Tran-Mongolian: Ulan Bataar to Irkutsk by Train

After my brief stint in Mongolia it was on on to Siberia on April 22. I boarded the train at 9pm and met my young Mongolian cabinmate, a student at a university in Ulan Ude, Russia. We exchanged the few words that we had in common then went to sleep.

The next scene begins just after sunrise the next morning as we are awoken and bombarded with instructions in Russian at the Mongolian exit station. We hand over our passports and wait about 3 hours to get them back before we chug 5km up the tracks across the border and stop again at the Russian entry station and are eventually greeted by a young Russian border agent wearing high heels and a mini-skirt. Depite being in Siberia, this has been the hottest border crossing thus far. Here, we again hand over our passports and wait another five hours. At some point the army comes on board with a drug sniffing dog. Whereas in China they use Golden Retrievers on advertisements for dog meat stew, here they are used to search for drugs.

Around 4pm, just as I give up all hope that we will ever leave this border, we slowly pull away from the station.The next few hours until the late sunset are spent enjoying the vast desolation of the Siberian landscape. Here are some thoughts I scribbled down during this period, paraphrased of course:

Analagous to the old American Western frontier, a land of occasional scrub brush and grasses chewed to the stub by grazing animals; open ranges and ramschackle wooden structures; low, bare mountains and wide valleys, frozen lake and lazy rivers; dusty double-track roads-- no asphalt; the occasional small town with rusted out ruins of industrial factories.

These were my impressions of Siberia (this small corner of it at least).

Sometime 'round about the end of twilight we entered the bustling Siberian city of Ulan Ude and I drifted off to sleep. Once again I was awoken by sunrise as we passed through a landscape of patchy snow, quaintly painted wooden houses and evergreen forests just south of Irkutsk. I arrived there and joined up with two German girls whom I had met several days prior on the train from Beijing. The date was April 24.

And then the basics: found a hostel, got some sustenance, met a french guy, then the four of us caught a minibus for a day trip to a town on the shores of Lake Baikal. The lowdown on Baikal: The largest lake in the world in terms of volume and depth, containing approximately 20% of the planet's fresh water supply. It is impressive. We arrived on the shores of the lake and were treated to a grand vista of an endless body of water just beginning to throw off the reigns of winter. The surface was still frozen except for the parts just at the shoreline, but at times we could literally see it crumbling and melting before our eyes. It is the changing of the seasons here.

This, by sheer luck, was Easter Sunday, which meant there were a handful of families celebrating on the shore by barbequeing and drinking copious amounts of Vodka. The French guy we were with spoke a bit of Russian and we were soon invited to join one of the families in their festivites. After three quick shots of vodka in true Russian fashion, we were feeling good and gave up our plans to hike up the hill. Instead we just enjoyed the shore for a few hours, eating smoked whole trout and enjoying the company of our Russian brothers and sisters. We returned tired to Irkutsk under a cold rain and spent the rest of the day in the social atmosphere of the hostel.

The next day, in short: exploring the market, getting some bland but filling Russian food, seeing the local art museum, and exploring the city, which felt more like Europe than Asia. In the afternoon I met a jolly Australian couple on their 6-month honeymoon, and we went to a beer house along with a couple of stray Russian youngsters that we picked up along the way. This led into another jovial evening.

On the final day, the highlights were a walk around town on this bright sunny day with one of the Russian boys, Igor, and his nice girlfriend who spoke some English. It was an unadulterated cultural experience, and it was beautiful. Otherwise, I just killed time with other hostelites until the time when I and Franziska, one of the German girls, who was on the same train to Moscow as I, left for the train station at 1am. And thus began the 85-hour ride to the great western capital of the world's most longitudal nation. Goodbye East, hello West.