From Siberia to China

The journey ahead from Siberia to China was would turn out to be a challenging one that would take us from the depths of hell, through purgatory to the gates of heaven past the Russian border. Due to the devious machinations of the dark overlord, we were forced into taking a 12 hour stopover in Chita, a city half way between Irkutsk and the Russian/Chinese border.

Our first impressions of Chita were positive. It has a beautiful, new Orthodox cathedral directly opposite from the train station with shining golden domes. As we ventured further into town we found a square with a big slide and sculptures carved from ice as in many other Russian towns in winter. We bought some tasty, cheap Blinis from a food van in the square.

As we went further, ominous forebodings started to present themselves, subtly at first. On the main street off the square there were aggressive dogs outside one of the buildings which were only hemmed in by a one foot fence. We nervously crossed the busy main road to get away from them and were pleased with our decision when these hounds of hell jumped the fence and started barking and intimidating passers by.

After wandering around some more we decided there wasn't much to see or do in Chita for our twelve hours so we thought we would find a cafe to kill time. We surveyed the guide book which had a couple of places listed. After wandering around town we realised we couldn't find these places, had they closed down, were our map reading skills a little shoddy, or were they being kept from us by some dark, inexplicable force? We wandered into one place that claimed to be a cafe bar only to be met with the Russian equivalent of the scene in westerns where the stranger walks into the saloon. The man in the corner stopped playing the piano, the barman stopped pouring the whiskey and all eyes turned to see the folks who aren't from round here. People's expressions weren't too friendly so we decided to leave.

We then found a posh hotel bar and tried to use our remaining roubles to buy a seat with expensive coffee and small sandwiches. Our money was fast running out and the rich Russians who patronised this bar were wondering why these scruffy, malingering backpackers were lowering the tone of their elite establishment. After this we decided to go back to the train station.

This turned out to be a fatal error because we arrived back to find half the Russian army wandering around the station looking bored. This was not good news as we had spent the past 3 weeks avoiding Russian officials because of their reputation for corruption and unfairness. We skulked upstairs to the station cafe to try and hide but the cafe was full of them and they were all drinking beer. So we now realised we were in a train station full of drunk, bored Russian soldiers. We sat down and tried to look unobtrusive which was hard because we'd forgotten to pack our Russian soldier's uniforms. After a while one of the soldiers wandered over in a drunken state and started trying to talk to us but we didn't get very far because of the language barrier. He then started to intimate that we should show him our passports. We decided that handing our passports over to a drunk 20 year old Russian conscript was probably not advisable so we played dumb and pretended not to understand. He got more and more annoyed and started saying what we assumed to be unflattering things at a raised volume. He got up and started loom over me in an intimidating manor. I think he was deciding whether he would get away with hitting me but luckily, after looking round at his fellow soldiers, he decided against this. He walked away and we decided 6 hours in the station with these people was a very bad idea so we legged it.

We wandered around trying to find a bar or cheap hotel room to spend the remainder of the time in but we kept getting turned away. Eventually we found a basement restaurant where we ordered coffee, a kebab and some vodka to calm our nerves. Luckily people in here were friendly and a little baffled at what these foreigners were doing in their restaurant in the middle of the week at 11pm. After a while, the man at the bar came over to speak to us with a small amount of English. He was funny and would write down a question in English such as 'What country are you from?' and then come over and ask us. He would then go back to compose another one and come back in a few minutes with another question. This was Ivan. He asked us whether we were married, whether we liked Chita (to which we said yes :-)) and what religion we were. We found out that Ivan was devoutly religious. He brought his MP3 player over and played some beautiful, harmonised acapella singing recorded at his local church. Some time later Ivan asked if we wanted to leave and go with him as the place was closing and the staff wanted to go home. At this point we were a little nervous because we wondered if there was some con involved but he seemed nice so we tried to prevent our suspicious sides getting the better of us.

What we came to understand was that Ivan was worried about us wandering around Chita on our own with our bags looking like easy targets for muggers. We agreed with this assessment but there was nowhere to go because it was 12.30am and the train station was a worse option than walking around the streets. We had about 3 hours until our train at this point. Ivan then took it upon himself to be our guardian angel insisting on staying with us until our train left at just after 3am. Of all the kindness we had experienced from people in Russia, this had to be the most incredible. Firstly he took us to the town square we were in earlier and insisted we all have a go on the ice slide. We encountered some young blokes here who looked a bit shady and we were worried about why they were hanging around the square at 1am. They also turned out to be nice and wanted to have their photos taken with the strange foreigners who went down ice slides in the middle of the night.

After this we ran out of options for what to do in Chita and had to go back to the station, hoping that the soldiers would have got on their trains. Ivan insisted on accompanying us to the station because he knew, as we did, what a dodgy place it was. There were still quite a few soldiers there but not as many as before. So we sat in purgatory, hoping no-one would hassle us. As we sat there Ivan wandered off for a while and we wondered where he was going. He came back 10 minutes later with some beers for us all and some gifts for me and Karen. He gave me a wooden religious icon for protection and gave Karen a new badge for her Russian hat which she had removed because hers had the old Soviet insignia on. As we sat there we started talking to people around us. There was a guy from the Buryat ethnic group called Jarkal and two Russian soldiers. Jarkal was really friendly and spoke the best English out of all of them. He was studying to be a teacher at the local college and also really liked European football. He supported A.C. Milan. The soldiers were friendly enough towards us but were a bit racist and rude to Jarkal, speaking to him gruffly and saying he was descended from Genghis Khan. He looked as though he was used to this and just brushed it off. We managed to pass the time this way happily for a few hours until the train finally arrived. So with gifts, new friends and a reaffirmed faith in the Russian people, we approached the train. Ivan and the Jarkal helped us onto the platform with our bags and Ivan even got onto the train and showed us all the way to our compartment. The train was the nicest we had seen in Russia and we had a four person compartment to ourselves for the imminent 36 hour train journey and border crossing. After a long and arduous day we had reached heaven.

Karen is still in touch with Ivan 2 months later. They email each other so Karen can practice her Russian and Ivan can practice his English.