The Year of Caroline Hits the Rails - 16 October 2007 - Beijing, China

... the wheels, the water, the trams, a few marshrutky, a traffic jam on a car ferry, a curb-mounting mongolian "private taxi", a russki jeep decked out in leopardskin print with a disco vibe, and a two-humped camel with one floppy hump. But most of all, many, many trains.
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"OK Kirstie, we might have a bit of a problem"
"What is that?"
"Well we need tickets to Vladimir and all I can see is Bladderhump, and the ticket woman appears to hate my guts anyway so we just need to ditch the whole Trans-Mongolian idea, stay in Moscow for 3 weeks and then fly to Mongolia."
"You need to learn to read Cyrillic - Bllummphurph IS Vladimir, and all ticket women growl like that. Get up there and sort it out."
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My friend Kirstie, already setting out on the Trans-Mongolian from Moscow to Beijing, kindly agreed for me to tag along, thus neatly providing about 2/3 of the total distance I needed to get to Singapore (from where we fly home - we tried to hitch a freighter ship home, but in July, the December trade routes were already booked out...). I received detailed instructions about visas (I was busy baking, so just got a visa agent to sort them out), what to bring (forgot the insect repellant and a travel mug), and suggestions for the sorts of things we could do along the way.

And in that seemingly innocuous list lay the seeds that would eventually lead to the two of us getting all Russian as we simutaneously yelled at ticket ladies and stood our ground, comparing the restaurant cars of different trains from the Altai to the Baikal (some "express", some "fast" and some just plain local), making friends with artists, engineers [read: this is aka for Party operatives. I didn't know that till later], professional travellers, people who'd never left home, a lot of Russian guys who, upon hearing you were from Australia, would shout "Kosta Tszyu!", and, in one fun-filled evening, three strippers named Olga, Anastasia and Natasha, who invited us round to their club in Tomsk.

The thing is, lots of people do the Trans-Mongolian in a single trip, literally getting on in Moscow, getting comfy, and getting off again 6 days later in Beijing. Sometimes people jump off a few times along the way, more often than not with their onwards tickets sorted. I met a couple from London who were getting the train from London to Beijing (9 days) because he didn't like to fly. I met more than a few people who told me how brave we were to be organising our trip (and our tickets) as we went. We weren't brave. We just didn't realise how evil the Russian train system was.

Just for an example - Russia has 10 different time zones (3pm in Moscow is midnight over next to the Bering Sea). But all "national" train tickets operate on Moscow time. So you might think that getting into, say, Tomsk at 8pm is OK, whereas that is actually 8pm Moscow time, and therefore 1am local time, and so a total disaster. Conversely, leaving Tomsk at 3am is really 8am, so is perfect. My head hurt most of the time with all the converting. (Walking into train stations took on a weird Twilight Zone feel as the clocks inside were always on Moscow time too).

And then there's the ettiquiette of train travel. Everything you have, food and drink-wise, should be offered to everyone in your cabin. It is perfectly acceptable to play music on your crappy Russian mobile when other people are trying to sleep. It is also perfectly acceptable to have a shouting match every time you enter a new train, about who gets to put their luggage where. And then everyone is friends again. And you have to sit in your assigned seat. People got very anxious otherwise.
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"Let's just go down for one vodka, I mean, we're in Russia, we should."
... [2 hours later]
(Whispered aside) "Caroline"
"Yes Miss Kirstie"
"Get me the hell out of here, we're having vodka shots with the local militia, the man next to me is called Vladimir and he's also from Vladimir, the one across from me has explained it's OK for Russian men to have affairs, and the mafia at the next table are starting to look like they might come join us."
"It's OK. These nice Austrian window extrusion experts are going to save us."

And they did.
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So went the first serious night out on the tiles for the trip (in a Soviet monolith containing the only Chinese restaurant in town). It was followed up by more vodka in Tomsk as we held a room party for, well, the two of us. We discovered the importance of how to specify DRY red wine in Russia - after being confronted with what appeared to be weak sweet sherry. Made friends with the locals on Olkhon Island in a plastic ger bar in the middle of a deserted street. And just when we thought things might be a little quiet, crashed the ex-pat scene in Ulaanbaator (thank you Anna.....).

The highlight in terms of expanding our liquid horizons has been, without a doubt, drinking fermented horse milk, then vodka made from horse milk, then fermented horse milk with horse milk vodka mixed in (all different and uniquely scary drinks at 11 in thr morning), in the countryside in Mongolia. The amount we had to have was exacerbated by constantly losing at drinking games with our Gobi driver.

But it hasn't all been cocktails and train-induced breakdowns. In between we've seen a few sights, made a few friends.

We celebrated Moscow's 860th birthday, complete with street fairs and strong men competitions. Were introduced to the special catergory of Australians-on-tour (the just drinking kind who throw up at 4 in the morning and think going beyond Moscow and St Petersburg is wilderness adventuring. Sadly we didn't see Greg again). Saw the unreal city of Sudzal, where churches from all over Russia have been relocated, turning the entire town into an openair museum. Hit the Tatar capital of Kazan - I had to stop reading my book on Russian minority territories when the section on Kazan focussed on street gangs, but our overwhelming impression of the city was left by the TWENTY-FOUR weddings we saw in one day on the streets. We just lined up with the brides for the prize photo spots.

We stopped in at Tomsk and made friends with a wooden fringework artisan. Made the monster trek to Irkutsk with seven Irish train enthusiasts (all older middle-aged men, who would have thought...). Took the bus to Olkhon Island with the locals - including three teenagers who spent the trip lying on our legs sleeping off their night out in Irkutsk- and stayed on the shores of the world's deepest lake. Seen kremlins from Moscow to Siberia. Mourned the end of the onion-topped churches as we got closer to Mongolia. Undertook a personal tour of the Haagen Daaz outlets all along the way.

Then crossed the border into Mongolia - 11 hours after sliding to a halt on the Russian side of the border we had moved 1 1/2 kilometres, crossed into Mongolia, and witnessed the slickest smuggling operation I've ever seen (Kirstie and I politely declined to carry 4 cartons of cigarettes for the nice lady in our carriage but we did pull the blinds down for her as she shifted her wares around in between visits from customs officials and the police).

Mongolia was wonderful, friendly and very different from Russia (which is on occasion better characterised as "interesting"...). I nearly broke down in the Ulaanbaator train station when they simply sold us the tickets we wanted, for about 20% of what we thought we'd need to pay for them. The train ticket vendor looked a bit confused at our effusive thanks and demands to shake his hand.

UB was lovely. We walked around, did a couple of sights, got organised for our trip to the country. Played pool with the owner of our hostel in UB. Spent an afternoon eavesdropping on a couple of *hard-core* travellers who's conversation was a miracle of constructions with every second word being "dude" and "totally" as in ("So, dude, Cambodia totally rocks. We, like, rocked up to the border and it was pretty knarly, we had to leave our cars with the border dudes, they were totally cool, like, we made pretty good friends, you now, they were totally chilled dudes. Then we hooked up with this Polack dude at Siem Reap, he was totally awesome, took us to these totally wild places, like this one place we went, there was this, like, restaurant, this one woman, she was totally just cooking for people." "Totally.")

Then we hit the countryside for 10 days with a lady named Rosa, a guide named Naraa, and a legend of a driver named Jack. His English was limited to "Good, Jack, good", "eat, eat eat, oh, oh, oh", and "Kero" (that was me) and "Gerrl" (that was Kirstie). We made local dumplings (buuz) with a local guy so telented we forever after called him Buuz Man (I though I might lose Kirstie to the idylic countryside, after we'd seen gers being made, put up and taken down, stopped off to see a family making felt, attended a hair-cutting ceremony, and then found the Buuz Man. He was unmarried and looked mildly interested in the idea of an Australian bride.)

We saw two-humped camels. A goat travelling on a motorbike. Beautiful, beautiful horses. And yaks. Scrambled up sand dunes. Got trapped in an Indian chanting ceremony for 3 hours in Mongolia's first monastery in Khartoum. And kept stopping in at local families, who would drop whatever they were doing, sit you down, and produce tea (or, god forbid, more of that fermented horse milk). Amazingly friendly people.

We returned to UB and reunited all our best new Mongolian friends, yes, all 3 of them, the wonderful Anna from Adelaide, who had us for dinner every second night and let us cook in her kitchen and talk to her cat, and Jean-Charles and Benjamin, the two French travellers we'd met in the Gobi, where they'd joined us for a desert disco in Jack's jeep, 8 of us sqeezed in and raising the roof to Jack's one jumpy tape. So it was only fitting to say goodbye with a night of karaoke, singing I'm So Excited at 3 in the morning and getting all emotional over You Are The Sunshine of My Life (so, maybe we'd had a few drinks).

We woke 3 hours later, got to the station for our train to Beijing, and realised it was snowing. Proper, heavy, flaky snow that settled on the ground and didn't melt. I'm not sure what has happened to my general rule for this year of staying in warm places.
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And so now we're in China, Trans-Mongolian all done. We're awash with rice and yummy food, can't read a damn thing, but can tell you at any given point in time how many days it is to the Olympics. More of that on the next email.

Some final vital bits for you budding train spotters out there:

1. We travelled 9 legs to cover the Trans Mongolian in 36 days, a total of over 8,100km, with a couple of minor detours off the traditional 7,621km train line. Changed bogies twice as the gauges change off the international standard going into Russian and, back on to international standard as you come out of Mongolia.

2. We manuvered our way through ticket offices at 6 major stations, 10 different ticket windows, worked out the electronic ticketing machines with the help of 2 Swiss guys in Kazan, returned one entire set of tickets, and rerouted in a serious way 4 times.

3. We never, ever cried inside the ticket office.

4. For god's sake take a Russian phrasebook. They love a chat and will keep talking at you in Russian for hours after you've exhausted "hello" and "thank you". It was with a phrasebook that the man on the train to Omsk told us that I need to bake more cakes for Kirstie to eat and that he would cut her throat in the night for her money because she was a lawyer. "Ha ha ha!" (in a rumbly Russian tone).

5. Best investment I ever EVER made - the Thomas Cook International Timetable. This brick covers every major train (bus, boat) in the world outside western Europe. Invaluable for deciphering the bloody Russian rail system, finding the local Action bus routes in Canberra (I kid you not), propping up table legs and swatting small rodents. I love the TC people almost as much as ...

6. ... The Man in Seat 61 - that uber-geeky but unbelievably info-packed website on every train trip in the known world (methinks). Kind of online train porn for those into that kind of thing. Put together and maintained by a British public servant who updates info on his own daily train commutes. And possibly my future husband.
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[Finally, a segue, see I saved it to the end this time. Possibly given that this trip had a bit of a theme, I've had lots of suggestions for all sorts of OTHER themes this time round too. The Equator (going to places on or around the Equator's distance, staying at the Equator Hotels, drinking in the Equatorial bars, taking pictures next to placards of the world, having lots of *really interesting* discussions about the coriolis effect and which way the water goes round the drains, etc). The Superlatives (the biggest, highest, deepest, worst and so on). The Classic Photos (pushing over the Leaning Tower of Pisa, looking thoughful in front of The Thinker, so on, so forth). My enduring favorite - yet to be undertaken - remains the Aaron Spelling Tour (vising each locale each AS show was set in, you know, Dallas, Beverly Hills, taking a trip on the Love Boat, hanging out TJ Hooker style, taking a trip to Fantasy Island - da plane! da plane! - all from the homebase of a pink Priscilla-like bus with onboard experts for each show, finishing up with a tour of the Spelling mansion present-wrapping room). Still remains a dream....]

So anyway, from here we head down through China - Xian, err, somewhere in the south, Laos, then, umm somewhere else, and Singapore! Today we are going to find the temple of Tripitaka, so all you old Monkey Magic fans, stay tuned.

xxxc

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"For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Robert Louis Stevenson