At the end of 2019, me and a friend decided to travel Russia by train. Starting in Vladivostok, the plan was to arrive in Moscow two weeks later. An Experience with capital E.

You will get an impression of our trip by watching below movie made by myself:

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Diary

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Somewhere close to Belogorsk, 00:56, 9 dec 2019,

The Cold.

When writing this I just passed a sign on one of the little stations next to the railway saying “-30°C”. It is cold here in, what they call, The Far East of Russia. When we landed in Vladivostok one of the first things we did was shop for some good coats. We succeeded and fulfilled two objectives: 1. to arm us against the mercyless cold and maybe more important 2. to blend in with the Russians;)
Vladivostok was a cool city with viewpoints over the city and the Pacific ocean and we met some nice people as well.
Time for our first train trip, marking the start of our Trans-Siberian rail-adventure: a 12 hour overnight ride to Khabarovsk. We arrived in the morning and struggled to find a hotel. Walking around in this cold is funny:

• Your eyelashes freeze
• When inhaling through your nose it seems like you have something in your nose, but thats just because your nose hairs freeze and stick together
  When walking to the riverside boulevard we noticed that the 1km-wide Amur river was complety frozen, something which is hard to imagine for such a big flowing river. We brought our ice skates and crossed the river walking, but didn’t find the smooth ice to go iceskating on.
  We had a few too many beers and vodkas that night when we found a nice bar that night, something we regretted the next morning.
  Now we are on our way to our next destination: lake Baikal. This trip takes 2,5 days by train! So we will have to settle in and get comfortable and embrace the train life. We travel third class but it exceeds our expectations. Instead of drunk Russians and smelly feet we find ourselves accompanied with people of all ages, sharing food and minding eachother.
  Greetings Pim and Marijn.

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Irkutsk, 00:46, 13 dec 2019

Life on the train.

Before we went to Russia people told us to book tickets for ‘the Trans Siberian express’ via a travel agency or to book tickets in advance etc etc. Well, we decided not to do that. Simply because we don’t know what our trip was going to look like and because we don’t like planning in advance. So we decided to just fly to Vladivostok and see from there. Perfect choice. As we expected, you can just buy tickets at any railway station. The Trans Siberian railway is just a nickname for the track running from Vladivostok to Moscow and there are several trains passing by every day. Unfortunately there is no such thing as a hop-on-hop-off ticket so you just have to buy a ticket for your next destination on the trail.

The trains are pretty nice. There is first class (cabin for yourselve), second class (cabin shared with 3 others) and third class (wagon completely shared, 54 beds). For the real experience we took third class for our first train and an experience it was. Sitting/lying together with so many people creates an athmosphere of solidarity. ‘We’re in this together’. You (try to) make a little chat, you move out of the way when somebody wants to pass, you wait together at the toilet.

There is one staff, normally woman, on each wagon that takes care of you. She warns you when your stop is approaching, sells tea, cleans, hands out bedlinen but also cuts away the ice on the vulnerable parts of the carriage of the train at every stop.

The stops are pretty funny. There are stops that take 2 minutes and stops that take 15 or 30 minutes. Since there are few of the long ones, you really want to make use of them. After hours in the train with no fresh air, you really want to go out for some fresh. So we take care we are ready to rumble when the train stops: jackets and shoes on. Outside we buy some food at one of the kiosks, run around the station to get our energy out or simply stand at the platform with a tea among al the smokers (some go out in shorts and sandals in -30C!).

When in the train you try to shift to lower gear, take it easy. Read a book, write stories like this, look out the window.

пока-пока, Pim & Marijn

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Somewhere near Tulun, 23:25, 14dec

Baikal and Irkutsk.

Before impulsively replying ‘yes’ to my friend when he said “hey man, let’s do this rail trip through Russia” I had no idea what to expect or what I even should look forward to. All but one thing, because I heard about the Baikal lake before and I thought for sure this would be a beautiful place. Moreover, when chatting to a someone on a friends’ party, somebody mentioned ‘that you can iceskate on the frozen lake in winter’. This really sparked our enthousiasm resulting in 3kg extra baggage when we checked in for our flight: we took our Salomon marathon iceskates with. Weeks before our trip the only thing we could talk about was ‘how cool it would be to cross the frozen lake’ or to make daytours from one lakeside village to the other.

Our train ride from Khabarovsk to the village Baykalsk alongside the lake lasted for 2 and a half day. We picked up some delay during our first night, still don’t know why, and never made up for it. We were planned to be at our destination before midnight, but eventually were there around 01:00. Worse was the fact that we were dropped of at a different station than expected and had to walk for 1,5hour on a dark and icy road to reach the hotel. But after 2,5 days in the train it felt like a welcome stretch to the legs.

The next day we were hyped to go to the lake to look at the ice conditions. You can imagine the disappointment when we saw the reflections of little waves in the water when we approached:( Apperrantly, even though temperatures are -20C at night, the lake only freezes completely in Januari because the lake is 1.5km deep. It just takes time for such a large volume to freeze. We were bummed, but hey!, maybe we can find some other opportunities to do some outdoor iceskating. The dissapointment soon was followed by excitement because accidentally we found out that Baykalsk was thé area for skiing and even our friend Putin slid down the slopes of Baykalsk sometime in the past. Hours later we were in the lift taking us and our rental gear (cheap as hell) to the top. A great day of skiing followed.

The next day we wanted to get some more out of the lake Baikal area and decided to take the train to Slyudyanka and from there a taxi to Kultuk. We dropped our bags at a hotel and went hiking on one of the tracks of the Great Baikal Trail. Ironically we hiked alongside the railway for some time, the same which we were gonna pass being aboard the train hours later. The trail stopped at some point, but we just marched on making our own trail. Beautiful views and a mesmerizing sunset over the lake followed. We were back at the hotel just before dark, took a taxi back to Slyudyanka from where we had our next train to Irkutsk.

We took an ‘expensive’ hotel in Irkutsk (€22 pp) and had a good nights rest. Next day we roamed the city. Irkutsk has some relaxed vibes with a nice riverside park. We stumbled upon a stadium which we thought would be a football stadium, however when coming closer we saw little icehockey players. One of the doors was open and we managed to sneak in. After the icehockey players we saw the Russian youth team preparing for what looked like a speedskating training. ‘Should we ask?!’ Ofcourse we asked. ‘Excuse me, we are from Holland, would it be possible to bring our iceskates and do some skating ourselves?’. The woman replied that it would be possible in an hour from now. We rushed back to the hotel to get our skates. Returning, we found that the rink was empty with the lights out. Damn. But what the heck, we still knew the way to sneak in. So we went skating in the dark. We suspected that somebody would see us eventually and would send us back. Five minutes past, ten minutes past, still nothing. We decided to put on our training clothes (we were still in jeans) and to just make a training out of this (Weissensee in one month from now!). At a certain point the lights went on, little iceskaters entered for a training. but nobody told us to stop what we were doing. So we had a great training in what will probably be the greatest venue we will ever train on (big stadium, big stands, big stadium lights).
We were hungry afterwards and just went to the first restaurant we saw. Strange scenes when we entered a room full of drunk dancing Russians, singing, doing quizzes etc. Time for bed.

Next day we strolled around the city some more and bought a train ticket for our next destination: Krasnoyarsk. A 17 hour overnight train ride. We will arrive early in the morning tomorrow.

Pim & Marijn