Author: Elizabeth

Woke up in Yekaterinburg this morning, it felt good to sleep in a hotel bed after our marathon 56-hour train journey from Irkutskt.
(We had thought it was a little shorter but totally overlooked the fact we would be crossing THREE time zones.  Which of course led to jokes in the group about the trip that never ends because they keep moving the clock on us!).  Having said that, we all enjoyed crossing Siberia — this really is a cool journey, to see such a vast landscape, and to watch the changes in terrain as the miles roll past.  And one advantage of getting in late and going to sleep “on land”  is that I woke up steady on my feet.  After the last long train segment, I walked a bit like a drunken sailor for an hour or two, unused to my world  not rocking and swaying.

Started our day with a walking tour of the city.  One highlight was The Church of the Spilled Blood, constructed on the site of the assassination of Nicholas & Alexandra and their children.  We were surprised to see the commitment that Russia has made to honouring them (given the Revolution and all) and they have even been made saints by the Orthodox Church.  This year is the 100th anniversary of their deaths, and Yekaterinburg is bracing for pilgrims expected from all over Russia, and indeed from around the world.

Another highlight on our perambulation was the Sevastianov House — originally the property of a wealthy pre-Revolution merchant, and now the Yekaterinburg official residence of Vladimir Putin.  I do hope the picture I am attaching is clear enough for you to see that it looks like a very delicious cake!

Geoff and I struck out on our own later in the afternoon, as we were the only ones in the group who wanted to see the Yeltsin Centre, an interesting museum covering Boris Yeltsin’s life and times.  It made me want to go find a book to remind myself about his presidency, as I found that I remembered only high points, but didn’t have an appreciation for the amount of change that happened during his time in office.

Back on the train tomorrow morning, heading for Moscow — but it will be merely a 24 hour trip.  For hardcore train people like ourselves, this will seem like hardly any time at all… 🙂

We have just boarded the Trans-Siberian Express and I must share a picture of the gorgeous train station at Irkutsk.  Too bad it’s an overcast day, but that is always a good day to travel.  This leg is long, about 50 hours on the train, from Irkutsk to Yekaterinburg.  Once again we brought food for the journey, although there is apparently a nice restaurant car, so we may not eat everything we brought.

And of course there is a samovar in the carriage, as there always is here, and I have just made myself a “wee cup of tea” to start my journey.  Ahhhhh, this is the life!

We left Mongolia by train on Saturday, and crossed the Russian border very early Sunday morning, meaning we are now officially on the Trans-Siberian Express leg of our journey.

We have stopped off in a smallish town called Listvyanka, on the shore of Lake Baikal, which is beautiful.  It’s big (80 km across at the widest point), and deep (contains significantly more water than Lake Superior, even though the surface area is smaller), so that might give you an idea, but the really remarkable thing is the clarity of the water, it is unbelievable.

This morning we visited a market, and sampled the local smoked fish (which was delicious), but also Geoff tried a Baikal oilfish, which was apparently NOT so delicious!  We also bought a snack for the next leg of our train journey tomorrow — walnuts threaded onto a string and the whole  thing dipped in fruit leather.  Not sure what it tastes like, but can’t wait to try it.

This afternoon we went to a banya (Russian sauna).  It was a bit hot for me, and I found the super-hot steam room followed by big ladles of cold water to be a bit jarring.  But everyone else loved the experience, including being gently smacked with big bunches of wet birch twigs.  Very authentic… ?

And hey, I have another exciting thing to report.  Our little group (15) turns out to be full of opera fans — who knew? — and last night we booked 11 tickets to see Carmen at the Mariinsky Theatre when we arrive in St Petersburg. Exciting!

Mongolia has been interesting. It’s a small country, of about 3 million people, with nearly half of them living in Ulan Baator, which by the way is apparently the world’s coldest capital city. We were surprised by the Buddhist influence, there are several prominent temples in UB,with monks studying and chanting, and shrines/prayer wheels, similar to what we had seen some years ago in Tibet, with one striking difference being no prayer flags here.

I’ve learned a lot about Ghenghis Khan, whose military skills were  impressive — he brought together tribes of nomads from a pretty small area to conquer an enormous chunk of Asia and part of Europe. If you have been to Cracow, Poland, you may remember the trumpeter who plays each day at a certain time, and the song is cut off suddenly., to commemorate the brave trumpeter who was killed by an arrow there trying to warn the town of an invasion.  Well, I did remember the trumpeter, but didn’t realize he was warning about (and was shot by) the army of Ghenghis Khan! Here is a photo of Ghenghis’s memorial, where we stopped en route from Ulan Baator to the Gorkhi Terelj National Park.

The nomadic way of life is alive and well here, with families continuing to move around with their animals. Our guide spoke of the difficulty of trying to find your friends and relatives when they have no fixed address — apparently it is generally a matter of asking nomad families as you go along, as they have an informal information network that tries to keep track of who is where, or who else might know something. And I gather they are starting to use GPS, which our guide jokes is the acronym for a Ger Positioning System.  We see quite a few cars driving off-road over the hills and valleys here, and not SUVs but just family sedans going to and from places that, well, aren’t actually on a road. Yurts/gers are also used by city dwellers as holiday homes, in the Mongolian version of cottaging. We ourselves spent the last two nights in yurts in the Gorkhi Terelj national park, although I do wonder if ours are a bit more luxurious than the nomadic standard version — does this look like glamping to you?

Heading out on the train again this afternoon — Russia, here we come!

Quite the day we had yesterday. Early start from Beijing, the train turned out to be — well, not luxurious, but higher-end than any of us expected. We shared a compartment with two ladies, they took the upper bunks and Geoff and I are on the ground floor. Our tour group is 15 in all — we are Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans. And our tour guide is Russian.  Here we are with our “roomies”!

Passed through pleasant scenery  on our 11-hour train trip to the Mongolia border, starting with green saw-toothed mountains outside Beijing, turning gradually into flatter land, and ending up with very flat and scrubby land, grazed by sheep, goats, horses, and yes, eventually camels. The China-Mongolia border itself was an adventure. We didn’t have to change trains, but they changed the WHEELS on the train, to accommodate a different track gauge in Mongolia. Coupled with the Customs/Immigration border controls, it was a four-hour process. The guards told us we could get off the train to stretch our legs, but a few of us wandered too far down the track, and when we turned to get back on the train they had locked the doors, and we had to sit out the hours in the waiting room of the station. At first we felt a bit sorry for ourselves, what with the others being on the train and in relative comfort, but we all got to know each other quite well, enjoyed some good laughs at our predicament, and eventually scored a triumph for Canada when Geoff — in Chinese — talked the Customs staff into letting him leave the station and cross the street to buy a bag of cold beer. Our hero!  Happily, we may have had the last laugh, because when we got back to the train we found that to prevent stowaways, the train’s bathrooms had been lockedfor the whole four hours (and they continued to be locked for another three hours after), while we in our station waiting room had not only beer but a loo as well.

And I just have to show you a picture of my lunch on the train. Aren’t you jealous?  I bet YOU didn’t have a pig cookie for YOUR lunch today!

Making an early start this morning, we met the group at 5:30 AM and walked with our bags to the train station. Destination Ulan Baator, train leaves in an hour, I am watching the luggage while my personal assistant goes to find coffee for the two of us.  That flowered shopping bag is not fashionable, but it contains all our food for the two day train trip.   Hope we actually bought what we thought we were at the supermarket, based on Geoff’s language skills we think we know what was on the labels, more or less.  Hoping there is no cat food in the mix. 

Heading out on the UP Express.  Who’s got the best hiking shoes?  Gobi Desert, here we come.

We are now at that stage of thinking about what we need to take.  It has to cover us in warmer and cooler places, in hotels and in a yurt (!) and sleeping on a train.  Plus there is the worry of trying to keep the cats from sleeping on the neat piles of travel clothes and goods.  Hmmm…..