Trans Siberian Railway - April 2014

I had planned a trip home in April to celebrate my mother's 95th birthday and Nancy had other commitments so I decided to take the long way home and travel on the Trans Siberia Railway (something Nancy didn't want to do but I have always wanted to do).

I arranged for a visa (not an easy or cheap task) and started making plans. Then Russia took over the Crimea and things looked a bit iffy.  I put things aside and didn't make any more plans but decided to wait and see what happened. While back in the UK, I noticed that things weren't so bad (at least it wasn't the top news item as it was in the USA), so I went ahead and arranged the trip. I decided not to travel by train all the way from London (the Byelorussian transit visit by itself is expensive and it takes time) and I got a cheap Easy Jet flight into Moscow.  

I flew into Moscow's Demidodovo airport on a damp and dreary Wednesday afternoon.  It's always a bit disconcerting when arriving in a foreign country especially when both the language and alphabet are different but somehow I managed to find the train into Moscow and the subsequent Metro ride to my hotel in the Novay Gorod district.   The Metro is a most wonderful feature of Moscow with such beautiful stations and the incredibly frequent trains.  

I was staying in the Novay Gorod Hotel - a reasonably priced basic hotel in this the most expensive of cities and within easy walking distance of Red Square - I highly recommend it.   After checking in, I walked through the damp drizzle to the sights of Red Square - St Basil's, the Kremlin, the Lenin Mausoleum and the GUM Department Store.  

St Basils Cathedral, Red Square

Red Square is indeed a wonder to behold - the multi-colored onion domes of St. Basils Cathedral, the spires of the Kremlin and the Kremlin walls, the somber edifice of the Lenin Mausoleum and of course the GUM department store.  GUM has been renovated and it now has every high end vendor in there - Cartier, Gucci, Benetton, you name them, they are there.  I escaped from the damp and indulged in an expensive latte and cake and watched the shoppers go by.   What a contrast to my previous trip in the 1990's just prior to the fall of the Soviet Union.  

Moscow traffic is a quite intimidating. First there is a lot of it, the roads are wide and multi-laned, and everyone drives exceedingly fast - way too fast.  The pedestrian is a second class citizen and he is forced to wait long times for a green light to cross, or he has to take a detour through one of the many under-ground subways.

Red Square at night

In the evening the skies cleared and it turned into a beautiful night with twilight going on till almost 10:00. I had a very mediocre meal (I wasn't there for the food) and did a lot more walking around the central district.

The Kremlin and Moscow River

Next morning was clear and sunny.  Being Thursday the Kremlin was closed and for whatever reason access to Red Square was restricted (there was some event going on).   I set off on the south side of the Moscow River from which there is a great view of the Kremlin and Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.  

Cathedral of Christ the Saviour

The cathedral is quite spectacular and as I approached they started chiming the bells (the Russian Orthodox people like their bells) and this went on for a good 20 minutes.  All very nice indeed.  Further down (or is it up) the Moscow River is the weird and very wonderful statue of Peter the Great.  This statue, erected in 1997, is quite different and quite controversial - Peter the Great didn't like Moscow and moved the capital to St Petersburg.  It comes up in many lists as one of the ugliest statues in the world.   It is certainly distinctive.

Peter the Great

I walked the length of the Arbat which was not very inspiring - before I remember it as a somewhat artsy area but now it is just a street of fast food restaurants and cheesy tourist shops

Limited access to Red Square was being given to visit Lenin's Mausoleum so I got in line and very respectfully paid my respect to Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.  He was a relatively small fellow but he is looking well for being dead for nigh on 90 years. I actually made a second pass round to savor the experience.  Beneath the Kremlin walls there is still a small bust of Stalin there and Trotsky too. Someone had placed red rosess beneath Stalin's statue.

Uncle Joe Stalin

I walked back to the hotel to check out.  I left my bags at the hotel and went back for more walking. This time to the Pushkin Museum of 19th and 20th Century Art. What a great collection - there were multiple examples from just about anyone who was anyone from that era.  A great gallery, well worth the visit.  I wonder if that art was collected before the revolution or was it booty from the Second World War?

By mid afternoon it was time to make my way to the station for the first leg to Nizhny Novgorod. There are three stations that serve Nizhny Novgorod and my ticket didn't say which one I was supposed to leave from.  The Internet came to the rescue and I managed to find the right one.  When I arrived at the station it was terribly confusing - there must have been 30 odd platforms and everything was in Cyrillic.  No one seemed to speak English but after staring at the departure board for a while I figured out the train number was the key to the system and that led me to the right platform. 

It was a short trip (4 hours) to Nizhny Novgorod and there were 6 of us in the compartment. Nothing much was said until we were pulling into our destination and then everyone got very helpful. It ended up with a young woman and her daughter taking me in their taxi all the way to my hotel. Such generosity. 

The modern Ibis Hotel was a bit characterless but perfect for my needs. They spoke English and the restaurant was open until midnight. 

Church Tower - Nizhny Novgorod

Next morning I was off to explore Nizhny on foot. The older parts of town are not that large so it was quite manageable in the one day I had before my evening train departure.  There was a walled Kremlin; the mighty Volga River; several beautiful old churches, a pedestrian street thronged with people, and some very nice old wooden buildings. 

Chkalov Statue and Kremlin

There is a statue to a Russian Aviator - Valery Chkalov (he was the first to fly over the pole from Russia to the US).  It's an impressive statue situated on the bluffs overlooking the Volga River - a great location.  Below the statue there must be a military base and when I was there a military band was playing and they were drilling the troops. They must have been practicing for some sort of official review as every now and then a black car would parade slowly up and down the lines of troops to salutes and cheers from the soldiers. The Russian national anthem played by a military band is certainly a stirring piece of music.

Soldiers Drilling - Nizhny Novgorod

My train left around 10:00 pm. This time for a slightly longer 20 hr trip to Yekaterinberg.  I had the share of a sleeper compartment with a Russian guy named Mikhail (aren't they all Mikhail).   A nice ride through the Ural Mountains which really aren't any more than hills in this part of Russia.  I think the highest mountains are still only 1500ft above sea level.   Hardly noticeable as a hill, let alone the mighty Ural Mountains.

Things were getting colder after shirt sleeve weather in Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod and we passed through snow covered ground and rivers with ice on the banks.

Every carriage on Russian trains has a women (provodnitsa) or more rarely a man (provodnik) who looks after the carriage making sure it is clean and orderly, checking your tickets when you get on, and making sure you get off at the correct stop.  At each station they don their uniform and get out and stand by their carriage policing access to the carriage and signaling when it is OK to leave.  The stops were fairly well scheduled with a predetermined stop - some for 2 minutes, some for 10, some for as long as 20 minutes.  The longer ones gave me time to dash out of the station and walk around the streets in front of the station.  I never came close to missing getting back on the train, but I imagine it has happened, and I imagine it would be pretty disastrous with all your belongings on the train and you in the backwoods of Siberia in the clothes you stood up in and nothing more.

We pulled into Ekaterinburg in the early evening and I grabbed a way too expensive taxi to my not too distant hotel.  In a foreign country you are sometimes at the mercy of these sharks.  Uber will change all that.

Again, Ekaterinburg is relatively small - at least the places you want to see are in the middle of town and are all within walking distance.  The biggest thing to happen here of course is that the Romanovs (Tsar Nicholas and his family) were exterminated here by the Bolsheviks in 1918.   The house in which they were incarcerated for the last year of their lives has been pulled down (by Boris Yeltsin in the 1970's to avoid it becoming a focal point for monarchist supporters) but there is now a beautiful church built on the site and it is presumably a pilgrimage spot for admirers of the now canonized Romanov family members.

Church of the Blood - Romanov execution site

Boris Yeltsin Statue - Ekaterinburg

My train to Vladivostock left Ekaterinburg in the late afternoon so I had the entire day to wander around the city.  Of course I visited the Romanov church, and the Boris Yeltsin statue (he started out as mayor of Ekaterinburg), the impressive city hall, the statue of Sverdlov (Lenin's right hand man until the flu epidemic after World War I took him - or did it, there are suggestions of a plot to exterminate him).   The river here is dammed and it makes a nice lake in the center of town.  A giant keyboard is laid out on the banks of the river, presumably as an art installation - mildly interesting.

The Big Keyboard - Ekaterinburg

I felt I had seen the sights by the mid-afternoon and after stocking up on fruit, yoghurt and biscuits for the journey, I made my way to the station to catch the train which would carry me over the next 5 days to Vladivostok.   There was the same confusion at the station as to which platform the train would arrive at and when it would arrive and again no one seemed to speak English.   Fortunately I had enough time to see how the arrival/departure board worked before my train came in.

For the first part of this leg of the journey I had a compartment to myself.  It was very nice to be able to spread out and relax and not worry about anyone else.   During this part of the trip the carriage never seemed very full, though at various times 2 different people joined me in my compartment for shorter legs of the journey.   It made it nice, a bit of company and a bit of solitude.

The Birch Forest - Taiga

The scenery is not the most exciting or varied.  There were lots and lots of birch trees, and on higher altitude sections some fir trees.  Often times we would follow the path of a river and that made it interesting.   There were frequent villages with lots of very attractive wooden homes, all in weathered wood and some looking quite dilapidated.  The roads in these settlements were often just dirt roads and the inhabitants were obviously quite poor fiscally speaking (but as the film Happy People - a Year in the Taiga points out they are rich in other ways).

The larger cities were a different item - Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Chita, Khabarovsk, etc are huge cities with significant populations.  Lots of industry in these places and a significant railway network connecting them (all over-head electrified).  These places did not look quite so attractive with lots of the typical Soviet-era tower blocks and shabby buildings.

The Provodnitsa and Food Vendors

At the stations people would come out to the train and try and sell various food stuffs.   Often times this didn't look too appetizing to me - smelly dried fish, red caviar, dubious looking pastries.  I stuck to my yoghurt and biscuits.

I would have dinner in the restaurant car each evening and to my surprise the food was quite good.   My memories from my trip back in the 1990s was that the food there was awful, but now it was very acceptable.   The high point of the day was borscht soup and a beef stew for dinner washed down with a cold beer.

The Samovar

At the end of each carriage is a samovar to provide hot water at any time.  It is a weird looking contraption that looks way over engineered just to deliver the occasional cup of water, but every carriage has one and at least it provided me with water for my morning coffee.  At the other end of the carriage were the toilets and these were again quite adequate - no showers, but lots of hot water and our carriage was always clean.  The provodnitsa on my carriage did an excellent job of keeping everything tidy during the journey.

There was a lot of talk in the guide book about protecting your valuables from possible theft but really I felt everything was quite safe.  In fact I became quite cavalier about leaving cameras and phones in the compartment while I went walkabout.  Perhaps it might be more of an issue in 2nd and 3rd class, I was slumming it in 1st class.

The Trans Siberian Express in Khabarovsk

The schedule of the train is posted in each carriage and there is an arrival and departure time for each station along the way.  This way I could plan my forays into the station or further afield.  The provodnitsa would always stand guard and tell me a time 5 minutes less than the available time just to make sure I made it back.  Apart from a section in the middle where it looked like they were around 1 hour late, the train ran exactly on schedule.  In fact the train pulled into Vladivostok station exactly to the minute which is not bad for a 7 day trip.  They could show Amtrak a few things.

All railways run on Moscow time throughout Russia, and this gets more and more wayward as you cross the country.  Inside the station the clock would show Moscow time, outside the station would show local time.   By the time we reached Vladivostok there was a 7 hour difference.

Vladivostok

Vladivostok was another city that you can easily walk around the main sights in a day (or even less).  I found a hotel not far from the railway station and got a brief overview of the city on the night of my arrival and then the next day set off early to explore.  A Saturday morning market in the main square with some interesting looking produce, a fine new suspension bridge spanning the Golden Horn (with apologies to Istanbul), a funicular railway up the side of the hill, a WW II era submarine open to the public, a pretty poor looking beach right in the heart of the city.

Submarine - Vladivostok

The submarine was interesting - what incredibly cramped and miserable conditions must have existed when at sea.  The funicular railway was fun to ride but didn't really go anywhere interesting so I immediately walked back down the hill.  The beach was not the best, but when you are ice-locked for 3 months of the year then I don't suppose you can expect much and whatever you have is quite welcoming.   What was really nice was the arts and crafts type decorations on the railway station - beautiful colored tiles, copper spouting and gutters - a real work of art.  The steam engine on the station was World War II era and was actually made in the USA and shipped to the USSR during the war as a part of the Land Lease Act.

Lenin Statue at Sunset, Vladivostok

In Russia you drive on the right side of the road, as we do in the US, and most all cars are left hand drive.   However because Vladivostok is near to Japan where they drive on the left side of the road in right hand drive cars, most cars are right hand drive.  In fact it seemed like almost 90% of cars were right hand drive.   However they still drive on the right side of the road.  That has to lead to a higher incidence of accidents.

There is a fine airport express train running hourly to the airport from the main station in Vladivostok.  I took it out for my late afternoon flight to Seoul.   Vladivostok airport was small but nice and modern.

Arriving in the very large and very new and very efficient Incheon Airport in Seoul was like stepping into another world.   What an incredible airport - they could certainly show the US a thing about designing, building and running an airport.  I can think of none that come anywhere close over here.

A not so exciting stay at a mediocre airport hotel for the night then I was off the next morning to Japan (Narita) and on to San Francisco.   Don't forget to buy the Royce chocolate whenever you are in Japan.

As usual all the photos are on my Smugmug site.