“There’s something about this departure forcing me to continually go out of our compartment and stare out of the windows in the corridor, as if everything depends upon me and that I watch the lights in Moscow, the blocks of flats and later on the warehouses and trees fly past and past and lie down behind us. As if everything will stop if I’m not here to let it disappear.”
The train took six and a half days in all. We went through the Siberian cold, white and full of factories without roofs and windows, and down to the red-brown Mongolia, the Gobi desert with sand, camels and horse skeletons, and from there further and finally down to China. We saw a quarter of the world roll past under us and man, it’s huge.
We travelled second class and had compartments with four beds. Luckily the train wasn’t full, so we were spared the random fourth person that would have taken the last bed. Every wagon had its own samovar, and a toilet with a sink. This was where we brushed our teeth, washed our hair, had a shower and washed our clothes. Our neighbours in our wagon was from Sweden, Finland, Holland, Ireland, Spain and Britain.
The eating wagon changed with the country, so we had the Russian one for the greater part of the trip. The restaurant lady was grumpy and spoke nothing but Russian, but her soljanka was ok, and one day she showed me a sepia picture of herself as young.
The excitement that went through the train when we were finally stopping at a station. We put on our clothes and hung around by the windows in the corridor, everyone waiting to breathe again. And then, when we were hurried inside again by the Chinese conductor, with what we could buy from the babooskas outside (noodles, beer and Russian sausage) everyone would look at the time schedule, when are we stopping next time? Is it in four hours? Six? We’ll just have to wait then.
At one tiny station in Siberia we were close to losing some passengers, including my dad. A train rolled in between ours and the station, and a minute later we started to move. I was so scared. There were some others in the wagon with more sense and vigour than me, so they made them stop and wait.
Most of us in the wagon got to know each other rather well, living this close for six and a half day, playing cards, talking, exchanging books and addresses. One of the nights we even had a party because Harri from Finland’s birthday (we gave the restaurant lady some euros to have it in her wagon). It was surprisingly sad to say goodbye at the train station in Beijing, but when we got to the hotel and discovered what a shower is and that it can be used to washing the Gobi desert out of your hair, it was hard to be very sad.
Siberia
Mongolia
The Gobi desert
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