Train Leg #9
Seventy-nine kilometres out of Tomsk is the junction where the branch line we are on rejoins the main east-west route. In a classic piece of short sighted lobbying the Tomsk city administrators of the time wanted to protect their own transportation monopolies and so got bypassed by the railway. Then their town got bypassed by progress. Thick taiga surrounds us as we cover in a couple of hours what took a year to construct.
At the obviously named Tayga we are only a couple of hundred kilometers away from the halfway point between Moscow and Beijing. This train is almost perfectly timed, leaving in the late evening and by crossing yet another time zone, thus gaining an hour, we should arrive in Krasnoyarsk just before lunch. The published arrival times are actually quite reliable as the drivers get bonuses for pulling into the stations at the advertised time. A side effect of this can be long periods in the middle of the night where the train is stationary so as not to get too far ahead of schedule.
The whole time zone thing has become quite confusing. All schedules are on Moscow time and so you are constantly adding and subtracting hours to work out when you actually are. For example the printed arrival time to Novosibirsk was 3am which would be a terrible time but when three hours get added to this it actually works nicely.
Tomsk was a bit confusing however as it was not particularly clear which time zone we were in. According to all our maps and the inside the station clock it was four hours ahead of the capital. But on the main clock it was still the three that Novosibirsk had been. In the end it hardly mattered. We had been checked out of the hotel since midday anyway and had spent most of the afternoon just hanging out waiting for the departure time to roll around. Getting there early also allowed me to run across to the supermarket next to the station and restock our supplies and grab a couple of mystery pastries for dinner. One meat one cheese.
Almost immediately on boarding it was time to pull open the sealed bag of sheets and perform the awkward dance of making up a top bunk. I am getting sick of all this bed making, who comes on holiday to make their bed every second day. Once again it is quite amusing to watch all of the immaculately presented girls change persona after boarding. Trackpants and a t-shirt replacing the super styled outfits they were waiting on the platform in. Even the make up gets scraped off. Having walked past thousands of these girls in the past month it is still mildly surprising that they actually allow themselves to be seen in public like this. Somehow a train carriage must break the at home/in public divider.
That this happens is a good thing for us. On the street it is very obvious that people are going about their business in their own wee world. A history of severe punishments for wrong expressions takes a bit longer than a decade to work its way out of the national psyche. Still, there is usually an awkward time before this happens, once the sheets and blankets are arranged appropriately we sit in constrained silence sharing the space with two girls our age who resolutely stare at the table. Not even people person Arnika initiates conversation.
Above Rdoc in his side berth is Sergei IV, an engineer on his way to a new job in Krasnoyarsk. He had heard our initial chattering in English and was intrigued why we might be going there. Just as you meet so many Dutch people when backpacking that numbering becomes the easiest way to keep track of them all we had reached the same need with Sergeis.
Right when we really started getting into conversation the lights went out. Arnika was already tucked up and reading in bed but Richard, Sergei and I had a long whispered conversation standing there by the door in the dark. Some of the questions he managed to clear up for us included the dressing down in private. Because of the acommodation situation of most people they put a lot of effort into their public appearance where they spend the majority of their time. The dressing down is both to preserve the nice clothes and also because it is extremely rare to have visitors into ones home.
The other mystery he cleared up was how come we had been seeing so many weddings. Whoever gets married in September will have a happy and stable life whereas May is an unlucky month. The reason for seeing them all over the place is that after the civil ceremony the wedding party goes on a tour of the historical points of thier respective city. Just like backpackers. A very helpful tip was to always give flowers in odd numbers with even being only for funerals. A dozen roses isn’t going to get you very far in Russia.
Getting stuff done.
My top bunk was very cozy and I managed to get a fairly good and refreshing sleep. The beds in platscart are about twenty centimetres too short for someone of six feet and I was awoken the next morning by people walking up and down the aisle. It is an incredibly odd way to return to consciousness, your soles being brushed past by other’s shoulders. Todd, my mad Welsh flatmate in Golfe Juan once told me that if you want to wake someone up and them be happy about it to do it by pulling on their big toe. Well this theory does not apply to the whole foot.
Having woken I now discovered that while sleeping I had also lowered my blanket down like a blind on the person under me who was sitting up trying to eat some breakfast. The dark bread purchased for our own breakfast once again clashed with the chocolate spread that was supposed to be a treat. Arnika reveled in her Vegemite. How did I remember to bring her a jar of this Australian abomination and forget Marmite for myself?
About this time we stop in Bogotol, seemingly just a small town but one I have been looking out for as a reminder. Soon after we are back up to speed we cross the Chulim River. A hundred years earlier, and with the bridge still to be constructed, the rails were simply frozen into place on the surface ice. Even with the comparative brevity of this leg it seems to be one full of constant marveling at the sheer scope and challenge required to create this aortic artery of a nation. The kilometre posts slide by including the one announcing the halfway point between Moscow and Beijing. An hour later and the train is emptying out into Krasnoyarsk. Sergei IV is farewelled.
Like many cities in Siberia, Krasnoyarsk was closed to foreigners. Any city declared of ‘stragegic importance’ was given this status presumably to protect all those advances that were going to set the people free. Apparently there are numbered Krasnoyarsks to the north that still have this restriction. Based around a forge or a mine or some factory producing a ridiculously high percentage of aluminium or some such permission, was required to go there.
Dealing with that sort of bureaucracy to gain this must have been a nightmare and with few attractions to counterbalance this who would bother? Except just by telling someone they cannot go somewhere is sure to make them want to. Jumping down onto the platform I ponder firstly how you actually close a city to only certain people when it is a main stop on the way east. Then secondly what would happen if you did just disembark? Spending so much of its history closed to outsiders perhaps goes some way to explaining the difficulty we had in finding a hotel willing to even accept us as guests. I am beginning to understand institutional repression.
“You cannot stay here without registration.”
“How much is registration?”
“We cannot register you on a foreign passport.”
Argued out of repeating the successful searching strategy employed in Tomsk the next four hours were spent in the company of the entirety of our luggage. The strain of these continually exasperating searches was starting to show in the intergroup relations. It is said that one of the most important factors in selecting a travel buddy is whether you walk at the same speed. Into the fourth hour of fruitless trudging, the steadily increasing rain adding weight to your pack with every step does not make you very patient with those whose natural pace loses them half a block every two traversed. Nor particularly receptive to accusations of sexism when the accuser and straggler is the one who insisted on not just sending out unencumbered emissaries.
We found closed hotels, got directed to non-existent ones under stadia, tried two that were housed on boats that had a distinct air of the drunken sailor about them, and in our exhaustion even fancy ones all with no luck. Of course we should have just stuck to ul. Lenina because no matter the city we always end up staying on a Lenina.
I wanted to escape this city too.
Next challenge, filling out a whole bunch of forms that are written only in Cyrillic. A small price to pay maybe for being allowed to stay. Translating letter by letter it is a very gradual filling out of the twenty eight required fields. All with the extra pressure of previous experience where one mistake often results in a termination of the transaction. Rdoc has a translation program loaded onto his PDA and the literal translations help some.
Surely it is easier for everyone if this was just done in the usual way, us hand over our passports and visas and they find the pertinent information. This works especially well as the visa has our details in Cyrillic, not so much of an issue for me as Tomac has four of the five letters that are the same in both alphabets, but Knight is a surprisingly difficult word to phonetically convert.
Now allowed out of the reception area the Hotel Sever shows itself in an entirely different light. In a similar way to how people dress differently in public to private the building is all about grandeur in the public spaces. So you get a huge red carpeted marble staircase being towered over by painted representations of famous battles. The corridor is about five metres wide. Its carpet is not faring as well as that on the stairs. The long runner down the middle that creates the impression of those driveways with a strip of grass sown down the middle that are always so infuriating to mow has come unattached in many places creating hazardous undulations. An important fact to remember for night time as invariably the minimum of light bulbs will be in use.
As in Tomsk our allocation is one twin and one single room. Arnika was craving a bit of company and so was going to take the twin with Rdoc but in the wait for the single to become ready both Rdoc and myself fell asleep on the ancient but very comfortable beds. The room is very small compared to the luxury of TGU. There are no decorations but we do have a kettle, some cups and even a functioning shower.
The window takes double glazing to an extreme with a foot between each pane. A useful place to store food as you can open the inside one. Under the windowsill is a radiator and it is quite comfortable to sit in the little alcove warming your feet while looking out onto the street. I hope that our division of the rooms does not exacerbate the tension from earlier.
There is the impression that Arnika wants to talk but both Rdoc and myself are too tired to do much beyond discuss potential food options. Also neither of us really work on the whole endlessly rehash a situation to work it out philosophy. More the ‘it was shit, we are all obviously tired and hungry, fixing both of those will probably see everything sort itself out’ variety. But even just going for food somehow further established this feeling of ostracism for Arnika. Being a vegetarian she didn’t want any part of the cheesiest, greasiest and best pizza in Siberia opting instead for some disappointing wrap thing. After all of the walking we had already done that day there was no way Rdoc and I were going to go on another pointless hunt when all we wanted was right there across the street. Season two Extras on the laptop was a good way to end the day in a more relaxed way.
Tags: culture, myths and legends, food, Krasnoyarsk, Russia, train, Trans-Siberia, Travel
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