Tuesday, July 28, 2009

in siberia, after 86 hours on the train...

we made it to siberia, after spending 3 1/2 days on the train from moscow to krasnoyarsk, a day in krasnoyarsk, then another 17 hours from krasnoyarsk to irkustk, where we are right now.

the train ride wasn't quite what i expected. don't know what i was expecting, but i guess something more memorable. we rode in kupe (2nd) class, which has cabins with 4 berths in each. they're small and cramped but not too bad. scenery was okay, it didn't get interesting until the last part of the train ride. a lot of siberia is swamp land and uninhabited. our cabin mates were nice, russian, but didn't speak much. so pretty much 3 days of starting out the window and reading. getting exercise was difficult. we tried walking up the train one time and that was enough for us. so during the longer train stops we'd get out on the platforms.

the platforms at the smaller cities were interesting, lots of vendors selling fruit, fish, shoes, random stuff. less so at the bigger cities. we bought all our food before getting on the train, stuff we could eat with just hot water of without cooking (noodles, soup, bread cheese). it was nice to get off the train though.

we spent a night in krasnoyarsk, primarily to visit stolby, which climbers will know from the patagonia video. that was interesting, we ended up staying in a real russian hotel. they had no cold water (yes cold water, not hot water), who knows why. so ended up we didn't get to take a shower after being on the train for 3 days. i'll write about stolby in another post.

arrived in irkustk last night after one night on the train. we're going on a guided 4-day trek tomorrow in the southern lake baikal region and hope to climb a little bit afterwards. that's still to be worked out.

a little frustrating today as we are trying to buy our train tickets to mongolia to make sure we have tickets and leave russia before our visas expire, but it seems we can't do it from here, since we want to have a stopover in ulan-ude. i guess we'll hope for the best and either find a way to buy tickets here through an agency or try our luck in ulan-ude and hope there's room on a train...

fortunately the bed bug bites pretty much don't itch anymore. erick had bites show up the day we got on the train and got to spend the worst part of it on the train. now we're checking all the mattresses we sleep on when we arrive at the hostels/hotels.

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