May 4

We awoke this morning back at Aleksandr and Galina’s house in Ust-Barguzin to Galina making a delicious porridge with raisins for breakfast. After we’d eaten,we were pointed in the direction of the visitor’s centre to watch a film (in english!) about Baikal’s nerpa, which we’d learnt of with interest last night. Unfortunately, when we got there, the woman manning the visitor’s centre pointed us back in the direction of Aleksander, much to the frustration of Arlina who even tried calling back to the house to sort out the discrepancy. The woman was, however, adamant that she couldn’t help us so Tom, Arlina and I went for a walk around Ust-Barguzin town instead.

After some aimless wandering, we ended up at the river, where the car ferry was parked. Our drive from Baikal yesterday took three or four hours and took a circuitous route through the Barguzin valley. However if we’d arrived a week later, or two weeks earlier, the drive would take only an hour, as we’d be able to cross the river, which today was flowing lazily with the thaw. In the summer, the car ferry shuttles from one side to the other in a matter of minutes, and in winter, of course, it’s easy to drive straight over the top of the ice. At the river, we met a local with a large bag full of beer who pulled a few breakdance tricks on the river’s edge and seemed rather delighted to be photographed doing so.

A few more aimless wanderings ensued, most of which were spent commenting on the window frame decoration of the local architecture, before we popped in to a shop to buy a box of chocolates for Galina and a bottle of the heinous honey and chilli vodka we’d had earlier for Aleksandr. Arlina had expressed concerns last night about the shops being shut in small towns on Sundays, however it turns out that Ust-Barguzin (or Russia as a whole, I’m not quite sure) had “swapped” Friday and Sunday this week in order to take full advantage of wednesday and thursday labour day public holidays.

We got back to the house for an early lunch before bidding farewell to Galina, who presented us with a postcard of Baikal in the summertime and urged us to come back and see it, and starting the uneventful five-hour drive back to Ulan-Ude with Aleksandr and Arlina. We arrived around five o’clock and said our goodbyes and thank yous, then capped off the evening with a stroll through town, a visit to the supermarket and a meal of sorts at ‘Happy Land’ cafeteria.

We’re both a bit sad to say goodbye to Russia in the end. I feel that if we’d spent two or three more weeks with Aleksander, Galina and Arlina we would be able to understand the language quite well, and after being overwhelmed by the views of Lake Baikal, Russia’s beauty has certainly caught our attention. I think Aleksandr and his family are very lucky to be able to spend so much time with such a beautiful national park, and to watch it change through the seasons each year.

May 3

When I awoke this morning my head was full of vodka-sand – the toasting here in Baikal is killing me. I’d slept alongside the housecat Marquisa, who had initially selected Max as a companion before being politely informed of her cat allergy. The previous night I’d lost at darts to our host Valodya in a first-to-501, best of three contest, after eating his two Baikal fish delicacies – one steamed fish layered with olives, chilli and cheese, the other raw Baikal fish seasoned with onion. We were informed that the latter was only acceptable because of the unusually clean water here.

We were up early because that’s when the ice fishing is best. Over a typically hearty breakfast of creamed rice, pickle, cheese and sausage Valodya told us a tall story about his dog, Bricht, barking at a bear the night before. At least, I assumed he was having us on.

After eating we got into the “special warm clothes” that Aleksandr had insisted upon so vehemently back in Ust-Barguzin the day before – thermal leggings, extra jackets, and our warmest hats and gloves. We were also loaned ice-proof boots, and I was given some particularly impressive knee-high ice fishing boots with a thick inner sock.

Walking down from the guesthouse, we met the snowmobile driver on the shoreline, each picking a different spot on the fragile icy shore to step gingerly to the tougher ice further out, as hairline cracks appeared under our feet. The snowmobile had been parked about fifty metres out from shore, and had a caravan of two sleds attached to the back of it. Within a couple of minutes we were off, faced resolutely backward to avoid the worst of the biting cold wind on our faces. Bricht, who had followed us down, trailed us hopefully for some distance until Aleksandr finally convinced him that this trip wasn’t for him.

Max and I had no real idea where we were going, or how long it would take. As we sledded along we were occasionally crossing worrying cracks in the ice, where spring waters had begun to thaw, carving deep rivulets six or eight inches wide into the white surface. After passing one such that was even wider, perhaps a foot and a half, a halt was called and Aleksandr and the driver debated for some minutes whether to continue. Evidently as spring advances conditions are getting perilous for sledding and driving on the ice.

It would be hard to overstate the alien beauty of this place to us – we were skating along on a giant white expanse, with no end before the horizon in one direction. The whole of this lake, which is more than easily visible from space, perhaps a hundred kilometres east-west and several hundred north-south, is frozen solid. It is ringed by rocky cliffs, green forests, golden river plains and snow-capped peaks. The whole is something like the ur-landscape of the fantasy novel, in fact I am constantly reminded, nerdishly, of Robert E. Howard’s Hyperborea. Not to mention that all of Baikal teems with wildlife – otters, squirrels, umpteen varieties of bird including cranes, herons, eagles, crows, wrens, gulls, ducks … and deer, seals, bears, cows. It is an utterly, utterly magical place. It’s not hard to understand how every civilization to come into contact with it has held it in reverence.

Eventually Sacha’s debate with the driver ended positively, we moved on, and in a few minutes had reached a crazy ice fishing shanty town, where fishermen had bivouacked on the ice for days catching fish through holes drilled in its surface. Amongst the tents, antique generators and sleds, the place was a mess of dead and dying fish, with thirty or so men standing or sitting around gently tickling lines dropped through the ice. Every so often there’d be a burst of activity as someone hooked one, and began hauling up his sixteen or seventeen metres of fishing wire.

We wandered around inspecting the proceedings for a few minutes. Most of the fish being caught were small – less than half a kilogram probably – but there had been one “sik” of two or three kilos caught that morning. Perhaps over a hundred of the smaller variety. Aleksandr grabbed a guy he knew, who we heard had been out living on the ice for the past seventeen days, to borrow a line. Soon I was dangling it through an abandoned ice-hole. The trick was to gently raise and lower the bait in a rhythmic manner, and wait for some action. As a consequence all the men were gesturing spasmodically with their reels, as if the whole place were some sort of prayer camp.

The Baikal uniform is the camouflage fishing suit, with big black boots, and that’s what almost all these ice fishers were wearing. You could also see the odd guy dressed like James Dean on ice, with aviator sunglasses and a giant furry deerstalker.

It only took me a couple of minutes to hook one – although admittedly I took plenty of advice from Sacha on technique — and as I did five or six of the guys near me also got lucky, leading me to speculate that perhaps the fish were moving around in large groups beneath our feet. Pulling up my line very inexpertly, a very decent-sized catch emerged, which flipped around for minutes afterward, disturbing Max a bit and reminding me of the closing scenes of the clip to “Epic” by Faith No More.

Fish having been caught, it was time to continue. We had been snowmobiling in the zaliv between the Sacred Nose peninsula and the eastern shore of Baikal, and now it was time to go out on the open lake in search of the nerpa, the world’s only freshwater seal. The wind bit harder out on the open ice, and the nerpa were not where Aleksandr and the driver originally expected them to be. More debates occurred and we pressed on for a time, stopping intermittently for Aleksandr to scan the surroundings with his tripod-mounted field telescope.

At one such stop we drank a very peculiar Siberian cocktail to warm ourselves up – chilli and honey flavoured vodka mixed with hot black tea and sugar. I thought it was excellent, but Max wasn’t keen, so I ended up with two of these drinks. Given the disorienting conditions I now felt more than slightly tipsy, but I was really enjoying myself and also felt significantly warmer!

Finally Aleksandr spotted some tiny black blobs in the far distance, perhaps one or two kilometres away. These were the seals, encamped next to a hole out in the middle of the ice. We couldn’t approach in the snowmobile because they would dive, so Alina, Max and I began a long march across the ice to see how close we could get to these tiny black specks. Unfortunately, after five minutes of walking they disappeared from view, either having moved on, or having somehow observed us and become alarmed.

Despite some more searching we weren’t to have better luck with the seals, not that it bothered us. It was somehow enough just to know they were there, what with how entranced we were merely by being out on the ice like this.

We returned by snowmobile from the open ice-lake past several smaller bays, including one whose promontory was shaped very much like a razorbacked wild boar. On the way we stopped at a beach where the ice was thawing more rapidly than in other places due to the presence of two hot springs on the shoreline. Getting out to investigate a little further round, we found the springs done up as wooden baths, the water in them very hot and quite temperate respectively. The hotter of the two gave off a strong smell of hydrogen sulphide and had some sort of noxious greenery growing on the bath-seat, so we declined to get into it, but we dipped our legs in the other up to the knee.

Where the ice had thawed here we got a very slight glimpse of the famed clarity of Baikal’s water, which is due to the presence of millions of tiny crustacea that filter algae from the lake. At a depth of a metre or two, it was still easy to see tiny details and blemishes on the smoothed lake rocks that lined the shore.

For the return leg to Mokharava (where Valodya’s guesthouse was) Sacha suggested Max and I try the un-walled rear sled of the snowmobile, which we promptly hopped onto. It was far more comfortable than the more secure central sled owing to the increased knee-room, but we were rather too complacent! At one point the snowmobile driver pulled a vicious chicane to hit the sweet spot of a wide ice-crack and both of us very nearly fell off the vehicle, me to the left and Max to the right. After that, and with much thumbs-ups and embarrassed looks at Sacha, we were both a damn sight more careful.

On the way we ran across some fishermen illegally bringing up a net that had frozen solid for two months, and assessing which of the fish they’d trapped were still good enough to eat. The bad pile was probably some three times the size of the good, in which several of the fish were still feebly alive. Aleksandr went into park ranger mode and confiscated many of the fish as a penalty, storing them on the snowmobile. When we arrived back at Mokharava the spring ice had deteriorated still further. It seems to melt a little during the day and re-freeze at night as the season gets older, making the surface unreliable. The snowmobile was parked further out than in the morning and as Aleksandr and the driver entered another debate – part of which no doubt concerned how much longer the vehicle could still be used – Max, Arlina and I were left to fend for ourselves as far as getting to shore was concerned.

As we stepped with care on the stronger looking patches of ice, we occasionally broke through six inches or so to the next layer, and this happened more and more as we neared the shore. It was quite unnerving, although the waterproof boots helped and I think we were only in a few feet of water. By the time we reached the edge, I was crashing through with every ungainly step.

We were surprisingly exhausted by our ice adventures, although it was only around one o’clock in the afternoon. We were also both a little burnt by the wind and sun. After a brief dawdle along the beach we returned for yet another monster lunch – to put it in perspective, every meal here is probably twice the size that I’d have at any given meal of an ordinary day back home. Shortly thereafter we said our farewells to Valodya and were back in the car returning to Ust-Barguzin.

That evening we dined on the fish that Sacha had conveniently confiscated, cleaned one by one on the massive log table at the back of his expansive backyard, then salted and grilled on sticks over a campfire. The fish was very tasty, if riddled with bones, and there were a few jokes made at Max’s expense owing to her perceived dislike of the meat, a bit unfair given the only thing she’d actually refused was Valodya’s somewhat intimidating raw fish dish. Back inside we were treated to the burning first distillation of Sacha’s mother’s milk vodka, and then the totally scary firewater that was its second distillation. Must’ve been about sixty percent ethanol, and I was moderately proud of my ability to down a small shot without blinking.

May 2

I’m sitting at the kitchen table of a wooden cabin on the Sacred Nose peninsula of Lake Baikal, watching Tom and Valodya play darts against the front door. Everytime someone comes in, they knock tentatively so as not to get stabbed in the eye. We’ve just had a huge dinner comprising mostly fish — fish soup, a raw fish dish with raw onion and fish with a very rich sour cream and tomato sauce baked onto it. We learnt that our host Valodya was once a cook in Irkutsk.

We started this morning with a large breakfast of boiled grain topped with mayonnaise and pork sausages at Aleksandr and Galina’s kitchen table before getting told sturdily to “pack warm” and that we hadn’t packed warm enough and shuffled out the front door to start our day in the Barguzin valley. Aleksandr and Galina have shown amazing hospitality and have taken us in as if their own. Aleksandr has worked as a park ranger for twenty years and has a promising amount of smile lines and Galina is a mathematics teacher at school.

We drove for an hour or so through forest before breaking into the Barguzin valley — a rich yellow plain to rival the wheatfields of home, dotted with the bright red of new shoots on the leaveless trees and the occasional dark green pine tree. The rivers, still bright white with ice, wind through the scene, and in the distance to three directions are deep blue, snowcapped mountains. It looks like someone took a slice of Australia, wrapped it in Switzerland and dipped the whole lot in icing sugar.

Our first stop was the ruins of an ancient castle called “Saxonya” (because it’s reminiscent of Saxon ruins), an assembly of large rocks intruding bizarrely on an otherwise rolling landscape, and worn away over time in an almost sculptural way — the more you look at them the more you recognise things — an animal, or a nose. We climbed around and over the rock formations, pausing regularly to stare at the utterly amazing landscape. After Arina and I thought the better of it, Tom climbed up the tallest hill himself. As he got higher and higher and tinier and tinier, we realised that the fallen rocks at the top were not as small aswe thought, but rather taller than a human. At the very peak was a Tabu — a place where the Buryat people go to talk to their god.

After wearing ourselves out on the ruins, we found a way down the hill and out of the biting wind to the car where Aleksandr was waiting with the heater on, and drove to a village named Suvo we’d seen from the top, where a woman named Nina met us with a typically well-rounded Russian feast for lunch. The best thing about the lunch was that everything there had been made by Nina using produce from her farm — from the delicious, tough brown bread and the pork in the cabbage stew for mains to the cakes, cottage cheese, apple jam and “cow berries” for dessert. We were walked from the summer house to the winter house, where the mounted head of a fanged musk deer greeted us, to be shown the traditional oven, which is wood-fuelled and has a flue to control the heat.

We stopped again to pay homage at “bull rock”, a shaman worship site where legend says a helpful and benevolent bull was turned into a rock rather than dying — the cows certainly seemed to believe the legend, there were plenty around grazing on the dry grasses. The rock was draped in a garland of colourful strips of cloth wrapped around a wreath, and had a large amount of offerings including money, cigarettes, tea, biscuits, vodka and even white sauce at its base.

Afterwards, we turned back toward the lake to cross onto the Svyatoy Nos (Sacred Nose) peninsula. The drive took a while, and I nodded off for a bit after the large lunch, but started to pay attention again as we crossed the isthmus that connects the large nose-shaped peninsula to the mainland. We stopped for tea and cookies at the end of the isthmus at a wooden bench and table and stared out over the icy lake, dotted with people ice fishing, getting quite excited about getting out there tomorrow.

Just after we’d crossed onto the peninsula proper, Aleksandr spotted some otters on the lake where the ice had thawed around the shore, swimming and grooming themselves. Siberian otters are possibly cuter than the type usually seen at the zoo, with long golden-brown fur and fatter bodies. It was a thrill to see them in the wild, ducking in and out of the water and onto the ice. We stopped again by a wooden idol and indulged in the Russian Tradition of drinking vodka. In this particular tradition, we all donned our hats (Aleksandr had a great double-peaked, pom-pommed knitted hat to go with his park ranger camouflage and fisherman’s vest), and toasted to good luck for our journey from brightly coloured plastic cups. Someone had given the idol, carved into an old man, a navy blue beanie and placed a cigarette between his lips, so that he looked quite comical and disturbingly malevolent, and I was quite glad we placated him with small change and a toast.

We ended the day by arriving at our bunkhouse by the lake ready for our early-morning fishing trip tomorrow and going for a stroll along the deserted beach front, crunching the ice under our feet and arguing over whether an animal cry from the woods was made by a cow (Arlina’s guess, and of course the correct one), a bear (my guess) or a wolf (Tom’s guess). Valodya has a dog named “Bricht”, a very large German Shepherd who fetches sticks, loves pats and fights the bears that come to steal fish from the smokehouse.

May 1

We woke up today unsure of what to expect. Tuyana had given us instructions to be downstairs and checked out at nine o’clock to be driven to Barguzin, a small town on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, but I wasn’t sure if she and her driver Nikolai were taking us.

We woke, hurriedly packed and breakfasted and arrived downstairs on time, to meet Tuyana and two new faces – tall, friendly Arlina and burly Aleksandr, two Russians. Tuyana had told us that we would be guided around Baikal by a local – Aleksandr — and his fifteen year old daughter, but Arlina certainly didn’t look fifteen, so I was quite confused.

Arlina had good English and got talking to us immediately, laughing frequently, while Aleksandr played the enigmatic straight man. We chucked our packs in the boot of Aleksandr’s trusty-looking station wagon and set off, stopping off for supplies at MegaTitan Complex, a supermarket on the outskirts of Ulan-Ude.

As we drove towards Barguzin, we entered a heavily forested mountainous region and snow soon appeared. At high points, Buddhist prayer flags were evident on the branches of roadside trees, and at one such point the Cossack-looking Aleksandr tossed a few coins out the driver’s side window as an offering.

The terrain was quite fascinating, but it wasn’t until the lake itself appeared to the side of the road that we began to get extremely excited. I hadn’t been sure what to expect – there had been some talk of cruises, but Tuyana had said that the lake was too “icy” — but I didn’t realise that that meant that the surface of this massive freshwater reservoir, tens of kilometres across, was still solid with metre-thick ice at the end of April!

The expanse of white continued from the shore to the horizon, with the other side only occasionally visible, and as we drove this sight was ever-present. It’s mind-boggling – it looks as if the sea itself has frozen over.

We drove for many hours – six or so in total – stopping for tea at the Hima River and for lunch at a hot springs resort on the Baikal shoreline. At one point we hopped out and explored icy Baikal a little, inspecting a hollowed out body of thawing snow on the shore with the rise of the “Sacred Nose” peninsula in the distance.

Finally we arrived at Ust-Barguzin, where Aleksandr has his home. As we’d driven I’d begun to realise that it was Aleksandr who had all the local knowledge, and we’d gradually worked out that he was some sort of park ranger. Arlina was frequently deferring to his knowledge on questions of scenery and the local terrain.

We were welcomed into the house by Galina, Aleksandr’s wife, and their young daughter Mascha. After settling in briefly and having a cup of tea with Galina, who devilled us with questions about Australia, we walked down to the lake with Arlina. The Siberian soil is sandy – much the same as in West Australia – which at this time of year leads to the bizarre condition of desert-like sandy slopes and beaches coming to an abrupt halt at the edge of the lake’s ice, as if two geographical zones have been ripped up by gods and tossed down patchwork-style across the earth.

We wandered for an hour or so along the lake, and on our return we got somewhat lost in Barguzin, as Arlina hadn’t been there before. As she told us, this trip is an “experiment” for her to work out whether she wants to work as a tour guide. We made it back to the house eventually with the help of some locals.

Aleksandr had hinted earlier that he’d give us a taste of the Russian banya (Russian-style sauna) tradition in the evening, and he was as good as his word. Declaring himself to be a “banya expert”, he led us out the back of his house into his rustic backyard, complete with vegetable patches, well, numerous wooden sheds, and not one but two expansive bath-houses made from Siberian pine logs. We were feeling a bit modest but I suppose you have to be game for anything.

Russian banya goes as follows: first you strip down and walk through the shower room into the hot room, where water is ladled over heated stones to create a very steamy atmosphere. Here you sit for several minutes replenishing the steam periodically until your body reaches a great heat. At this point, two bunches of beech leaves dipped in steaming hot water are used to flog you front and back, increasing your heat still further. You then emerge into the shower room to be dowsed with icy water from a tub before retiring outside to the cold Siberian air (and in winter, for a brief snow-dive). The process is then repeated, and so you alternate hot, then cold until you tire of it.

Aleksandr was good enough to demonstrate all the essential aspects – including giving us both an introductory beech flogging – and the whole procedure felt quite wonderful. Not to mention exotic! It came as a complete surprise to us that it was incorporated into the Baikal tour, and it looks as if there may be a few more cool tricks up Aleksandr’s Siberian sleeves.

After banya came dinner, Baikal fish baked with tomato and cheese, as well as pickled mushroom salad and a lot of vodka toasting. I was marched through five shots of “Baikal Crystal” vodka in the space of half an hour or so. A period drama about some conflict between Russia and Sweden during the time of Peter the Great was showing, and that provided some distractions after dinner while we inflicted some of our music on Arlina, who was interested in the type of stuff we listen to.

Aleksandr – Sacha – whipped out a map of the local area and described tomorrow’s itinerary. We are driving around a thawing river to a local valley to go hiking, and then taking a snowmobile out on the lake ice for ice fishing (!), and finally hiking a little more on the Sacred Nose peninsula before dossing for the night at what I think will be some sort of ranger station, or possibly camping – I’m not sure. In any case, it sounds pretty damn great.

April 30

We woke up early this morning to take advantage of our hotel breakfast, which, though not quite up to the standard of the Amursky Zaliv, was really quite nice. This meant we had about four hours to fill before meeting with Tuyana in the afternoon, so we walked down to Ploshchad Soveta to get minibus number eight to the open air ethnographic museum about 6km out of town.

The museum tracked human habitation of the Buryatiya area from the stone age through to just short of the current day through a series of “villages”. The village representing the oldest inhabitants included some impressive (if somewhat worn) petroglyphs and stones arranged in ritual and burial formations from different eras.

The track then moved through to the nomadic inhabitants, showing various styles of tent-type dwellings starting with small but tall conical huts similar to wig-wams, sheeted with pine or larch bark (for poor people) and yak or bear hide (for rich people). One interesting display was of a typical shamanist village, containing a compound of four or five huts, a variety of fishing, hunting and reindeer-breeding tools, and a very impressive shaman’s house consisting of a line of totems to the south representing the evil wolf-spirits and glutton-spirits of the lower world, the shaman’s hut representing the middle world, and a line of totems to the north representing the good horse-spirits and similar of the upper world.

As the dwellings moved through to more recent times they became more elaborate, with a double-door system, then wooden floor lifted off the ground, then carpeted with pelts. The style of dwelling then changed to the yurt, which is a much larger circular structure with defined walls and roof. The yurts retained the central hearths of the earlier dwellings and were mostly clad with yak pelts. As agricultural techniques became more advanced and the people started to move around less, wooden dwellings were made. The first wooden houses imitated the yurt in construction, then additional square rooms were added to the rear. The most recent displays were similar to the houses seen in the older parts of the city, with wooden walls and bright windows framed with carved “wood lace”.

The biggest surprise for us was the extensive zoo, which had many local and imported species, including camels, goats, hawks, eagles, owls, foxes wolves, bears and tigers. Tuyana later explained that both the tigers and bears had been left in the area as cubs by travelling circuses who couldn’t take the animals with them.

The museum seems to be the pride of the area, but unfortunately for us it is early in the tourist season and things weren’t quite up and running. There were a few people about, but most of the dwellings were locked and we got the impression that the place would be a lot more interactive in the summer.

In the afternoon we met with Tuyana, who took us to visit a Buryat house in a village just outside of Ulan-Ude called Arbazhil. The village is slowly disintegrating as more and more people move to the city for work, but one of the inhabitants, Gaya, took us in to her home and ran us through some of the aspects of her culture. She was currently living in her winter house, which was a three-room log house with a windowless entry/storage hall that seemed mostly to function as a cold-lock, a kitchen area with a curtained coat closet and washing basin and a very effective wood stove, and a living room facing the garden with a shrine, couches and a low table on which was laid out a lovely spread of salads.

We started by eating lunch, which began with home grown-vegetables, coleslaw and bread with a wonderful spread made from sour cream and flour, which I suspect was then fried, served warm. Gaya explained that part of the reason to live indoors in winter was to protect the vegetables, which were all lined up in containers by the windows, ready for planting in June. Gaya then brought out a delicious soup containing noodles, carrots and beef in a rich broth, and then showed us how to construct pozi by placing spoonfuls of minced pork and beef with garlic and onion in pastry circles held in her left hand, then pinching the pastry around the meat with her right hand, leaving a small gap in the top for the steam to get in and form ”gravy”. Her perfectly-formed pozi made it look so easy that Tom and I had a go and made some rather mutated ones. Luckily, when she brought them out fifteen minutes later after the steaming, they all tasted just as good. We also learnt the trick to eating pozi, which involves biting a small hole in the bottom of the skin first and sucking out the juice before eating the rest.

Throughout we were drinking green tea brewed with milk (which was surprisingly tasty) and a locally brewed spirit blessed by the Dali Lama and named with the Tibetan word for immortal, “amarita”. The drink contained about twenty local herbs known for their medicinal effects, and tasted very good for such a strong spirit. The meal was finished off with some deep-fried cookies and a runny jam made from the “sea buckthorn”- a small, bright orange berry which is notoriously hard to gather due to the clusters of large thorns that surround the fruit. Our host was definitely working from the “refill as soon as empty” principle, and as Tom and I generally work from the “eat what’s in front of you” principle, there was a lot of food and drink consumed before we eventually cottoned on and left some behind.

We had a good long chat after lunch, talking about our lives and comparing the eductaion and pension systems of our respective countries. Gaya was particularly interested in Ayers Rock, as her eight-year-old daughter had been given a school project on it earlier in the year and thought they searched through number of encyclopaedias and other references, they couldn’t find out how it was made. We weren’t really sure either, but we had a guess that, as it was a single rock, its height might be the result of erosion of the surrounding soil rather than the usual earthquake or tectonic plate shift which normally causes mountains. As we were saying this I was suddenly getting flashes of the Telstra ad where the dad tells his kid the the Great Wall of China was to keep the rabbits out. I hope we’re not spreading misinformation around the world!

Afterwards, Gaya showed us a traditional Buryat game played with the knucklebones of sheep. The knucklebones each have four distinct sides, one of which looks like a horse running, one of which has two lumps like a camel, one of which has two curves like the horns of a sheep and the other which has two points like the horns of a goat. The gam is played by collecting a very generous handful of bones in your hands and throwing them on the table. You then flick one knucklebone into another, but only if both are the same animal (a sheep hits a sheep and so on), and you can’t touch any other knucklebones on the table. When you are successul, you take one of the contacted knucklebones from the table, and continue your turn until you make an unsuccessful flick. The round finishes when there are no more bones on the table, at which point the person with the fewest knuckbones puts them into the centre, everyone else matches the number from their own collection and the second round starts. This continues until all but two people have been knocked out, and the person with the most bones at the end wins. Gaya showed obvious delight in whooping all three of us at this game.

We then went outside to play small-target archery, where our aim was to hit a ten-centremetre long cylindrical beanbag placed on the floor fifteen metres away. Tuyana opted out, but the remaining three of us each hit a target before we drove back to the hotel.

Tom and I went for a stroll through the centre of town to cap off the evening. We tried to buy a painting from a street vendor, but ended up just getting intimidated and embarrassed as he dragged us from shop to shop trying (rather rudely) to change our 500 rouble note so he could give us change. We eventually got away and Tom picked up a deep-fried version of a pozi for dinner, before we went into a kitchen-wear shop and found a gorgeous large mug decorated with warriors and rural scenes which we (read “I” :o) couldn’t resist adding to our souvenir collection. I’m feeling a bit better today, but the day had definitely taken it out of me, so we called it an early night and went back to our rather lovely hotel, where you find us now. Tomorrow we head out to Lake Baikal, about which we are both rather excited.

April 29

“Interesting” turned out to be an understatement regarding the platzkart carriage of the overnight train from Chita to Ulan-Ude.

We were in places 5 and 7, the two bottom bunks of the second open compartment. Shortly after we boarded at around half past midnight, following a last minute checkout from our hotel, where we’d paid for 1.5 nights so we could relax there before departure, we set about arranging our pastil (train service sheets and pillow) on the sleeper seats and trying to get some shut-eye.

The three or four youngish Russian guys who’d decided to make 5,6,7 and 8 their own personal party town had other ideas. It started when a blond guy sat himself on the end of my bed and said something to me, to which I responded that I didn’t understand. He then stated “mest” (Russian for “seat”) indicating the position he’d taken up opposite his mates, who were having a couple of beers on the platzkart bed that converts to a table. I indicated “yeah, whatever”, guessing that I could probably sleep anyway.

However, three or four guys soon became six or seven guys, and by this stage both Max and I had two large, raucous Russian lads perched on the end of our “beds” taking up precious legroom, and were getting pretty annoyed. Especially since ours was the only compartment in the entire carriage (which sleeps over fifty people) to get this treatment! Everyone else seemed to be sleeping in peace. I was speculating at this stage whether these guys thought they could put one over on us without copping a stream of abuse because we were foreigners, but I’m not sure that was the case.

Max sat up in bed and said something fairly sharp to a guy who’d just sat down directly on her leg, provoking mockery. They were all obviously blind drunk and intent on getting drunker, with no end in sight. At one point they were playing little comedy movies at great volume on their mobile phones while laughing riotously, until the provodnitsa stomped down to tell them to shut the noise off, prompting more gales of laughter.

As I tried to get some sleep amidst all this, beanie pulled down over my eyes, I could hear them occasionally giggling to each other about our few halting Russian words, and our desire to get some “slyeep”. “Slyeep, heh-heh,” one would say, nudging the next who’d snigger. It was quite infuriating.

Eventually I sat up, at which point the chap on the end of my bed sidled up and put his arm around me, trying to calm my presumably evident bad temper. Proffering a glass of beer, he flicked his Adam’s apple with his index finger, insisting that I have a drink to “apologise” for the noise. I wasn’t keen – not really being able to assess the situation, I thought dimly there was an outside chance it was spiked – and he seemed to guess this, because he then took a sip as if to demonstrate that it wasn’t poison! “Nyet,” I said, but in Russia it’s considered quite offensive to refuse food and drink when it’s offered to you, and he was very insistent, so I knocked it back, in response to which he feigned admiration for my ability to drink a small glass of beer.

By this time, we had the attention of all the other guys, so I started to explain to them in sign language how I really wasn’t cool with them sitting on my wife. To this I received a chorus of drunken “I em syorry”s, laughingly, but then the guy who was apparently the ringleader came over and introduced himself.

“Me – Sanya,” he announced. “You?”
“Tom.”
“Ah! Tom ent Jerry!” the guy who’d given me a drink exclaimed.
“Hey – fuck you!” I said, and this phrase, which they obviously recognised well, echoed around the group. They all thought that being sworn at in English was very funny.

Sanya was instructing his cohorts to give Max a bit more space and making dramatic “ssh” noises, so it seemed the strategy of befriending these guys was working a bit better than the previous aggro tack. I had another couple of beers with them, explaining defensively that Australians know how to drink just as well as Russians, which they enjoyed mightily, and then they dragged me down to the space between carriages for a slightly unnerving arm-in-arm group photo (to give you an idea of my paranoid state amongst this gang, I was half wondering whether I was being set up to be beaten or robbed!).

At this point I announced quite seriously that it was now time for “Dom” to “slyeep”, and went back to bed. They continued drinking and chatting for a while, but at a greatly reduced volume – with a multitude of “ssh”s – that allowed both Max and I to snatch a bit of proper rest, albeit only about three or four hours.

So, that was last night.

This morning, an incredible transformation occurred. I was woken near seven o’clock Ulan-Ude time (Moscow +5 hours) by a sotto voce whisper: “Domas – wake up!” I continued to feign sleep, but couldn’t get back in the mood, so I sat up and was offered a cup of the sugary black tea all Russians drink when they’re on trains, by a guy who I didn’t quite recognise from the night before. This was Andrei, who I was told had arrived late to the party to learn about the Australians in the carriage, and had become quite excited. As a native of Petrovsk-Zabaikalsk, a small town in the Baikal region, he knew quite a bit of English from school but, he claimed to my surprise, he had never met a native English speaker in the flesh in his entire life.

After Max awoke, we spent the next hour and a half receiving endless apologies for the shenanigans of the night before. Sanya, who’d returned to the car, explained: “is Russian tradition to drink vodka before train. Please – yexcuse me.” By the sound of it they’d all been going hard on the spirits before they even boarded and started on the beer. He sounded genuinely remorseful for having given any offence. It was all quite gentlemanly, in stark contrast to the night before. I think at one point Sanya was trying to explain to me that they’d all been in the army together once, but I can’t be certain.

We ended up exchanging addresses with Andrei, whose English was really quite excellent for a guy with only five years of education in the language, and waved him and Sanya off the train when we reached their station a little outside Ulan-Ude. It’d be neat to be able to send him a postcard from somewhere a bit further along our route.

On arrival at Ulan-Ude, we were met by Tuyana, the Buryatin Tour guide who’s going to show us around the Baikal area for the next week or so. She’s a confident, austerely dressed Buryat woman of (I guess) about forty years, with fluent English that she learned at the foreign languages department of the local university.

Along with the tour driver, whose name we’re not apparently supposed to learn, we went straight to our room at the Hotel Sagaan Morin, which, compared to everywhere else we’ve stayed with the possible exception of the Minshuku Kuwatani-ya in Takayama, is bloody fantastic, and comes with a comparatively palatial attached bathroom with new fittings! So that’s nice.

After a brief break to shower, tidy up and attempt with mixed success to use the internet at the post office, we embarked on a whirlwind city sightseeing tour with Tuyana.

Ulan-Ude (“Red / Beautiful Gateway” — it had its name changed around 1930 from a more typically Russian one ending in –irsk, which eludes me) is the capital of Buryatiya with a population of about 400,000, most of whom seem to be ethnically Buryat. It has a pretty different vibe from both Vladivostok and Chita – the pace of development seems a bit quicker, there is a slightly longer history here, and it’s rather multicultural with quite a strong Mongolian and Chinese presence as well. The city is built on trade, having been a staging post for enormous summer and winter mercantile fairs in centuries past, at this pivotal junction between East and West on the Chinese “tea road”. It is evidently a cosmopolitan place, an aspect that can’t have flourished at all during the relative isolation of the Soviet era.

Tuyana immediately started brain-dumping vast quantities of local lore upon us, at a rate that taxed our mental faculties. It’s quite a different experience, having a guide. Everything in view is suddenly information-enriched. “Government building” becomes “headquarters of the Buryatin Parliament and residence of the President of Buryatiya, built in the 1960s after the Soviet style”. “Cute log house” becomes “19th century log house built in the Cossack style, under the eaves you can observe wooden carvings in a style that combines elements from both Cossack and Buryat traditions. Lacking its own facilities, the owners must obtain water from this street pump, which reaches down seven metres to the pure ground water of the region.” And so forth.

Amongst the sights we saw in Ulan-Ude were: the world’s largest Lenin head in the obligatory Plashchud Lenina, old cottages downtown belonging to the wealthiest families of the time, the panoramic view from the “Hill of Love” overlooking the intersection of the Selengar and Ude rivers and the city, a reconstructed triumphal arch dedicated to Tsar Nicholas II – where monuments have been destroyed, the new Russian practice is to rebuild them, as if they are recreating their history all over the country — and numerous public buildings including the university and museums.

The highlight, however, must be the gorgeous Orthodox church we visited, Ogitria Cathedral which is built in the Siberian style, rather than the “kremlin-ish” style that we’ve seen elsewhere. Outside was a whitewashed expanse rising perhaps thirty metres, with a dome and a tiered tower, and inside was a low-arched rectangular congregation area, notable for its lack of any seating, and for its rather beautiful Byzantine-style murals and paintings of Christ, the apostles, the evangelists, and Mary, whose icon receives special dedications because it is rumoured to have miraculously wept at some time in the past. In fact the church is dedicated in particular to Mary or “mother of God” as Tuyana referred to her, and it seems she is roughly as important a figure in the Orthodox religion as she is in Roman Catholicism.

Tuyana explained that this church, like others in places such as St Petersburg, was preserved during the Soviet anti-religious mania by being cunningly turned into an anti-religious museum. For decades it housed relics from dozens of local churches, and also a famous Chinese statue of the Buddha believed in legend to have been sculpted in Gautama’s own lifetime. When perestroika occurred in the late 80s, the treasures were redistributed to the churches that were reconstructed across the countryside in their original locations, and the Buddha was returned to its former monastery. I thought there was a certain poetry in the relics of one religion taking shelter from ideology in the house of another religion.

As we were about to leave, one of the church officials suggested we should climb the tower and observe the bells being rung. We were given into the care of the bell-ringer, a guy of about twenty to twenty-five who had a face that was scarred nastily, though by what we couldn’t say. I thought perhaps he’d been burned, whereas Max thought he might have had leprosy. Quite a lot of his nose was missing, in any case.

This chap led us up several darkened stone staircases and two wooden ones to the top of the bell-tower, and proceeded to blow our minds with a one-man bell-ringing show. All his limbs were put to use – steadying his whole body with his right leg in a special sling, he operated three small bells with his right hand, two medium sized bells with his left hand, and used pedals to alternate the two largest bells. The harmonious, rhythmic clamour up there was physically painful, and Tuyana, who’d never been up before, looked quite dismayed. We all stood there in amazement, fingers in ears, until the bell-ringing finally stopped and the ringer turned once more to cross himself in the Orthodox fashion while bowing gently to the far end of the cathedral.

We concluded today’s tours with a visit to the Ivolginsk datsan, another Mahayana Buddhist (or “lamaist”) monastery outside of Ulan-Ude. This monastery is the only one in all of Russia which was allowed to continue operating following the post-WWII purges of religious sites instigated by Stalin, and this under diplomatic pressure from other countries. Even now, although the local Lamaist faith has close ties with Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama is not permitted by the Chinese government to visit. It’s fair to say that the Buryat people have had to deal with a lot recently, after decades of systematised government efforts to extinguish both their language and their culture. I’m happy to say these efforts seem to have failed quite completely.

Tuyana described herself as a “philosophical” practising Buddhist, which I guess means she feels herself to have a somewhat more sophisticated take on religion than some. With her on hand, we were able to enter the main temple itself, where we were treated to detailed explanations of the disciples, guardians, goddesses and various Buddhas depicted on the temples tankas (tapestries). We learned about the five colours of things (white – metal, blue – water, red – fire, green – forests, yellow – sun) and the colours of the four directions. Tuyana became a bit bolder and told us some tall tales about visitors to the datsan who had received great success after making leaps of faith, about yogic miracles performed by lamas who have mastered “emptiness”, and about how many modern scientific discoveries, for example quantum physics, have been anticipated and well understood in advance by Buddhist philosophers. It was a little as if she was trying to convert us.

The datsan also has a Bodhi tree that is believed to be a direct descendant of that under which Gautama received Enlightenment, and one of the former Khambo Lamas here was recently exhumed after seven decades only for the lesser lamas to discover that his body had been miraculously preserved by his faith! Tuyana explained that the Khambo Lama had asked his lamas to chant a funeral prayer for him. They protested, refusing his request as he was still alive, but in the end, they reluctantly agreed after he said that he wished to leave this world. The Khambo lama then left his body, leaving a will asking his lamas to exhume his body in the future. This holy corpse is now being prepared for a permanent display in a new building being constructed within the datsan, but photos at the souvenir stand showing the man in life and in death did show an amazing preservation.

We were both tiring due to lack of sleep and the vast information intake, and Max had had a sore throat for a couple of days and had been falling a bit ill during the day, so we were pretty glad to retire to the hotel for a nap at this point. Max was quite a bit sicker than I’d thought, and I helped her into bed with a fever. My own nap turned into three or four hours of sleep, and I popped out later for supplies, grabbing a bite to eat and returning with the stuff that’s needed for a lemon and sugar tea – namely lemons and sugar — and some fruit juice at around ten o’clock as the Siberian sun was setting. When I got back Max was feeling quite a bit better, and we’re hoping she’ll be able to shake off the bug for tomorrow.

April 28

I slept with only a couple of five-minute breaks from about half past two in the afternoon yesterday up until seven o’clock this morning. Over sixteen hours in total: evidently I was even more exhausted than I felt yesterday when we finally staggered up our stairs with our packs, having carried them back to the Hotel Turist from the leave-luggage room at Chita Station. I suppose it’s only fair, though, given I’d been able to snatch barely an hour of sleep in the uncomfortable station waiting room during the early hours of the morning.

We woke with intent this morning, the previous day having weighed fairly heavily in the disappointment stakes, what with the fatiguing four-hour hotel search on no sleep and so forth. The intent with which we woke was to see Aginskoe, a town near Chita which boasts (to use Trivial Pursuit rhetoric) two famous Buddhist datsans.

Our guidebook said something along the lines of “take a share taxi” without any indication of what a Chita share taxi looks like, or how to bargain your way onto one. We set out in the direction of the bus station, and I have to admit I was sceptical about our working this one out what with our dozen or words of Russian: “hello”, “thank you”, “thank you very much”, “goodbye”, “how much?”, “where”, “when”, “train” and anything that happens to be the same, or nearly the same, in English as it is in Russian (there are surprisingly many words in this category, admittedly).

We arrived at the bus station and began walking up and down in search of any signs, stops or timetables labelled “Aginskoe” in Cyrillic. I quickly found one for a bus leaving at 5 o’clock in the evening, which was utterly useless to us. After ten or fifteen more minutes of diligent searching – including being propositioned by an English-speaking cab driver who offered to take us there for the equivalent of $US150 — we found a van labelled “Chita – Aginskoe” with a driver sound asleep in the cab. A friendly Buryatin (Chinese, maybe, actually) woman in the back saw us looking bemused and beckoned Max over, whereupon she opened the door and we transacted a comically inept conversation (with much smiling and giggling) regarding when the van left and when it arrived, and how much it cost.

A few minutes later we were on our way for a couple of hundred roubles each, in the back with half a dozen other passengers.

The datsans were terribly impressive structures, one built at the start of the nineteenth century and the other at the end. Quite near to Aginskoe is Mt Alkhenay, reckoned by the local Buryat Buddhists to be the fifth most important holy mountain in the world, although it’s quite small and I suspect the ranking is hotly contested elsewhere. Nevertheless Buddhism is very strong in the semi-autonomous Buryatiya Republic (the name of this region of Russia) and was not eradicated in the slightest during the atheist mania of the earlier Soviet era.

Buddhist decorators, unlike the architects and designers of the former Soviet Union, are not intimidated by bold use of colour, and so each datsan was liberally decorated with brightly painted wood carvings of guardian beasts and sages. Next to the latter datsan was an enormous stupa, which must rival the golden stupa of Vientiane in terms of ridiculous size.

We wove our way clockwise around the temples amidst worshippers paying their respects, some of whom were pouring offerings on the consecrated earth including water, milk and vodka. Then, after a good inspection of the surrounding grounds and monasteries (manifested as walled housing estates in the local style), we walked the six kilometres back to the centre of Aginskoe.

On the way we had ample opportunity to observe the local architectural patterns – log cabins constructed from brutish lengths of the pine trees that line the hills around here, with brightly painted metal roofs. There were no gardens, and the hard, dusty earth doesn’t look like it’d sustain much life at this time of year, let alone in the dead of winter. Each house is attached to at least a couple of hundred square metres of fenced terrain, space that in some cases was being used to manage livestock.

Up the main street into town we passed groups of cows nibbling rather piteously at the twigs of dead trees. Aginskoe is more picturesque again than Chita (although Chita is considerably prettier than Vladivostok), and there was little sign of the aftermath of public drunkenness here. In Chita, we’d seen a lot of public bins filled to overflowing where someone had plonked down on a bench with a slab of beer, and just sat there and finished it.

(In Russia, alcohol is more thoroughly intertwined with everyday life than anywhere else I’ve been. There is no time when it’s considered acceptable to start drinking, having beer at breakfast is quite normal. As is having a beer in your car, at the train or bus station, or when you pop out from work for morning tea. There may be more restraint when it comes to vodka – I’ve heard it said that beer (“piva”) isn’t considered an alcoholic beverage here, although all the varieties on sale are at least as strong as Australian full strength. When I see a young guy sitting in his van with a beer on the dash at half past eight in the morning here, I feel like a total wowser!)

To finish up in Aginskoe, we visited a Buryat museum charmingly dedicated to Buryatiya’s greatest scientist, whose name eludes me, but starts with “Tsa-” and ends in “-ov”. The place started in natural history with displays of the variegated local fauna (wolves, bears, wild boars, lynxes, and every kind of weasel, stoat, badger or otter in existence), and ended in a section devoted to Buryatiya’s achievements, half of which was about famous Olympic archers and wrestlers. The Buryats are a sort of sub-Mongol ethnicity so archery and wrestling are their favourite sports.

After the minivan back to Chita, we had bliny for dinner again, then visited Kafe Marazhenoe (“Icecream Cafe”) for a refreshing triple-scoop dish, most excellent. As I type Max is getting her pack ready for the late night trek to the voksal to catch the train to Ulan-Ude — platzkart or “open sleeper” class this time, which means we’ll be in with a few dozen other untermensch. Should be pretty interesting!

April 27

It’s been a long day today. We woke up on the train at about midnight and went about packing and the rest before disembarking at Chita, which had a helpful neon sign announcing itself, at 1.45am. We’d decided to rough it in the train station for the rest of the morning as we didn’t like our chances of turning up at a hotel at two in the morning unannounced and getting a good room, but unortunately we weren’t the only ones with this idea.

The station was packed full of weary-looking travellers, people asleep on luggage and people who looked like the central heating and free entry made this the best option for the night. We found two hard metal seats next to each other and deposited our things, dug about in our packs for various inflatable pillows and tried to catch some rest with limited success. Six o’clock rolled very slowly around and found us watching the midnight vigil for Orthodox Easter Sunday (live from Moscow) on the small TV in the station corner. The sun made an appearance half an hour later, and at seven o’clock we decided it was time to look for a hotel.

We lugged our packs up the hill and paid visits to the three hotels from the guidebook, one of which was booked and the other two of which had raised their prices threefold, putting them squarely out of our budget. We’d been looking for about an hour and a half at this stage with no success, so we dropped our packs off back down at the station left-luggage room and climbed the hill again to continue our quest. Anyway, long story short, it wasn’t much before 11 o’clock when we finally found somewhere pretty decent to stay, making us two rather tired people.

Our instincts were telling us to climb into bed, but as Chita had so far registered only as an inconvenience on our radar, we decided instead to do something nice. So we bought some bliny (buckwheat pancake) stuffed with sausage, cheese, pickle and white sauce for breakfast and ate it next to Lenin in Chita’s obligatory Lenin Square. Then we strolled off to the original log church, which had been built after the Decembrists had been exiled here and has since been turned into a museum full off oil paintings and artifacts of the men, their families and their lives. Both were thoroughly enjoyable.

Chita is a much prettier place than Vladivostok. A lot of the older buildings here have been restored or upgraded rather than being abandoned and left to rot, and the streets, parks and footpaths seem in much better condition too. It was founded about thiry-five years before Vladivostok and retains a handful of the original log homes (painted brown or green with vivid blue windows) as well as the slightly later two- to four- storey rendered brick buildings with elaborate molded decoration. The new church is amazingly beautiful -it sits opposite the train station so the first thing you see when you arrive is its five golden domes contrasting brilliantly with its bright blue walls and white moldings, the spires apparently weaving in and out of each other as you change your angle relative to it.

Well, Tom fell asleep a few hours ago at three o’clock, and I’ve right mind to follow him now. Tommorrow we plan to get up early and take a shared taxi two hours south to the Buddhist datsans of Aginskoe.

April 26

No – Sleep – ‘Til Chita! Etc.

Vastly improved mood onboard today – not that it was that bad yesterday – thanks in large part to the ancient art of taking showers.

Max has already discussed the hostile environs of the Rossiya kupeyny toilet, but just to recap, they’re small steel rooms with a porous rubber mat on the drain-floor, a mirror, a straight-to-the-tracks toilet and an auto-off cold tap.

Although the room is well capable of taking any sort of watery mess you throw at it, there’s not an easy way of showering in it. We solved the problem by half-filling a 2L plastic bottle with cold water, topping it up with boiling water from the carriage samovar, and having commando showers in our thongs (by which I mean flip-flops, any Americans reading). I even had a shave, and felt much better for it though I cut myself quite a bit thanks to the cold water.

We also deciphered the timetable today, which meant we knew exactly how long we would stop at each station. This allowed us to lay in a station-vendor’s lunch of grilled chicken and queer ravioli-like dumplings, as well as a couple of moderately priced drinks.

So there has been an adjustment today, we are no longer lands-people, we have become train-people, slashing and burning the wares of stall-vendors as we cross the Siberian wasteland. The quasi-nomadic sense of the place must intensify greatly if you do the whole trip from Moscow to Vladivostok, a mere 7000km over a full week, or something similar. Russia is incredibly enormous. You are basically pitching your tent in your compartment, setting it up with drying towels and food caches. Once a day you receive governance in the form of the provodnitsa, who comes through to sweep out the dust, and in our case usually says something incomprehensible in Russian. Today she seemed to ask why we weren’t sleeping on the top bunks – we’d assumed we should leave them for other passengers, but perhaps we were supposed to know in advance we wouldn’t have any company in the compartment.

People are allowed to bring pets on the train, so there is a terrier on board Car 12 with us, that we have imaginatively nicknamed “Train-Dog”. Train-Dog bounds up and down our corridor from time to time, when his owners (a young Russian couple) make the trip to the samovar to fill their teacups. We snatched a couple of snapshots of him this afternoon, he’s a friendly little tyke.

At about ten o’clock this morning, we officially crossed from Chetinskaya (Russia’s Far East) to Siberia proper, at a little place called Amazar. Since then there’s been endless tree-girt hills and iced-in rivers, and some settlements of very desolate demeanour. You can tell it gets cold when the firewood pile is the size of the house itself.

Most waterways here still have a cap of about a foot of ice on them, and we’ve seen the merest hints of snow falling here and there, plenty of patchy fallen snow however. As the river ice melts narrow waterways are carving their way into it, running water on frozen water. It’s evident from the marshy bogs in the valleys that the snow has only thawed quite recently. Trees are of two types: skinny vertical white-barked deciduous, or skinny vertical brown-barked “evergreen” coniferous, so the hills look like neatly arranged pincushions. This is wolf country, trapper country, bear country. Although as I type we are emerging, with the beginning of twilight, into a terrain that more and more begins to resemble the cliché of a wasted treeless steppe. The late afternoon sun is fire engine red, glaring through the interminably overcast sky.

We’ve had another quiet day on the train, then, mostly snacking and fooling around with hobbies and so on. I’ve been wishing I had something else to read, I polished off my last novel (In the Skin of a Lion) about two hours after boarding. A good book to read in this environment, though – Finnish loggers skating blind down frozen rivers seemed especially apposite. At least I’ve had ample opportunity to browse some of our guidebooks. I’m more or less capable of counting in Russian now, which makes it easier to buy things.

At half past one in the morning we’ll finally arrive in Chita after about 55 hours on the train. Then I expect we’ll have to huddle together in the station waiting area until the morning when we can strike out for the nearest guesthouse. It could get pretty miserable if they don’t have a heated room. As Max commented earlier, it might’ve been easier just to push straight on to Ulan-Ude where we would’ve arrived at a sane time of day, but this should work out ok, and we will also save ourselves a night’s accommodation.

April 25

Aah, the monotony. Today was spent sitting by the dusted-up window of our carriage, eating way too much, playing solitaire and watching the world go by. So far, we’ve got our four-seater compartment to ourselves, which in some ways is a good thing (makes it easier to change, for instance) and in some ways a bad thing (we’d bought enough snacks for four to share with our hypothetical roomies).

The scenery is, unfortunately, a little obscured by window-dirt, and our window faces east to catch the sunrise. So far, though, there’s been what could be best descibed as tundra, dead-looking forest of deciduous white-trunked trees still in their winter, some snow on the ground and a few empty fields flooded with the thaw. Occasionally, we past a collection of log houses with half-collapsed roofs, or ruins of old buildings, or a large, concrete soviet-style station building. ”Desolate” might describe the landscape fairly well.

At each station where we stop for a decent length of time (five to twenty minutes), old ladies sell hot food from heavy cloth trolley-bags, or younger women have set up small portions of salads on card tables. Passengerrs jump off the train and buy the hot food and cold beer with just enough time to jump back on board before departing. Our lunch (alright, second lunch :o) consisted of mashed potato with a cabbage-based stew and lamb meatballs, bought in a flash from one such vendor, and consumed perhaps even quicker.

This voyage is just as other-wordly as the ferry trip, sans nausea. People hang about in the narrow corridor staring out the windows and bargaining over powerpoints. Smokers huddle in the charcoal grey end-of-carriage spaces and open the doors with cloudbursts of smoke. The toilets open directly onto the rails, as does the bathroom drain (which can cause a bit of an icy surprise on the legs when brushing your teeth in the evening).

We took a constructive break from our private compartment kingdom after nightfall to be served a large beer and a triple shot of vodka next to an orange juice respectively, and caught half an hour of an incredibly bizarre Russian “comedy” called Kyin Gza Gza set in a desert with antiquated metal contraptions, two guys in suits and a tribe of people talking an odd language, giving each other gifts and ringing the bells hung from giant hoops through their noses. Hmm.