaos, people pushing, crowding and hawking. There is an energy to the third world that can be quite stimulating and attractive, but sometimes it is mostly just a mess and a hassle. With giant bags and a long journey ahead of us, mess and hassle were not want we wanted. Not that we had any choice in the matter.
We got into the carriage and went to our cabin, 2nd class, shared accommodations. For this run, 1st class was already sold out: because of the visa problems we hadn’t been able to book early. But second class isn’t usually a big deal on these trains anyway. Except this time.
It was a total joke. The sheets were crumpled in a ball on the bed. The table was filthy with garbage, dirty dishes and random sticky spots. Bags were everywhere – in our baggage spots even. We have big bags ourselves, no room to share space, so we can’t accommodate anybody else’s luggage. And especially not when going across a border. It was an absolute disaster – the more expletives you add to that the closer you’ll come to how we felt.
We were mad. The owner of the bags was, predictably, AWOL. We moved all the bags into the corridor. Not our problem. We moved the open jar of pickles into the corridor as well. You read that correctly – an open jar of pickles, sitting on the floor in the middle of the compartment. Bobbing in the brine and everything. Your guess is as good as mine, but the jar was also summarily removed. Cleaning the place was an extensive procedure, and naturally the cabin crew were nowhere to be seen. We’d spotted them taking bribes as we got on the train, so we didn’t have a lot of faith in them from the outset.
We were just sitting down after getting rid of the old sheets, getting fresh ones and scrubbing down our table – not our jobs but waiting for the attendants was clearly going to be futile – when this fat Mongolian shows up. (In fairness, there are a lot of big, stocky Mongolians). He immediately starts screaming and grunting – Mongolian can be pretty coarse to the ear. We just look at him, standing there in our doorway acting like an idiot. We were in no mood for this crap, but our cabinmate was a trilingual Mongolian and we let him do the talking. The fat Mongolian makes a throat-slash gesture.
Welcome to Mongolia – we’re not even there yet and they’re trying to kill us. Our cabinmate was trying to calm the guy down. The guy actually thought he was entitled to use our space for his stuff. Screw that.
Don’t worry, though, it got better. This journey was the gift that kept giving, for the full 18 hours. We barely had a moment of peace. We it came, we were able to enjoy the scenery as it became increasingly beautiful heading south towards the border, with forests thinning out into rivers and steppe. Those peaceful moments were sparse, what with the cavalcade of mental midgets coming by our cabin, in addition to our grunting, belligerent friend.
There was another guy, another trader with multiple bags of goods. We’ll call him Dumbass, so as to distinguish him from Fatass. He was trying to spread all his possessions all over the carriage to avoid paying customs. Yes, that’s what I want when crossing a border: some guy saying “Here, just hold onto this bag for me ‘til we get to the other side.” Our cabinmate, good guy, was perhaps a bit naïve or maybe just intimidated, and took some bags, as did most of the other Mongolians on the train, to the chagrin of the foreigners who were stuck with these bags. Not on our side of the cabin, mind you, no way.
The Russian border police, for their part, were having none of it. I was in the process of hauling giant bags out of our cabin and back into the hallway when they boarded, with Dumbass coming down the hallway to stress out about it. They had him pegged immediately – they knew it had nothing to do with us. They told Dumbass off. The bags were removed and sent down the hall to live with him for the crossing. He freaked and panicked. Normally, such histrionics would fall into the “not our problem, don’t care” file, but he did get our attention when after one tongue-lashing from a border guard he threw a big red suitcase flying down the hall, crashing by our door and spilling its contents all over the corridor.
Border crossed – after six hours I should note, most of which were under conditions of zero access to the toilet. We kept a sentry on duty while I made a beer run. If I had known we were about to lose access to our bathroom I probably wouldn’t have made a beer run but we were bored and knew it would take six hours. Fatass came by. One hour of me sitting around doing nothing, and he just happens to come by in the five minutes that I was gone? So Sunshine is sitting there by herself and he grunts whatever stupid thing he wanted to grunt, the coward not man enough to come by until he saw me walking to the store. Unreal.
With the border crossed, we rolled through the night towards Ulanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. I would have preferred to look out the window at the new country but it was night. Good time for some shut-eye, right? Maybe a little peace and quiet after all that stupidity? No, not quite.
There are two locks on these train doors, a mechanical lock where the handle is and another blunt lock that simply blocks the door from being opened more than a crack. We learned that the handle lock didn’t work when a random lady opened the door as we were sitting around reading. What? I went outside, Sunshine locked me out and sure enough I powered the door open. It had been tampered with, broken, whatever. One lock down. The other one didn’t work either. We found that out when Dumbass burst through in the middle of the night. What the hell?
He passed out within seconds of breaking in. He was drunk as hell, no doubt, the smell confirmed that. The cabin attendants, as they’d been the entire trip, were worthless. They were in on whatever was going on at the border – and if this guy was paying them then one can imagine how much help they were going to be. I did try to get their help on the matter of the passed out drunken a-hole in our room. They just laughed. Not sure what you do. The train was full or we would have moved to a different car a long time ago. You could do something to the guy, but if he wakes up you’re kind of screwed because he has a bunch of friends down the hall.
Later, we found out how this worked. His ticket was only to Sukhbaatar, on the border. He’d paid the conductors for the bed, and they’d already tampered with the locks. It was our bad luck that the free bed was in our cabin. The conductors were getting paid to let a drunken loser break into our room and pass out. We were entirely on our own, in a brand new country, rolling through the countryside with no towns of any sort, and no hope other than that things wouldn’t get even worse than they already were.
There is some humour in it, I guess. Like when Drinky McIdiot rolled off the bed onto the floor and stayed there. Our polite Mongolian cabinmate attempted to poke and prod the guy awake because he had fallen on our cabinmate’s bag, but to no avail. We tried to chill out and relax, but it really wasn’t something that was going to happen. We could not get off that train fast enough.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Calm Before the Storm
The ride to Ulan Ude was very smooth. It’s actually one of the best parts of the Trans-Siberian because for two or three hours the track runs alongside Lake Baikal, giving off great views. It was like a long, extended good-bye. On Olkhon, we’d had the chance to dip our toes into its cold waters. With wind-blown trees around us, shamanistic totems above us, the power of the frigid, mile-deep waters was palpable. The locals know it, too, and there are many shaman sites around the island. Baikal is one of the most spiritually powerful places I’ve been too. It sucks you into its vortex and you don’t really want to leave.
As we skirted the lake on the train, we mostly stared out the window. Farewell came and soon we were in Ulan Ude. It was with great – great – relief that we saw two girls on the platform bearing a sign that read “Sunshine”. For once, our contacts were there waiting for us. They took us to the guesthouse – a tiny one with just three rooms – and then guided us around town. Ulan Ude is good for two things, basically. One is the Lenin head. It must be the largest such thing in Russia. It towers over the main square, black and round like the giant Communist bowling ball of death just waiting to roll over the hapless bourgeoisie. The Russians still like Lenin, for the most part, along with other aspects of Soviet kitsch. There are Soviet kitsch restaurants in St. Petersburg and Moscow...the ones too young to have truly suffered those days just love it.
The other thing about Ulan Ude is that it is a cultural transition zone. The Buryats are Mongols and Ulan Ude is their capital. It still feels like Russia, but the people are more Asian. And for anyone going to Mongolia, it is a worthwhile introduction to the culture. They even eat the same food – buuza (in Mongolia just buuz), a steamed dumpling filled with meat.
We actually had way too much time in Ulan Ude, but it gave us a chance to explore a bit. We found three brewpubs, which was good times. The largest and most professional was Bier Haus, which sits at the edge of town. A row of stalls lines the road leading there and in one of those we found five more beers we’d not seen until that point. It wasn’t really a pub, but we made it one.
When the sun finally set, we hit up a very well-stocked grocery store we’d found for provisions for the 18-hour ride to Ulanbaatar. A little tipsy, we bought way too much food. The prize purchase has to have been the bag of ikura. It was cheap by ikura standards, but what exactly did we think we were going to do with it?
As it turns out, figuring out what to do with an abundance of salmon roe wasn't even close to the worst of our problems on that journey.
As we skirted the lake on the train, we mostly stared out the window. Farewell came and soon we were in Ulan Ude. It was with great – great – relief that we saw two girls on the platform bearing a sign that read “Sunshine”. For once, our contacts were there waiting for us. They took us to the guesthouse – a tiny one with just three rooms – and then guided us around town. Ulan Ude is good for two things, basically. One is the Lenin head. It must be the largest such thing in Russia. It towers over the main square, black and round like the giant Communist bowling ball of death just waiting to roll over the hapless bourgeoisie. The Russians still like Lenin, for the most part, along with other aspects of Soviet kitsch. There are Soviet kitsch restaurants in St. Petersburg and Moscow...the ones too young to have truly suffered those days just love it.
The other thing about Ulan Ude is that it is a cultural transition zone. The Buryats are Mongols and Ulan Ude is their capital. It still feels like Russia, but the people are more Asian. And for anyone going to Mongolia, it is a worthwhile introduction to the culture. They even eat the same food – buuza (in Mongolia just buuz), a steamed dumpling filled with meat.
We actually had way too much time in Ulan Ude, but it gave us a chance to explore a bit. We found three brewpubs, which was good times. The largest and most professional was Bier Haus, which sits at the edge of town. A row of stalls lines the road leading there and in one of those we found five more beers we’d not seen until that point. It wasn’t really a pub, but we made it one.
When the sun finally set, we hit up a very well-stocked grocery store we’d found for provisions for the 18-hour ride to Ulanbaatar. A little tipsy, we bought way too much food. The prize purchase has to have been the bag of ikura. It was cheap by ikura standards, but what exactly did we think we were going to do with it?
As it turns out, figuring out what to do with an abundance of salmon roe wasn't even close to the worst of our problems on that journey.
Saturday, August 20, 2011
Into the Land of the Omul-Eaters
We took a stop at Irkutsk, like many people do. It must be the most popular stop on the entire Trans-Siberian. We wanted to head to the remote Olkhon Island, in Lake Baikal. A mile deep, holding 20% of the world’s fresh water and no small amount off the world’s powerful nature spirits, Baikal is a special place. But first you have to get there.
We had somebody make arrangements for us ahead of time. And just like last time, those arrangements weren’t really worth much. We had been told that a minibus would leave at 11am to take us there, from the train station. They’d have our names on a sign, waiting for us when we got off the train. And of course our minibus would have “Olkhon” written on a sign in its window, too.
We didn’t honestly expect to see someone standing there with our names on a sign, but we also couldn’t find the minibus, either. Must not be here yet, we thought, it’s only 9:30. No worries, just find a bench and relax. I bought a chebureki – fried dough filled with meat and onions. Three bites in I donated it to the local pigeons, fumbling it to the ground, then cursing myself for doing so. But seriously, there are a million variations of meat in dough around the world, and chebureki is one of the better ones in my experience. No idea why. It’s mystery meat of the highest order, greasy as all heck, and spiced according to Russian tastes, which is to say not at all. I probably shouldn’t even like it, but I do.
10:55 arrived and still no minibus. Now we were getting worried, especially after what had happened in Krasnoyarsk. We did not need to be stranded for 3 days in Irkutsk. With onward tickets already booked we knew we might be able to move on, but it would mean forfeiting the tickets we’d already purchased. Oh, and three days in Irkutsk is a lot, especially when sleeping on park benches.
11am rolls around and we’re getting worried for real. We didn’t have a place to stay in town, and we didn’t really know what we were going to do if we couldn’t get to the island. Drink beer down by the river, I suppose. I know I said that last time, but that’s what you do in Russia in the summertime. They set up seasonal beer tents. They’ve got sound systems, draught taps and the whole works. And then they all go drink beer by the river. And eat dried fish. Or smoked fish. Whichever you like better.
With our situation becoming rather murky, Sunshine suggests I ask at the minibus that’s been there a while and looks like it’s ready to leave. It has no sign, it looks a bit like a private tour actually, but it looked promising, I guess because the driver had a Baikal shirt. I am the designated “talker”, on account of knowing more Russian than Sunshine. I asked, and it was the minibus we wanted. What? Yeah, our fixer hadn’t fixed a single thing for us. Thankfully, we did it for ourselves. Crisis averted. We probably should have asked much earlier but no worries because we were on the minibus and on our way.
The road to Olkhon is long and mostly boring, through pastureland. Did you know they raise cows in Siberia? Well, they do. Sometimes, like when we’re rolling past birch forests, Siberia looks like Siberia. But green grass fields with cows? Who knew?
As you near the lake, the green of life disappears. The ground becomes a barren moonscape, the villages increasingly desolate. At the penultimate village, the roads are littered with stray dogs and fallen drunks, right in the middle of the street. Amid the desolation, there are totem sticks at the side of the road and among the Buryat people that live here, elements of shamanism must still exist. These totem sticks are not unlike shrines you see at the side of the road in a lot of Asian countries. We saw a stupa, too – Buryats are Buddhist, almost unique among Russia’s ethnic stew (Tuvans are as well).
A short ferry takes you to Olkhon. By this point we’d been blasting at 80 km/h on dirt roads, jarring our vehicles and our bones. The scenery, aside from the decrepit villages, was stark beauty. On the island, it is more of the same. The driver didn’t seem to care much for his vehicle and we hammered through the rocky landscape, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
The main settlement on Olkhon Island is Kuzhir, a ramshackle wooden village. Sunshine made a good point – it looked like what a village in British Columbia would have looked like in the 19th century, just ramshackle wooden buildings and a muddy main street. The island is basically split between the barren southern and western parts and the green northeastern parts. The village sits at the edge of the forested part of the island, close to both water and wood. Even at that, life must be tough.
Smoked fish are cheap here, and a traditional source of life. These fish are called omul, and they are among the tastiest fish on the planet. Our guide in Ulan Ude would later note, in reference to omul, “I eat no other fish.” By that point, after several days of indulgence, the statement did not seem unreasonable at all. Omul come in a lot of different forms here, different treatments, cures, and levels of smoke. You can buy fresh ones, too, and the locals use them to make a ceviche-like dish.
Olkhon only recently received electricity and is starting to become an eco-tourism destination. Such places – relatively undiscovered and underdeveloped – can be great, albeit with some frustrations as well, as there remain some kinks in need of ironing. Here, though, the biggest problem was the weather. It’s Siberia. It was cold and rainy. The week before was hot and sunny, we were told, great for hiking, mountain biking and excursions for shamanic sites and traditional Buryat villages.
For us, however, the deluge meant forgoing all of those things and staying in our warm and cozy cabin. I finally finished my book. I’m a slow reader, and books take me forever to get through. We comforted ourselves with delicious smoked omul and planned a trip to the banya. Once they get this place going, Olkhon will be a great destination. And if they leave that road unpaved and the crossing to the island unbridged, it will probably remain an off-the-beaten track treasure.
But who knows what they’ll do – they need the money. There is no economy. Most of rural Siberia is subsistence living. The wooden villages are pretty, but there’s no industry and the growing season is short. Olkhon appears worthless for agriculture, so it’s all about the fish. A few years ago, stocks were at a low level and fishing for omul was banned – the locals kept fishing anyway because that’s about all they eat most of the year.
Overall, the richness and variety of smoked and dried fish in Russia is unparalleled, and the prices are great. One could be excused, upon sampling some oily, smoke-rich omul, for thinking that a life of eating nothing else is really not that hard a life after all. We felt like Olkhon was the land of the lotus-eaters, substituting lotus for omul. Even the Wikipedia article on the fish cites it as a “highlight of travelers along the Trans-Siberian”. Yup.
The other thing about rural places is the quality of sleep. I grew up in the suburbs, and I remember having trouble sleeping at my grandparents’ place in the country. It was too dark and too quiet. Now places like this are unbelievably good for sleep. Yet, it’s also interesting that we’re so spoiled for daylight I feel a little cheated when we actually have night time. Why does it need to get dark at all? We start going south in a few days and the adjustment will be a little weird.
We never did see good weather on Olkhon. The sun finally arrived about the same time we left the island, so at least our evening in Irkutsk was bright. That was more fun. The same non-fixer who had “booked” our passage on the minibus – but clearly did not – had set us up with a guesthouse. This place did not exist. We went to the address and nothing. We searched around – we’ve stayed in unconventional places without signs before – and nothing. We ended up staying at the Hotel Irkutsk, the local Soviet-era monstrosity. It was perfectly fine, and cost less than we’d expected. We walked along the river (as did the rest of the city) and had beers on a barge as the sun set on us for the first time in days. It felt good, and the next day was just a six-hour train ride to Ulan Ude.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
The Krasnoyarsk Story
And then things went off the rails.
Not the train, thankfully. That thing just kept on rolling. Coming into Krasnoyarsk, the scenery got prettier. Green rolling hills were dotted with picaresque wooden villages – those villages will truly be emblematic of Siberia for me now. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours when we pulled into Krasnoyarsk. The timezone thing was starting to really get to me. Our arrival was at 2:30am Moscow time, and that’s where I was stuck, even though locally it was 6:30 am. I had fallen asleep at the early hour of 11pm Moscow time…so you can see I got almost no sleep.
We’d expected to be met at the train station, by our homestay host/guide. We had visions of a hot shower – important after a 34 hour train ride – and a big bowl of porridge, followed by a big hike in beautiful Stolby Park just outside of town. Instead, we enjoyed panic, despair, and a few hours inside of a Subway being blasted by the soundtrack to a phenomenally crappy nightclub.
Our guide was a no-show. It is such an empty feeling, to get off the train expecting somebody to meet you and seeing nothing. Nobody. This was really, really, really not cool.
Krasnoyarsk is not Moscow – there isn’t much to do and not many places to stay. I’ve been down this road before. A $25 hotel room that costs $200, and an afternoon sucking back beer down by the river was starting to look as good as our day was going to get. The whole homestay thing was sight unseen, without even much information online. We were already out on a limb, but we wanted a really good experience in a short amount of time. Now we were stranded. What to do?
Well the first step was to call the homestay, right. Need Skype for that. The train station, of course, was in the grottiest part of town. It was grim times, but there was a Subway not too far away, and it was open. That became our home base. For many frustrating hours. This being Russia, they played very bad music at very high volumes for the duration of our stay. Can't complain too much, though, because the laissez-faire attitude of the staff allowed us to set up camp for several hours without actually buying anything. At one point we actually tried to buy something, but couldn't find anybody to actually process the transaction.
Eventually we were able to get hold of our host. She realized the mistake she made was pretty bad, and wanted a second chance. We rolled with it.
Stolby, the park we’d come to see with its green-cloaked mountains punctuated by sharp rocky outcroppings, was closed. As it turned out, they’d had some problems with the local bears (language lesson - 'bear' in Russian is 'medved') including some people being chased onto a roof and that sort of thing. Bears, huh. I guess we didn’t want to deal with bears anyway. What am I going to do with a bear? Stab it with my cheese-slicing knife? Call it names? No thank you.
They have a local equivalent of Grouse Mountain in Krasnoyarsk, so we did that, a packaged nature where you mostly just look at the wilderness from the top of a peak that you access by chairlift while drinking Japanese beer. It is a very pretty area, and we didn’t get the exercise we’d wanted, but it was a good substitute. There were no bears.
The homestay was actually quite nice. The hosts were friendly and we were well-fed. Krasnoyarsk – more than any other Siberian city we saw – has neighbourhoods that are essentially villages, with the wooden houses and lots of green space. We stayed out there, in one of those little village-hoods, on the edge of town.
They had a kitten named Tomas, a savage killer in the making. We did battle. Kittens love play-fighting, and I’m more than happy to accommodate. For dinner they served us some smoked salmon. It was the best we’d ever tasted. We asked where they got it – some old lady or fifteenth-generation smokehouse no doubt. The grocery store, they said. We were floored – they just randomly bought smoked salmon from the grocery store and it was the best we’d ever had. The Siberians seriously know about smoking fish.
The next leg, our third in total, was our first leg in 1st class. First class is definitely a step up. The clean bathrooms actually have toilet paper - most other trains seem to have budgeted a single roll for trips that average four or five days. Great if you're first to the dump as you're leaving Moscow but otherwise, well, there's a reason they sell toilet paper at the kiosks in the train stations. And the toilet paper is, um, well technically it is paper and it is positioned in the toilet, on a roll. But that's about the only way you'd know it was toilet paper...might as well use yesterday's newspaper. Hemorrhoid sufferers look out!
But most of all in first class you have two beds in the cabin, so no roommates. It is a little antisocial, yes, but privacy is the biggest luxury of all. It’s not a five-star experience or anything, with a big giant bathroom, a palm-lined beach or a pillow menu, but it’s nice to have space to yourself and it makes the trip just so much easier. The ride to Irkutsk takes 18 hours. Feels like nothing. You’re literally sitting there, two hours into the journey, wondering if you’re going to have time to do anything at all. A couple of beers, a couple of chapters, a quick nap and we’ll be there. And there is one of the most amazing places we’ve ever seen.
Not the train, thankfully. That thing just kept on rolling. Coming into Krasnoyarsk, the scenery got prettier. Green rolling hills were dotted with picaresque wooden villages – those villages will truly be emblematic of Siberia for me now. I hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours when we pulled into Krasnoyarsk. The timezone thing was starting to really get to me. Our arrival was at 2:30am Moscow time, and that’s where I was stuck, even though locally it was 6:30 am. I had fallen asleep at the early hour of 11pm Moscow time…so you can see I got almost no sleep.
We’d expected to be met at the train station, by our homestay host/guide. We had visions of a hot shower – important after a 34 hour train ride – and a big bowl of porridge, followed by a big hike in beautiful Stolby Park just outside of town. Instead, we enjoyed panic, despair, and a few hours inside of a Subway being blasted by the soundtrack to a phenomenally crappy nightclub.
Our guide was a no-show. It is such an empty feeling, to get off the train expecting somebody to meet you and seeing nothing. Nobody. This was really, really, really not cool.
Krasnoyarsk is not Moscow – there isn’t much to do and not many places to stay. I’ve been down this road before. A $25 hotel room that costs $200, and an afternoon sucking back beer down by the river was starting to look as good as our day was going to get. The whole homestay thing was sight unseen, without even much information online. We were already out on a limb, but we wanted a really good experience in a short amount of time. Now we were stranded. What to do?
Well the first step was to call the homestay, right. Need Skype for that. The train station, of course, was in the grottiest part of town. It was grim times, but there was a Subway not too far away, and it was open. That became our home base. For many frustrating hours. This being Russia, they played very bad music at very high volumes for the duration of our stay. Can't complain too much, though, because the laissez-faire attitude of the staff allowed us to set up camp for several hours without actually buying anything. At one point we actually tried to buy something, but couldn't find anybody to actually process the transaction.
Eventually we were able to get hold of our host. She realized the mistake she made was pretty bad, and wanted a second chance. We rolled with it.
Stolby, the park we’d come to see with its green-cloaked mountains punctuated by sharp rocky outcroppings, was closed. As it turned out, they’d had some problems with the local bears (language lesson - 'bear' in Russian is 'medved') including some people being chased onto a roof and that sort of thing. Bears, huh. I guess we didn’t want to deal with bears anyway. What am I going to do with a bear? Stab it with my cheese-slicing knife? Call it names? No thank you.
They have a local equivalent of Grouse Mountain in Krasnoyarsk, so we did that, a packaged nature where you mostly just look at the wilderness from the top of a peak that you access by chairlift while drinking Japanese beer. It is a very pretty area, and we didn’t get the exercise we’d wanted, but it was a good substitute. There were no bears.
The homestay was actually quite nice. The hosts were friendly and we were well-fed. Krasnoyarsk – more than any other Siberian city we saw – has neighbourhoods that are essentially villages, with the wooden houses and lots of green space. We stayed out there, in one of those little village-hoods, on the edge of town.
They had a kitten named Tomas, a savage killer in the making. We did battle. Kittens love play-fighting, and I’m more than happy to accommodate. For dinner they served us some smoked salmon. It was the best we’d ever tasted. We asked where they got it – some old lady or fifteenth-generation smokehouse no doubt. The grocery store, they said. We were floored – they just randomly bought smoked salmon from the grocery store and it was the best we’d ever had. The Siberians seriously know about smoking fish.
The next leg, our third in total, was our first leg in 1st class. First class is definitely a step up. The clean bathrooms actually have toilet paper - most other trains seem to have budgeted a single roll for trips that average four or five days. Great if you're first to the dump as you're leaving Moscow but otherwise, well, there's a reason they sell toilet paper at the kiosks in the train stations. And the toilet paper is, um, well technically it is paper and it is positioned in the toilet, on a roll. But that's about the only way you'd know it was toilet paper...might as well use yesterday's newspaper. Hemorrhoid sufferers look out!
But most of all in first class you have two beds in the cabin, so no roommates. It is a little antisocial, yes, but privacy is the biggest luxury of all. It’s not a five-star experience or anything, with a big giant bathroom, a palm-lined beach or a pillow menu, but it’s nice to have space to yourself and it makes the trip just so much easier. The ride to Irkutsk takes 18 hours. Feels like nothing. You’re literally sitting there, two hours into the journey, wondering if you’re going to have time to do anything at all. A couple of beers, a couple of chapters, a quick nap and we’ll be there. And there is one of the most amazing places we’ve ever seen.
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Rolling Through Siberia
Moscow seems like a very long time ago. We’re east of Novosibirsk on the second leg of the journey, still nine hours out from Krasnoyarsk. We entered Siberia, technically, somewhere just west of Tyumen, which was only a few hours after leaving Ekaterinburg. We toasted with a few beers purchased on the train platform in Tyumen, something the Russians are planning to ban (sales of beer at train stations) in 2013. I don’t really see what problem this solves – people want to find oblivion for a number of reasons and convenience isn’t really high on that list. And for those of us who want a beer for non-oblivion reasons, such rules are nothing short of ridiculous. Hey Dmitri, do something about the world’s highest number of junkies, before enacting stupid laws that take the fun out of those long-distance train rides.
Tyumen was the first of several cities that we would pass by. In the western part of Siberia, there are cities with some regularity. It was dark in Tyumen. The train system in Russia runs entirely on Moscow time, which can be a bit disorienting as you progress through the countries nine or so time zones. You wake up in the morning and the meal car isn’t open because to them it is in the middle of the night. But they’re still serving dinner at what to you is 2am.
When we awoke, sometime past the city of Omsk, the landscape had become decidedly more Siberian. It was flat, with and endless expanse of forests, fields and bogs. Villages are nearly all wooden now, sometimes brightly painted, and having a much cozier, more timeless appearance. A few hours before Novosibirsk we stopped at a place called Barabinsk. This was classic. The platform consisted of a thin strip of chewed-up tarmac, clearly not having received a single kopeck of funding for repair since the end of Communism, and possibly some time before that. Babushkas owned this place, walking around selling bread, fried doughy things and whole smoked fish. I bought one such fish from one such babushka, and it cost four dollars. Smoked fish is something the Russians do really, really well. They eat it with beer. I bought some beer, too. All the small stops have great food. The big city stops are worthless for food – I guess the theory is that the longer stops people can get out and go shopping or something. But those small stops – ones like Barabinsk – became some of the most memorable on the trip for the local characters selling local food. Our cabinmate bought a whole roasted chicken. Why not?
Along the way, we determined with the help of our map that we really were in Asia. We were farther east than Kashgar, which was the first place I’d been to in China. At Novosibirsk, we resupplied our beer and ate the last of the smoked fish. Our cabinmates were doing much the same thing, and as a result we finally after 22 hours or so got to meet them and hear their stories. Time moves slowly on the Trans-Siberian and there is seldom any urgency to do anything. We still had nine hours to chat.
Tyumen was the first of several cities that we would pass by. In the western part of Siberia, there are cities with some regularity. It was dark in Tyumen. The train system in Russia runs entirely on Moscow time, which can be a bit disorienting as you progress through the countries nine or so time zones. You wake up in the morning and the meal car isn’t open because to them it is in the middle of the night. But they’re still serving dinner at what to you is 2am.
When we awoke, sometime past the city of Omsk, the landscape had become decidedly more Siberian. It was flat, with and endless expanse of forests, fields and bogs. Villages are nearly all wooden now, sometimes brightly painted, and having a much cozier, more timeless appearance. A few hours before Novosibirsk we stopped at a place called Barabinsk. This was classic. The platform consisted of a thin strip of chewed-up tarmac, clearly not having received a single kopeck of funding for repair since the end of Communism, and possibly some time before that. Babushkas owned this place, walking around selling bread, fried doughy things and whole smoked fish. I bought one such fish from one such babushka, and it cost four dollars. Smoked fish is something the Russians do really, really well. They eat it with beer. I bought some beer, too. All the small stops have great food. The big city stops are worthless for food – I guess the theory is that the longer stops people can get out and go shopping or something. But those small stops – ones like Barabinsk – became some of the most memorable on the trip for the local characters selling local food. Our cabinmate bought a whole roasted chicken. Why not?
Along the way, we determined with the help of our map that we really were in Asia. We were farther east than Kashgar, which was the first place I’d been to in China. At Novosibirsk, we resupplied our beer and ate the last of the smoked fish. Our cabinmates were doing much the same thing, and as a result we finally after 22 hours or so got to meet them and hear their stories. Time moves slowly on the Trans-Siberian and there is seldom any urgency to do anything. We still had nine hours to chat.
Day One...slow and easy
“It doesn’t feel like we should be that close.”
It’s a funny thing to say when you’re still five hours away from your destination, but also funny when you’ve been on the train for 23 hours already. But Sunshine was right. We’d fallen into the rhythm of train life almost instantly, as soon as the gentle rocking began. Our 2nd class cabin had seen a variety of occupants as we rolled through the endless green of European Russia. We’d figured out ways to make the bathroom tolerable; we’d stretched our legs at the station stops and taken the opportunity to acquire local beer along the way. We were feeling pretty good about making it to Beijing with our sanity intact.
Our route took us through some of Russia’s ethnic republics in the central Volga region. Russia is more diverse than most people realize. This is evident in the faces in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but soon after leaving these cities come the Volga republics. The Chuvash live in Chuvashia, the Tatars live in Tatarstan. The Mary live in Mary-El and the Bashkirs live in Bashkortostan. This is just one small region of the country – further ethnic quilts exist in the Caucasus Mountains, in Siberia and in the Far East as well. We rode through the hop farms of Chuvashia at night, but we were able to see the Kazan Kremlin as we pulled in around 3am. A kremlin is a citadel, and many Russian cities have one. Kazan’s is unique in that it has not only a large Orthodox church but also a mosque. The Kazan Kremlin was lit up brightly, and was an amazing sight – probably better than when I visited it in 2004.
We passed through oil-rich Bashkortostan, and cut through Udmurtia as well, home of the Udmurts. Villages grew progressively older as we moved east. Modern suburbs fell into memory, replaced by wooden houses with large vegetable gardens, woodpiles and little wooden banyas pouring smoke from their chimneys. Soon we would arrive in the mineral-rich Ural Mountains, another section of vast Russia, and another unusual gateway into Asia – if you fly into Tokyo or Hong Kong your Asian gateway is quintessential. Ekaterinburg, a few kilometres inside the signpost marking the beginning of the continent, is definitely a different way of doing things.
The city is pleasant, which I guess is good enough. They have a little subway system that took us to our hotel, and we had a drink at a Czech pub. There is a pretty lake in the middle, some older buildings...basically a quiet provincial town that in summer is nice enough. There's a great beer store there that allows you to buy draft in big plastic bottles to go, so we did that. It wasn't the most adventurous stop of the trip...so probably the last stop on the trip that wasn't a little bit crazy in some way.
It’s a funny thing to say when you’re still five hours away from your destination, but also funny when you’ve been on the train for 23 hours already. But Sunshine was right. We’d fallen into the rhythm of train life almost instantly, as soon as the gentle rocking began. Our 2nd class cabin had seen a variety of occupants as we rolled through the endless green of European Russia. We’d figured out ways to make the bathroom tolerable; we’d stretched our legs at the station stops and taken the opportunity to acquire local beer along the way. We were feeling pretty good about making it to Beijing with our sanity intact.
Our route took us through some of Russia’s ethnic republics in the central Volga region. Russia is more diverse than most people realize. This is evident in the faces in St. Petersburg and Moscow, but soon after leaving these cities come the Volga republics. The Chuvash live in Chuvashia, the Tatars live in Tatarstan. The Mary live in Mary-El and the Bashkirs live in Bashkortostan. This is just one small region of the country – further ethnic quilts exist in the Caucasus Mountains, in Siberia and in the Far East as well. We rode through the hop farms of Chuvashia at night, but we were able to see the Kazan Kremlin as we pulled in around 3am. A kremlin is a citadel, and many Russian cities have one. Kazan’s is unique in that it has not only a large Orthodox church but also a mosque. The Kazan Kremlin was lit up brightly, and was an amazing sight – probably better than when I visited it in 2004.
We passed through oil-rich Bashkortostan, and cut through Udmurtia as well, home of the Udmurts. Villages grew progressively older as we moved east. Modern suburbs fell into memory, replaced by wooden houses with large vegetable gardens, woodpiles and little wooden banyas pouring smoke from their chimneys. Soon we would arrive in the mineral-rich Ural Mountains, another section of vast Russia, and another unusual gateway into Asia – if you fly into Tokyo or Hong Kong your Asian gateway is quintessential. Ekaterinburg, a few kilometres inside the signpost marking the beginning of the continent, is definitely a different way of doing things.
The city is pleasant, which I guess is good enough. They have a little subway system that took us to our hotel, and we had a drink at a Czech pub. There is a pretty lake in the middle, some older buildings...basically a quiet provincial town that in summer is nice enough. There's a great beer store there that allows you to buy draft in big plastic bottles to go, so we did that. It wasn't the most adventurous stop of the trip...so probably the last stop on the trip that wasn't a little bit crazy in some way.
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