Here is all my footage of the my journey on the Tran Siberian Railway from Moscow – Ulan Bator – Beijing.
Woke up from a shit sleep, can’t get used to all these new timezones at all! need a few days in one place i think.. can’t wait for Mongolia.
I got up ready and looked out my cabin window, wasn’t much to look at so had something to eat, then went to get coffee and about 20 feet away from the window in the corridor was Lake Baikal! It looked more like the ocean as you can’t see the other side from where we were.
After Lake Baikal we started heading towards Ulan Ude where we would then cut of onto the Trans-Mongolian route heading for Ulan Bator.
At Ulan Ude i went into the station shop to buy some food and beers and saw they have a russian version of Desperado’s but also noticed the same company do a ‘Beer and Coke’ combo! didn’t bother try any cause it would probably be minging.
Once we were passed Ulan Ude the landscape changed so much, big rolling hills, huge lakes.. probably one of the best things I’ve ever seen! don’t think any photos or video will do it justice.
Vincent also left this morning at 5am to go take his clients round Irkutsk for 2 days, then to Mongolia for 2 days.. so i think we will end up back on the same train again.. hopefully not the same cabin, cause as he was working, he was a bit boring. So now i have the carriage to myself till Ulan Bator.
Got 6 Hours to wait at the border crossing from Russia to Mongolia and then another possible 3 hours at Customs on the Mongolia side… Good Times.
Jetlag (Trainlag?) is really catching up with me today, woke up at 10 and as I’m looking at the time on my phone, Vincent tells me that we just crossed another timezone meaning it was now 11. Once we hit Mongolia though we go back an hour meaning the time will be GMT + 8 Hours. Passed through a lot of small towns full of cool log cabins, all painted up traditional russia style. We also passed through the Taiga and were really close to the area where the Tunguska event happened, which was one of the largest pre-atomic era explosions ever recorded. It destroyed 200 squared kilometres of forrest instantly, shockwaves were registered on seismic and the light from the blast could be seen throughout europe. No-one knows for sure what caused the blast but people reckon it was a meteorite.. Im sure my mate Sean probably has some weird conspiracy theories about what happened.
Watched ‘The Way Back’ before bed, so that i could maybe recognise the spot they cross the tracks near Lake Baikal when we pass it tomorrow.
Woke up and Vincent tells me we are now in Siberia and will cross the Asia / Siberia border back and forth about 4 times today. He said his GPS just started working today as in Russia they break the signal to the satellite. He then showed me the iPhone app he has for tracking himself, it was pretty cool.
We stopped at a few stations today that i can’t remember the names of except for Omsk.. The ladies were cutting about like usual trying to sell some food and beers but I’m all stocked up so stayed clear of them. Not much happened after Omsk we got to the Baraba Steppe which is which is a massive wetland in Siberia full of Bogs and Swamps. There is a massive forest in the distance but apparently if you were to try to walk towards it you would never get there as it is just clumps of trees that look close together from a difference.. The guidebook says many have died because of this and the sheer lack of landmarks. In spring it is nicknamed hell as the cloud is usually grey with clouds of Mosquito’s and Gnats.
We have also now passed two timezones today so we are now 8 hours ahead of UK time and 4 hours ahead of Moscow time. Managing to keep up with it alright, sticking to Vincent’s rule by going to bed at local time.
Got woke up in the morning by Vincent going through all his bags of food.. but it was 9am anyways so i got up to see what was outside, there wasn’t much to look at just forrest’s full of birch tree’s… So i got myself some coffee and sat at the window with my guidebook trying to work out where we were using the kilometre markers. We were ages away from anything cool so i went out in the corridor to take a few photos of inside the train and met a few more folk. I think that because I’m in first class I’m away from most of the people my age which sucks but some of the extra’s make up for it. There is an old guy from Leeds two doors down from me and he’s pretty cool! Spent about an hour talking about the film ‘The way back’ and he told me one of his friends was travelling on the train years ago and had met a guy who had been caught up in the 1905 war in Japan (If i remember correctly) that had walked the full length of the railway from Vladivostock to Moscow to get away from it all. Pretty mental.
Later we stopped at Balyezino Station for about 30 minutes and i went outside to take some photos and buy some food from the ladies at the station.
I bought some chicken and potatoes which were roasting so must have been freshly cooked, but when i got back on the the train the chicken was still pink inside so i just binned it.. bummer! We then set off again and went passed more forrest, little towns, old industrial areas and the some of the biggest grassland areas ever!
I have also now just figured out why Vincent is so OCD about everything, how he knows so much about the train and why he is so over prepared. He is a freelance tour guide on the trans-siberian and has 2 clients on the train who he is feeding as well as himself. He uses a GPS system so that his clients family can see where they are and also for insurance purposes so that he can hit the emergency button if anything bad happens. He says that he has taken the train over 170 times and has covered the distance equivalent to the moon and back and says he’s on his way to the moon again. So i am pretty lucky to be sharing a cabin with a guide!
About 5:30ish we stop at a station called Perma 2 and i head out for some more photos and buy some pastrami and bread to make a sandwich with.. When we get back on the train 10 minutes later Vincent tells me that we have passed through two timezones and that the time was now 7:45pm… About 8:30ish the sun started to set, so i had a beer and emptied my camera of all the photo’s and videos i had taken. I asked Vincent if he finds it hard to keep up with the changing timezones and he says ‘Yes!’ but says he has a rule he likes to stick to by going to bed when you should goto bed instead of the time you want to goto bed otherwise when you get to Ulan Bator or Beijing you will be knackered and need a full day of sleep to get back to normal.. So i went to bed at 11.
My Cabin.
The train @ Balyezino Station ( i think )
The train at sunset
On my last day in Moscow i was due to catch my Train to Ulan Bator at 9:30pm so i thought i would just chill at the hostel edit some footage and update the site.. After i done all that it seemed like i had loads of time left to kill so i went for a long walk and got some street food. This got me until around 5ish which still seemed like i had ages left, so i went back to the hostel watched a film and sat on facebook for a bit. After the film finished i realised it was 7:30 and i still hadn’t been to the supermarket to stock up on food for the train. So i walked up to see what food they had in the small supermarket next to the hostel that would last a few days on the train and they had nothing but fresh food that probably wouldn’t last 1 night out of the fridge. So i went back to the hostel and asked if there were any other supermarkets and they gave me directions to a larger one but that was a 20mins walk there and back and i was seriously running out of time to go catch my train. So i ran all the way, got some food and ran back.
I packed my stuff as quickly as i could, said my goodbyes to the guys in the hostel and headed round to try and work out the russian subway.
When i got to the subway station i went over to buy a ticket, opened my wallet and the lowest note i had was 50 rubles, so i handed it to the woman and she laughed and gave me 3 small coins back.. deffo got bumped out of 50 rubles which i don’t think is a lot anyway so i never argued.
Once on the platform i didn’t have a clue what side to get on, so i pulled out my tickets, showed some random folk the name of the station i was aiming for and pointed at both platforms, and most folk pointed me in the right direction. A few stops later i made it to the large station where i was to get the trans-siberian train from but surrounding it are 2 other stations.. so i just picked a random one then asked a police woman if i was in the right building and she got some army dude to take me to right building / platform and made sure i got on the correct train which was cool.
On the train i met the guy i would be staying with for 5 days, Vincent from Switzerland. He seems a bit OCD and over prepared.. He has brought everything you could ever need to spend time on a train from washing stuff to clean “the shower”, huge boxes full of food, a GPS system so his mates at home can see where he is and a do not disturb sign for the door.. I have no idea how he got it all to the station himself or how he got it all on the train but it makes me feel underprepared when all i have is some beer, vodka, 5 pasta pots and some sweets.. There is a restaurant car though and ladies selling stuff at most stations so I’m glad i never brought a lot.
I spent some time getting all my stuff sorted and then tried to get to sleep but there are a lot of stations just outside Moscow so the train was always stopping with the carriages slamming into each other so was hard to get a good sleep for the first few hours after that it quietened out.
