Train from Novosibirsk to Irkutsk

We were to spend two nights and a day on this train so we were hoping it would be a nice one. Unfortunately the train gods were in prankster mode when our tickets were allocated and we were put on THE-WORST-TRAIN-EVER-TO-TRAVERSE-THE-RUSSIAN-CONTINENT®. Even though we were in a 2nd class sleeper compartment the journey was far less comfortable than previous 3rd class journeys. We were to later learn, from the Russians sharing our carriage, that this was a Ukranian train and emphatically NOT a Russian train.

The first big problem with the train was that the inner window pane was held in with gaffer tape. This wouldn't necessarily be a huge problem if it hadn't been -25 degrees outside the train. When we arrived in the cabin there was snow in between the two panes and none of us bothered taking off our hats and coats for the whole journey.

The second big problem was that the Provodnik didn't appear to have cleaned the train since it set off from Kiev, including the toilet. We were later to find out that if you want the toilets cleaned then you have to bribe the guy. This helped to confirm Karen's theory about female carriage attendants keeping their carriages much cleaner than their male counterparts.

Fortunately, the people in our carriage were, again, really friendly. We were beginning to wonder if some counter divine intervention was at work here. The Prankster God arm wrestling with the God of Pleasant Journeys as the train trundled across the snowy Siberian wilderness.

Yuri and Helena were probably in their early forties and were from Novosibirsk on a weekend skiing excursion to the mountains south of Lake Baikal. They spoke no English so we were again reliant on Karen's Russian and the phrasebook and dictionary.

Helena was a teacher. Yuri was an electrical engineer who worked on the electronics that control the launching of rockets that go to the international space station. At this point we were quite excited to be in the presence of a real Russian rocket scientist :-) They were quite positive about the direction Russian society was heading and were critical of the stilted old soviet days which they saw as being primitive and backward. As an example of this Yuri explained that, apart from soviet Russia, the only sorts of societies that preserved their leaders physically through embalming were thousands of years in the past.

They were very kind to us and gave us slabs of amazing lattice fruit pastry. They seemed very bemused as to why we had decided to go to Russia in winter and tried to tell us in the nicest possible way that it would be unpleasant and cold. They illustrated this point by telling us a cautionary moral tale about their cat. Apparently, during a previous winter, their cat had decided it would be nice to have a sleep on the window sill in their front room. Unfortunately it got a bit too close to the window itself and they came down the next morning to find the cat frozen to the window pane. They eventually managed to extricate the traumatised cat from this position and nurse it back to health.

They were also very interested in our Russian guidebook. They wet themselves laughing when they came across a picture-postcard photograph of a Russian babushka in traditional dress who looked like a human incarnation of a Russian doll. Underneath the photograph it said 'Novosibirsk'. I suppose this photo seemed a bit unrepresentative of Novosibirsk which is a sophisticated city of two million people with large scientific and University research establishments :-)

They also enlightened us to something that had been confusing us since the train to Yekaterinburg. On this train an old lady had expressed concern at Karen's cough and cold. She tried to explain how this could be cured. We didn't understand what she was trying to tell us so, as if this might help, she wrote it down for us in Russian :-) Karen kept the piece of paper as a memento and, as she still had a bit of a cold on the train to Irkutsk, the note came up in conversation. We showed it to Yuri and Helena who burst out laughing. After much miming and dictionary referencing they were able to get across to us the magic formula to cure the common cold: to rub goose fat and onions on your chest. Suffice it to say this was the first thing Karen did when we arrived in Irkutsk.

Photos for this journey can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ianwhitfield/sets/72157603797561217/