Baikal, Birch, Banya and Bogka

I am currently writing to you from an island, called Olkhon Island, along the west of Lake Baikal in the middle of Siberia! It is cold and beautiful, and this and the train has been exactly what I hoped and dreamed it would be when I was pouring over Lonely Planet guidebooks and gap year brochures in my flat in Muswell Hill all those months ago. I loved China and I also loved Vietnam, but I went there because I was curious, wanting to go everywhere and Vietnam seemed like as good as place as any to start, and it was close to, and plan-able distance from Russia. Visiting Russia was the one thing I have wanted to do for a really long time, and I am happy to report, it has not disappointed.

As is fitting for a Trans-Siberian adventure, my Russia experience began with a train. When my visa expiry date and the train timetable were taken into consideration, it transpired that I had two options to get me across the border and into the Motherland. Option #1 was to catch one single train, first class from Ha’erbin to Khabavosk and to deal with the border crossing, customs officials and any bribes that I might potentially have to cough up (I am worryingly unphased by all of this…) on this nice comfortable train. Option #2 was a bit trickier and involved getting a local train to a Chinese border town, staying overnight & catching a bus at dawn the next morning to reach the border crossing before it shut for lunch, then getting through the border crossing, catching another bus to another town and then getting the one daily train to Chita and then changing trains to get me to Irkutsk. I did decide to do a difficult thing (unwittingly) and I haven’t expected things to be easy or to go smoothly the whole time, but I felt a little intimidated by the latter option given my lack of Chinese or Russian customs control vocabulary and so I took the easy option. The easy option was actually pretty luxurious (the only tickets available for the only train that would get me across the border before my visa expired were 1st class – pity) and I had a very nice carriage compartment all to myself, but it was also not without its difficulties. The woman in charge on all Russian trains is called the Provodnitsa, and she runs a very tight, er, train. Lucky for me she either took a liking to, or pity on me and all official business was conducted slowly, patiently and exclusively through the phrasebook. This worked for most things, but we had a few minor issues when we reached border control. The ‘bolshi’ red-head poked her red-head through my door and indicated that I should put on my coat and my shoes. This was shortly after the train had stopped for a while and I had seen the same red-head strutting up and down the side of the train, in her coat, in the snow, spanner in oil-dirty gloved hand (she may be my new feminist icon). I followed my orders and dressed as instructed but then nothing really seemed to happen for a long time. The train was moving again, but where it had been stopped for a while it was a bit colder and I thought that maybe she had been concerned that I would be getting a bit cold and that’s why she told me to dress up. I sat pondering this for quite a while, and then we pulled into what looked like a station. I stayed put, not wanting to do anything wrong (she’s a scary lady) and then she came running and flailing up the corridor yelling my name, and ushering me off the train. She then stopped and looked at me as though I had done something wrong, she turned and went back into my compartment and started packing up my luggage and dragged it out onto the platform. I was ushered towards the big group of people at the door to a building, and stood quietly next to a policeman in a very nice furry hat. Once they discovered I was English I was, for some reason, given special treatment and ushered to the front of every queue! I have heard some horror stories about Russian bureaucracy, and I can well believe they are true, but thus far the system has certainly favored me, which I guess is karmic reward or something, given the nightmare I went through in Hanoi (pretty sure karma doesn’t work that way, but it’s nice to be on the good side of a bent system for once). At this border crossing there were lots of Chinese traders dragging bags and bags and bags of produce through the gates. I have since been told anecdotally, that should you ask one of these traders for help on the customs form you will be instructed to tick ‘nyet’ for every box and then hand over a couple hundred roubles to be pocketed by the officials. Bureaucracy at its best.

When you are travelling on your own, and especially when you are travelling alone on trains, you always have to be a little bit on guard and a little bit awake, in case something should happen or someone is speaking at you in Vietnamese/Chinese/Russian/”English”. I say especially on trains, because when the train hits your station, especially in China and Vietnam, you have to go and you have to go quick. For the duration of this journey, in addition to the requisite standby alertness that has become so habitual the last three months, I was pretty anxious because I didn’t know what time the train was going to arrive beyond some time Monday morning, which was as far as my Chinese could get me when I booked the ticket. I was crossing time-zones, I thought, and morning could mean any time from 2am-11am. Sunday night I had trouble sleeping and woke up every 30 minutes to check that my luggage was packed and I could dress and go quickly when I needed to. I am aware, and tried to convince myself as I tried to get to sleep that I would be better to just relax and get some proper sleep so I could actually do a competent job of organizing myself and getting to a hotel when I reached Russia, but all this effected was ironic appreciation.

We arrived in Khabavosk around 0530 Beijing time. I was woken gently by the provodnitsa, and while my well practiced reflexes are usually quick and border occasionally on impressive, that morning I had the reflexes of a brick wall and mumbled something along the lines of “nee how (Chinese for ‘hello), are we at Khabavostock (which I think was a combination of Khabavosk and Vladivostock)”. She stifled a smirk and nodded and pointed to some time on her watch that I couldn’t see without my lenses and I nodded, sat and stared glassy eyed out of the window for a while, and it took me a little while to realize that what I was staring at was my first bit of Russian snow! All strapped up into the coat, hat, gloves and backpacks I padded my way carefully down the snow covered station steps and actually managed to orientate myself on the map! Before I left England, my wonderful friend Rory spent a painfully patient 2 hours teaching me the Cyrillic alphabet and I had been practicing for the whole time I had just spent on the train from China. I was super proud of myself when I managed to translate the English street names in the guide book (why English – the street names aren’t in English?!) into what I should look out for in Cyrillic and to my surprise not only did I get the translation right, I actually managed to find the street and the hotel! I think that after doing this travel thing for nearly 3.5 months, I am finally learning how to read a map! I even found my way to the hotel, very slowly because it was very icy and downhill, and managed to remain on my feet, although at one point I did nearly get hit by a tram because I wasn’t looking. Oops. I had to check into a hotel rather than a hostel in Khabavosk because there aren’t any hostels and not many tourists go there. It’s very far east, very cold, and there’s not too much to do or see there. I checked into my very, very nice hotel, walked straight into a very, very fancy shower that had jets and things to massage your legs (!) and then crawled into bed to catch up on the sleep I didn’t manage to have the night before, and I lay there and realized that I had no idea what time it was, what time zone I was in and that I had to stop speaking Chinese and somehow start speaking Russian. The Russian speaking is still going quite badly.

I enjoyed my few days in Khabavosk, and spent a lot of time wandering around this city that I found myself able to navigate with ease, visiting the most beautiful churches I have ever seen in my whole life and strolling idyllically along the Amur River, which is very beautiful when you’re facing away from the industrial end. I wrapped up as warmly as I could, but found myself feeling very inelegant when compared to all these beautiful Russian women wrapped up in furs, in leather boots and oozing glamour. One thing that did take me by surprise was that people would just start talking to me in Russian. This hadn’t happened in China or Vietnam (with Chinese or Vietnamese), and I realized that for the first time I don’t stand out and could actually look Russian (bar the trampy travel clothes). It surprised me how much I had actually relied on looking obviously different when I had been travelling and that people would responsively, treat me differently, and either try to overcharge or help me. When I was in those countries where I stood out like a sore thumb, the one thing I found myself missing the most was bread! Russia is most certainly the place to come should you ever be deprived of good bread for an extended period of time, and as much as I loved Chinese food (and I really do LOVE it), coming to Russia is like coming to all-you-can-eat-day at ‘carb-world’. It’s amazing! There’s so much bread, and cake, and pastries and everything that my little carb-deprived heart could ever desire and I pretty much haven’t stopped eating since I got here. I think those suits that were measured for my skeletal-Vietnamese-self are going to need some adjustment when I get back to the UK, for sure.

From Khabavosk I decided to make my next stop in a Siberian city called Irkutsk. The original plan was to go first to Ulan-Ude, but it was difficult to arrange a train here. It is surprising, but the majority of the itinerary that you pull together is subject to, and will probably change depending on what trains you are able to get and at what times, and so to Irkutsk I was next headed. Russian trains, wherever you are in Russia, run by Moscow time. When I was in Khabavosk I was +7 hours from Moscow, and so it was nice to discover that my train would leave at 1132 local time, rather than 0432 local time because this was actually Moscow time. I am told that one of the greatest joys of travel by train is shopping for food before the journey. The morning of my journey I ventured out into the falling snow, found a supermarket, and trailed the shelves looking for snacks for the 60 hours or so, ahead of me. On the train from Ha’erbin the train was very well heated and I was very hot a lot of the time. What primarily informed my food decisions therefore, was how well food would survive in the heat. Whilst I met my perishability criteria, when it came to my selections, I got it very wrong. I had packed a lot of fruit, crisps, cookies, bread rolls, instant noodles and some cartons of choco-milk. What I was supposed to pack, and what my fellow travel-companions had packed for their journey was bread, cheese, sausage, tomatoes, cucumber, tea, fruit, chocolate – a whole indulgent picnic, as well as the requisite instant noodles. This train was much cooler and a more comfortable heat, and from what I saw, food was kept well and eaten often. Coming from China and Vietnam, which are countries where you are smiled at a lot on the street, I initially found Russia to be a very unfriendly and frosty place. You don’t smile on the street; you scowl. What I have learned however, that whilst the street may be one place where you are eyed with suspicion and reserve, once you start to communicate with a Russian, you will be utterly overwhelmed with hospitality and generosity. I found it particularly difficult to break the ice with the three Russians sharing the compartment I was in; no-one spoke any English and my Russian is still at a very, very basic level and is geared towards buying things. After a few hours of persistent attempts to try and endear myself to them, we had a breakthrough and for the rest of the trip they were overwhelmingly inclusive (even though I don’t speak the language), insisted on feeding me a lot of food a lot of the time, and when I wasn’t being fed I was being offered tea and being asked questions which I couldn’t understand or answer! They were very patient with me, which was good, because we had a long way to go, and one guy even corrected my pronunciation as I read a Russian newspaper trying to sharpen my Cyrillic. The atmosphere inside the train was warm and relaxed. I was warm, but less relaxed for the first half of the journey, not knowing how this Russian train thing worked and not wanting to make any cultural faux pas and offend my new friends. One of the things (of many) they constantly mocked me for was my keenness behind the camera lens. Every time we came to a different type of scenery, or the sun came out, they would shout “Tamara” and make a camera noise and motion out of the window. The scenery is quite spectacular, and this happened a lot.

The first night on the train I had a lot of trouble sleeping and lay awake until about 0300. This didn’t bother me at all, and was potentially the most relaxing sleepless night I’ve ever had because I lay across my top bunk, tiger-style, and stared out of the window at the beautiful taiga forest covered with snow. In the darkness the whiteness of the snow and the birch trees reaching up out of the snow seemed luminescent, and were clearly visible through the blackness of night in the middle of nowhere. There are three main types of landscape that I have viewed so far, coming from the east to Siberia. The main one is called ‘taiga’ and refers to forests of birch and fir trees which are dense and plenty. When you’re not gazing whimsically out of the window at a million snow-covered trees, you might find yourself passing through a desolate plain of nothingness, where all you can see is essentially the horizon peering out from the miles of browned grass, punctuated occasionally by a tree, or two. Towards the end of the first train ride and after we reached Ulan-Ude the train takes you across the edge of Lake Baikal, which is absolutely stunning, calm and massive. The deepest lake in the world, and at its widest point it is 80km across, to ride alongside one of the coasts can sometimes feel like you are riding next to the ocean, especially because I traveled on a misty day and the other side of the lake was rarely visible. An exciting occasion on the train, and something to look forward to when the smells that make it oh such a sensory experience start to fog you out, is when the train pulls into one of the larger stations and makes a prolonged stop for up to 30 minutes. When this happens, the entire carriage pours out onto the platform, in their train attire of shorts, shirts and sandals – and a coat, and clusters together in the snow smoking rather than taking in the fresh air. There’s something quite exciting about long distance train travel, I think, and getting out at these stations, as well as breathing in some icy air and stretching cramped limbs, it is nice to experience the station atmosphere and be reminded that you are actually doing the Trans-Siberian!

I chose to come to Irkutsk because it is a city close to Lake Baikal and one that is fairly well set up for tourists, with hostels and cafes with English menus etc. After nearly one whole week of not having a proper conversation with a person not on the other end of the phone to me because no-one spoke any English, I was so very excited to be greeted by an English tongue when I arrived at my hostel!!! I think I was actually picked up at the train station by an angel masquerading as a Russian taxi driver with a Lada, because when I arrived, I asked the driver to take me to an art gallery within walking distance to, and on the same street as my apartment hostel, which was pretty tricky to locate and only written in the guide book in English (again, thank you LP). I had asked the driver if he spoke ‘Angliski’, to which he vehemently shook his head, but seeing the backpack and hearing the faltering request he must have guessed where I actually wanted to go because he drove me past the art gallery to show me where it was and then took me to the door of the hostel behind some apartment block somewhere on Lenin St that I would have had difficulty finding, and waited with me until someone came to the door. I tipped, and I tipped big. Not only did a cool old Russian man with a cool vintage car and a fur hat drive me through the streets of Irkutsk, he took me to the place I wanted to go without even having to ask! Sure beats Hanoi Taxis. After a very long and hot shower to scrub the remains of the train off of me I made myself at home in the hostel. It felt really great to be back among other backpackers, to have access to the internet and a kettle and supply of tea on hand. The next day I went out for some breakfast, found the intended café with surprising ease, and fuelled up with some buckwheat porridge and tea. It was such a nice introduction to Siberia, because even though my nose nearly fell off due to the cold on the way to the café, I sat in a window seat with the sun shining through on to my seat and watched as the trams rumbled past Russia happened around me. I spent the day walking about a surprisingly pretty city, visited a museum about those persons politically exiled here, ate some ‘omul’ fish from Lake Baikal and accidentally attended a service at the Russian orthodox cathedral, which was quite spectacular and very interesting, coming from a Cof E background.

The next morning, I and a few others that I had met and enjoyed talking (in English) to, caught a local electric stop-at-ALL-stations train to a small village near to the lake. We had planned and intended to hike along the lake, and started off by hiking about 4km through a very Russian forest. It was very beautiful, and there were millions and millions of fir and birch trees, all standing to attention like stoic soldiers in the snow. It is actually Autumn here, Winter starts properly at the end of December and runs through to March, and the forest was a mix of colours with the autumn browns, the greens and because there was still quite a lot of snow, white also. About 1km in we came to a large river, which had already completely frozen over. We crossed over on a precarious little bridge, only to step onto the ice and slid about, giggling like crazy. The giggles promptly stopped, and my heart, when I heard a loud ‘crack’, but the ice was too thick to break fully, so I slowly maneuvered off the ice and stuck to the snow covered mud. We came through the forest and out into the open just before the lake, and then we were kidnapped by a lady who had opened a museum on the bank of Baikal and wanted visitors. She was one of these ladies who takes her subject very seriously, soberly and weightily and just cannot comprehend why someone else isn’t doing the same. Her subject was primarily one man who was an author, philosopher, linguist, traveler etc… she loved him. There were also lots of paintings, some good, that she had collected, and an extensive explanation about each exhibit that she droned though, and then was translated for my unenthusiastic ears. When I thought it was finally all over (I came to walk, not to be talked at in Russian and look at bad art) she gave us a rather long ‘sermon’ on the powers of water and how we should say thank you to water and stones and that they will give us good energy when we are in a bad mood or do not appreciate the world. At the end, the very end of our accidental tour she tried to make us buy our own personal stone to thank and give us good energy. I was hasten to get back out into the fresh air and continue my hike, but a nice, friendly Russian man followed me out of the museum and handed me a pretty pink stone on a key chain, and said in English, that he had chosen this for me as a souvenir to remind me of lake Baikal. I was very happy with my gift, and had a lovely chat with the Russian, who disappeared off down the railway tracks in the opposite direction to us shortly afterwards. We later saw him on the train home and we had a broken conversation about Russia.

It is said that every time you swim in Lake Baikal you add 25 years to your life. Well, we were hiking in about -6 and a quick swim was not high on my agenda. I did splash my hand around a little bit, and pose for some photographs, but it was pretty cold and so we set off and walked along the rail tracks of the circum-Baikal railway on our way to the next village. As we were walking, some very pretty Russians who were stood on top of one of the railway tunnels carved into the mountains called down to us to come and drink with them. We did. After climbing up the very steep mountainside, we saw that they had built a little camp fire and gotten through a fair amount of vodka (Bogka in Russian) already. We found out that they had just graduated from university and were camping and getting drunk by the lake – and why the hell not. We drank with them, my first Russian vodka and it was good, and then bum-shuffled down the steep hill and continued our hike. We walked for about 6-7km along the railway tracks, having to jump out of the way of a speedy oncoming train once, and reached the next village as it started to get dark. The views of the lake were beautiful, and it was so incredibly peaceful, that but for the sound of our walking it was perfectly silent. The ‘train station’ at this village was a wooden platform by the side of a rail track, with a sign erected to indicate the name of the village and another to indicate the times of the 6 trains that would pass that day on their way to Irkutsk. A lot of very large and loud freight trains passed us as we were waiting, and then finally our little electric train came and picked us up, and took us back to the hostel.

I decided to spend quite a bit of time out here at the expense of visiting lots of different cities along the way because I have discovered I really, really love being in the countryside and outdoors, certainly more than I enjoy visiting cities. My third day in Siberia therefore, I travelled up to Olkhon island, which is very deserted, has two villages on it, a population of less than 1500 and is in the middle of this very beautiful lake. It took pretty much the whole day to get out here, and we came by mini-bus and ferry. Driving through actual Siberia is something I will never be able, or want to forget. It was incredible, and would alternate between this feeling of being in absolute awe at the landscape and the feeling that you actually are in the middle of nowhere and there is actually nothing for miles and miles and miles and the only thing you can really see is the horizon. It was wonderful!! That evening (after 4 pm because it gets dark quickly here) we sat around waiting for dinner doing the only thing that you really can do on this island when it gets dark – we drank. I should elaborate on ‘we’: I am currently traveling with two Canadian forest firefighters, lovely, and a couple who have been living in Australia for the past two years and are moving back to the UK. He is from England, and she is Polish, very beautiful and can communicate with the Russians by speaking Polish – it’s amazing!! The vodka is good, the food is good, but what is amazing, actually amazing, is the banya! I am officially a banya convert. Now, if you live in Siberia you have a small problem regarding hot water. Actually you have a problem regarding running water, but the banya deals with the heating, not the running problem. The banya is like a sauna, and is used by the Russians for bathing. 2-3 times a week, you will banya. To banya, (I love the word even, can you tell!?) you sit for a while in a baking hot room, very hot, hot, hot, hot, then you go into another room and ladle freezing cold water over yourself and return to the hot, hot room. It sounds crazy, I know it sounds crazy, but it is amazing, and you feel so clear and clean and energized but also supremely relaxed and just happy. Tonight I intend to combine the vodka with the banya and I am expecting great things. Tomorrow I am travelling back to Irkutsk and then getting on a 74 hour train to Mocba. Siberia has been incredible, if a little chilly, and I am so very happy here, and that I decided to come here. It’s incredible.