It
was in Ekaterinburg that I heard of another lone British
tourist. We were invited to share our excursions the next
day. On my last day in the unknown (I would depart to Moscow
the next day), I met up with Will,
a guy from my hometown of Bristol, heading East eventually
to Thailand. Upon my return, I received the following account
of his railway trip. As always, the journey is the destination...
Dear
all,
I
have transcribed a bit of my diary for your amusement (Its
rather long). You'll have to excuse the tenses being all
over the shop, but it is only a diary. Hope you enjoy it...
(Ekaterinburg
to Ulaanbaatar is 4488km and takes three days.)
DAY 1. Friday
5th October.
At the end of
each stage of my journey so far I have had a kind of sick
ache in the pit of my stomach in anticipation of what unknown
quantity lies ahead. So far it has never been a justified
fear. It is just that, from the moment that I entered Belarus,
each stage of my journey has been entirely different from
the preceding one and unlike anything I've ever experienced
before. It is this feeling that I had at 04.30-06.00 waiting
for my delayed train in Ekaterinburg (pronounced Yeh-Gatterinn-bwoorg)
Train #6 runs
from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar. It is a Mongolian train and
is crammed full of fierce looking Mongols who travel the
route back-and-fourth peddling their wares to the cities
and villages along the way. I found my compartment and the
attendant opened the door to four berths completely jam-packed
with three naked Mongols (two in one tiny bed) and about
200 Italian fur coats. We cleared the emptiest bunk and
I went straight to sleep.
I woke later in
the day to the same, relentless winterscape of flat, featureless
fields, brown emaciated bracken and endless shallow birch
forests that has flanked the train since Belarus. After
freshening up with a flannel in the toilet, I returned to
my compartment to find about 7 Mongols sat all over my bed
playing cards, and diced intestines all over the table.
Luckily I found a refuge in my neighboring compartment,
where there was a couple from Nottingham and a couple from
Norway who said they were both heading for Ulaanbaatar with
the Russia Experience. Unfortunately, being couples, I feared
that my presence had upset their continuity, so I didn't
stay too long. The diced intestines had disappeared when
I returned to my compartment.
The highlights
of the day are when we pull into a station. There is a frenzied
rush of activity in every compartment as the Mongols get
their wares ready and, as soon as the train stops, rush
out into the throng of the hundreds of people who are waiting
for this twice weekly 15-mintute market. When the train
starts to slowly roll out of the station the ones who are
still bargaining throw goods and money at each other in
hasty conclusion and run for the door to their carriage.
Occasionally, when it looks like some are not going to make
it, an anonymous person pulls the emergency brake. The couple
in my compartment run back in, sometimes laughing but usually
arguing, and start frantically thumbing through wads of
rubles. This routine happens roughly every four hours, and
by 11pm it is less of a highlight than a serious thwart
to my attempts to get to sleep.
DAY 2. Saturday
6th October.
I am so hungover
it is unreal. Last night, sensing my aggravation, two of
the Mongol traders (one from my compartment and his best
friend, who spoke very broken English) invited me to join
them in a vodka binge and we got through two bottles. I
see them in a completely different light now. Yesterday
I thought they were unfriendly and resentful of my intrusion,
but today I have grown rather fond of them and I am sorry
to learn that they will be getting off later to catch the
train back to Moscow. This is their life. For eight months
of the year they travel back and forth and their children
are brought up this way, playing in the aisles.
Borya (Russian
name) or Burlien (Mongol name) is the Mongol from my cabin
and Dima (or Demuul) his friend. About one and a half bottles
into last night Dima told me that he was gay. He said that
Borya didn’t know and that if anyone in Mongolia was to
find out then… (motioned cutting his throat). He is going
to Holland in December in search of free love. He then gave
me his e-mail address and asked me to help him. I’m not
quite sure how I’m to do this, but one thing I am sure of
is that no one you meet travelling is ever ‘normal’. They
always have some burning desire to divulge their deepest
secrets. I think it has something to do with the intimacy,
yet anonymity of solo travels.
"…the first
condition of right thought is right sensation – the first
condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell
it…" T.S. Eliot, ‘Rudyard Kipling’
They say that
Mongolians and Mongolia all smell of lamb fat. On this Mongolian
train you don’t notice it at first, but it creeps up on
you. It is not an unpleasant smell, it is just there permeating
everything. I will probably miss it when its gone…
In Ekaterinburg
I put a black and white film in my camera because the city
had no colour to give. Everything is covered in a layer
of black grime and the sky was an even shade of grey. Today
the land turned red and the sky blue and I began to see
the beauty of Siberia. The land is so vast and unspoilt
and even the cities are like blankets carefully laid over
the landscape. Houses are made from wood and other natural
materials and do not plough the earth with foundations.
The best way I can describe the villages is having the appearance
of allotments.
At about 9pm tonight
all the Mongol traders left the train at Ilansk, and now
it is as if we are travelling on a ghost train. I long for
the throng of activity and the noise that I feared when
first boarding the train. My new compartment companion is
a Russian from Novosibirsk. The trouble with Russians is
that no matter how many times you tell them you can’t speak
their language, they insist on talking to you in Russian.
This one will not shut up. I can only guess at most of what
he is talking about – complex political issues and farming
methods being among his favourite repertoire. It is so tiring
listening that often I just switch off and stare right through
him, but it doesn’t put him off. Obviously he doesn’t get
many attentive audiences for his opinionated
rantings.
"The railway
bazaar, with its gadgets and passengers, represented the
society so completely that to board it was to be challenged
by the national character. At times it was like a leisurely
seminar, but I also felt on some occasions that it was like
being jailed and then assaulted by the monstrously typical."
Paul Theroux, ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’
DAY 3. Sunday
7th October.
Valery, the mining
corporation import manager, has sporadic bouts of the kind
of snoring that only Otis Redding on volume setting 50 can
overcome. When I wake at 12pm he complains to me that the
window had come open in our compartment and let a gale in
(I deduced this from his raving theatrics). I nod in placid
agreement instead of telling him that I opened it a tad
to try and get rid of the foul curried garlic, b.o. smell
coming from the bellowing man. At one point early this morning
I woke to find the train sitting still in the middle of
nowhere. Valery was emitting a noise tantamount to a pneumatic
drill. I wondered why he had not woken the whole carriage
(I found out later that he had in fact done just that).
Sometime after midnight the heating comes on in the train
and by this time it had become an inferno. I felt suffocated
by the heat and the stench, and began to intensely dislike
my snoring companion. I lamented the absence of the Mongols
who would probably have a solution, even if it meant another
vodka binge to knock me out, and another pounding head the
next day. I resorted to kicking him. He stopped snoring.
30 seconds later he turned onto his side and resumed his
cacophony with a renewed vigour. I tried a harder kick but
the harder I kicked, the louder his snore. This went on
for about two hours, while the train just sat still. Eventually,
against all the odds, out of sheer exhaustion, I fell asleep.
I have found that
it takes an amount of time proportionate to the journey
to settle in to the rhythms of the train. The longer the
journey, the more at ease one becomes with his surroundings.
"The size,
the great length of the train was a comfort. The bigger
the train, the longer the journey, the happier I was – none
of the temporary suspense produced by the annoying awareness
of the local train’s spots of time. On the long trips I
seldom watched the stations pass – the progress of the train
didn’t interest me much. I had learned to become a resident
of the express, and I preferred to travel for two or three
days, reading, eating in the dining car, sleeping after
lunch, and bringing my journal up to date in the early evening
before having my first drink and deciding where we were
on my map." Paul Theroux, ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’
It took me the
whole of the first day to relax into this journey, the second
to make friends, and the third to really enjoy it. Valery
has learned to leave me to my blissful solace as I read,
write and slumber, occasionally rising to open the corridor
window and bask in the gentle sunlight of a crisp Siberian
October day. Children lean out of another carriage window,
wave and stick their tongues out at me. Platform vendors
sell ice creams and even the Provodniks have come to begrudgingly
smile at me as I board the train after a fresh air stop.
The Trans-Siberian, like my city stops along the way, has
become my home for the past three days, and the people I’ve
met my family. It will be a sad farewell when we part company
tomorrow to find yet another new home and family.
"Railways
are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level
no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed,
and never upsetting your drink. The train can reassure you
in awful places – a far cry from the awful sweats of doom
aeroplanes inspire, or the nauseating gas-sickness of the
long-distance bus, or the paralasis that afflicts the car
passenger. If a train is large and comfortable you don’t
even need a destination; a corner seat is enough, and you
can be one of those travellers who stay in motion, straddling
the tracks and never arrive or feel they ought to – like
that lucky man who lives on Italian Railways because he
is retired and has a free pass. Better to go first class
than to arrive, or, as the English novelist Michael Frayn
once rephrased McLuhan: ‘the journey is the goal’"
Paul Theroux, ‘The Great Railway Bazaar’
DAY 4. Monday
8th October.
Somewhere around
early evening last night I began to realise that my dislike
for the smelly Russian, who passes the hours by gourmandising
endlessly on foul, stinking food, had only been shelved
temporarily. Between midnight and 4am last night, enhanced
by no sleep, border checks and a new arrival in the compartment,
I realised it had been growing into a deep enraged loathing.
Later, while on the train from Beijing to Hong Kong and
finishing the last few pages of The Great Railway Bazaar,
I recognised the very same man in Mr Theroux’s companion
on none other than the Trans-Siberian Express:
"When I returned
he had changed into a blue track suit and, staring through
the eye-enlarging lenses of a pair of glasses askew on his
nose, he was slapping jam on a slice of bread with a jack-knife.
I put my story away. He munched his jam sandwich and, between
bites, belched. He finished his sandwich, undid a newspaper
parcel, and took out a chunk of grey meat. He cut a plug
from it, put it in his mouth, wrapped the meat, and took
off his glasses. He sniffed at the table, picked up my yellow
sleeve of pipe cleaners, put on his glasses, and studied
the writing. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. He
monkeyed with my pipe, my matches, tobacco, pen, radio,
timetable, Borges’ Labyrinths, checking his watch between
each item and sniffing, as if his nose would reveal what
his eyes could not. This went on for the rest of the day,
defeating what plans I had for establishing a routine and
eliminating any possibility of my writing a story. His prying
motions made me hate him almost immediately and I imagined
him thinking, as he tapped his watch crystal between sniffs
of my belongings, ‘Well, there’s thirty seconds gone’"
A generation later
and free from the clutches of communism, this rare species
has not evolved much, but has developed his annoyances into
more sophisticated means. Unlike his mute predecessor, he
has learnt to vocalise his dislike for everything I own
or eat and to then counter that with a long Russian speech
about what I should own or eat. He demonstrates this with
wild hand gestures and his own endless supply of food. He
has a huge hemp bag which he pulls out from under his bed,
regular as clockwork, to begin his fastidious ritual of
slowly filling a small margarine tub with spoonfuls of greasy,
pungent slops from hundreds of little plastic bags which
he fastidiously unwraps, takes a spoonful, and re-wraps
until he has filled his makeshift bowl. This process takes
about 45 minutes, after which he takes a stretch of my toilet
paper and wipes his greasy fingers, stained from years of
the same routine. He then picks at the food and forces me
to eat more than half of it.
Last night, as
I was sleeping, a woman boarded just before the border and
asked Valery if we minded her using our compartment. He
saw his chance and accepted. After which the Mongol woman
made me get up while she stashed illegal import goods everywhere
but under Valery’s bed until the compartment was full to
bursting. Then she gave Valery two bottles of vodka and
two bottles of beer in thanks for using the space under
MY bed! Next came the two, three-hour long border stops
during which comically bureaucratic police boarded and procrastinated
over passports, demanded we left the compartment while they
made the token gesture of looking at our bags and people
ran from compartment to compartment moving contraband and
denying everyone sleep.
Understandably
I woke this morning in a foul temper. I think Valery sensed
this as I did not hear a word from him all day until he
left the train and, feeling guilty but relieved beyond belief,
I helped him with his bags (just to make sure he was gone
for ever). I learnt, with some glee, from another passenger
that we were running 9 hours late and would not arrive in
Ulaanbaatar until late afternoon, giving me 5 hours of empty
carriage, sleep and solace. ‘The journey is the goal’…….
Love
Will xx
