This is my story of an adventure that took about 4+ months to plan, that would take us through 2 continents, 3 countries, some 4000 miles of railway lines, 5 time zones, country side and modern cities, local food and exotic cuisines, interesting people and incredible sites, some frustrations but most of all helped me appreciate life and liberty even more over the 16 days. The thick green line on the map was the path we took.Friday - 8/20 Our Trans Siberian and Trans Mongolian is billed as an adventure and I am already thinking about vacation after this. So to start we get a shuttle to JFK from DC, couple of hrs in JFK working and then an Aeroflot flight to Saint Petersburg via Moscow. The service is very efficient with hardly a smile wasted by the flight attendants. Surprisingly for a country suffering from alcoholism as a national epidemic, their national airlines does not encourage alcohol on the journey. Are these signs of a responsible leadership?
Sunday 8/22: Peterhof (click for pictures) The day starts with dreary weather….hopes of tourism are dashed, no luggage yet and the pouring rain. However once our guide meets us and we start driving to Peterhof, about 40KM from the city, the weather improves dramatically. In the meantime I see the old Soviet era buildings in the cloudy lights and it certainly conjures up some of the images I have seen of the USSR. We get to Peterhof but no pictures are allowed inside the palace which is a pity given its opulence. Lovely garden that is emblematic of European magnificence, a million pictures of the gardens as the weather continues to hold. Dandelions in the US may be our worst lawn enemy but here in the magnificent gardens of Peterhof, they seem to be the rave. There are more of those than actual grass and when I quizzed our guide about it and who in turn asked the gardener who was tending to the grass, I was given the “What are you talking about look”!. Now given Russia’s endorsement of Dandelions, I am beginning to feel very good about my lawn and will try and get our home owners to sign off on it….lets see how that conversation goes :).Lunch in Peterhof is my 1st real Beef Strogonoff with Russian salad. On the return we stop at the Peter and Paul cathedral, a very unique exterior but rather depressing interior considering it is an active church. Drive back is nice & whoppie as I get word that my bag has arrived, so we make a detour to the Pulkovo airport of Saint Petersburg to pick it up. Our driver is pulled over by the cops but when the driver returns he is not pleased and does not want to talk about it but our guide leaves me with the impression that fines don’t always have receipt issued…hmmmm. We return to the hotel, drop my bag and check to see if I got an empty shell or if my stuff is in there. Then we head out to get a boat ride through the canals of Saint Petersburg. But before that we stroll along the Nevsky Prospekt that is considered main street here and we are strongly advised to keep all valuables really close to the chest as it is full of unsavory sorts out to get you. The boat ride, thought not quite Vienna but fairly close with the lovely architectures and other sights on river Neva and Moskvy. We then have dinner at Lucky Shot a Russian, game restaurant. Interesting menu of bears, deers, wild boars, rabbits and more. Their version of lemon vodka is a jug of regular vodka with lemons in it. We go the conservative road with fish & beer even if it is a celebration of getting my bag back. Now restaurants are expensive in Russia and typically caters to a very select class of its citizen, but there is not an appropriate level of customer service associated to it, then again I may need to reset my customer service expectations. In addition after 48 hours in Russia, I am beginning to see a very monochromatic society. Diversity in Russian is defined not along races but along a variety of the Caucasian ethnic groups like Russians, Tajiks, Georgians, Slavs, Chechens, Siberians, Ukranians and more.We stop at a local grocery store to buy some water on our walk back to the hotel.
Monday 8/23: Pushkin (click for pictures) The weather is still nice, sunny and 70. We arrive at Pushkin, a town named after the great Russian poet, about 10am to visit Catherine’s Palace. Catherine II is also known as Catherine the Great and is credited for expanding the Russian empire on the east by annexing Siberia. She is also known to have put down her husband and gone through a stable of “favorites”, that is a quite the way to describe a boy friend!. Thankfully pictures are allowed in this magnificent palace that ironically was not built by Catherine but she only added to it. As we complete our visit, it starts raining, how serendipitous is that. We lunch at Stolle's, a chain of pie restaurants. These pies are mostly savory meat and fish pies, that are generally shaped after what they are stuffing it with. The afternoon is spent visiting the Church of the spilled blood, Paul and Peters fortress and cathedral ending at St. Isaaks cathedral. A very standard St. Petersburg sights for the average tourist. For dinner we go to “Don’t Grieve”, a Georgian restaurant. In Russia nothing is free. When I ordered my shish kabob, I had to order the sauce and side with that and they are priced separately as is bread. The entree’s don’t come with anything….I am just happy they cook it. We head back to the hotel and prepare for the train ride to Moscow. Our hotel folks were very good about storing our luggage and letting us hang out there for a while as I charged my camera, laptop etc. Met a district judge from DC, interesting I think. Our train to Moscow is on time and the 1st class accommodation is pretty good. St.Petersburg is a lovely city and worth a visit.
Tuesday 8/24: Moscow (click for pictures) We arrive in Moscow on the dot at 7.12am…if nothing else, the soviet culture of timeliness has stayed with the Russian Railways. However our breakfast arrived in multiple parts and ended incomplete. We start our tour of the city real early with a drive past the Lubiyanka HQ of the K G B, now FSB. Lovely drive by the Moscow river and our first view of the red walls of the Kremlin, a panoramic view of the city from Sparrow Hills including an arial look of the Lenin stadium that hosted the 1980 Olympics that was boycotted by many number of countries including the US. We stop by at Leo Tolstoy’s home that he moved to from his native Tulane in the late 1880’s to get his children better education in Moscow. We then hop on the underground metro on the circular line at Kievskaya, followed by Arbatskya and finally getting out at the Revolution square metro. There are 30 metro stations out of 170 that were specially decorated by the orders of Stalin. They are incredible with amazing mosaic and statutes adorning the long corridors. Like any large city in the world the metro in Moscow is busy and admittedly so trying to support a population of 18MM, that has grown from 4MM in the mid nineties 4.5 folds to what it is now. Next stop is the Christ our Saviour Cathedral a mid 20th century cathedral, typical Russian Orthodox onion domes with icons in the inside. We then head to the Kremlin….unfortunately the line to view Lenin’s tomb is too long to be bothered with besides there is controversy about if the body is truly Lenin’s since it looks very waxy. I guess I will just visit Madam Tausad’s when they get to Lenin. We enter the famous Red Square…..hmmmmm this is it? Very under-whelming. A little hard to visualize the site of the mighty Russian army marching past the Soviet bosses through this rather small square. But then in all fairness, half the square is blocked with bleachers being put in for some sort of a concert. We head towards the St.Basil’s church, the most recognized icon with its colorful onion domes. The church built in the mid 1400’s by Ivan the Terrible is medieval in its meager internal decorations. Really high steps takes us up and through what seems a maze of paths. Next stop is the Armory and the Diamond Fund inside the Kremlin….never thought I would be inside the Soviet Kremlin, the world sure has changed to a more democratic Russian federation. The Armory is a museum that holds the treasures of the Czars. These include some spectacular jewels (diamonds, rubies, emeralds and more), dresses of Catherine the great, shoes of the rather tall Peter the great, carriages, cutlery, weapons, Faberge eggs and more. We understand that between the many wars and the internal plunder, what is left is a small portion of the true quantities…. I wonder how a country founded in farming, hunting and fishing could afford all this but then again the rich minerals of Siberia should not be belittled. Done with tourism for the day, we check in to our hotel that is next door to the Kremlin and lunch at a local hotspot called Coffee Mania….looked like busy & successful business folks and rich bored home-makers. Short walk back catches us in the rain…no bother considering the weather has been a gift thus far (bright and 70) with all the smoke being history. Dinner is at a Belarusian restaurant up the road from our hotel. Lovely and quaint place with traditional hot pots of meats and vegetables that is downed by a barrel of vodka. I settle for my 1st glass of true Russian vodka called Russian Standard while Saritha has some tongue twister local brew. For some of my friends who find the way I pronounce Vodka funny, I must tell you that “Vodka” has been the only word Russian have understood me saying here!!! So BACK OFF.
Wednesday 8/25: Sergie Posad (click for pictures) Our day starts rather leisurely with a drive to Sergie Posad, a religious town 70KM away from Moscow on the golden ring. The town was built around the 14th century monastery that St. Sergius founded. The iconic blue onion domes with gold star’s is simply incredible. We spend some time visiting the trinity cathedrals on the monastery grounds after some nickel and dime nonsense…this time they want 100 roubles for me to carry my camera in! The cathedrals are typical to all that we have seen so far in Russia. The one highlight is the entry tower of the complex that has a room used for “exorcism” that was designed by Stroganoff, yup the dish is named after the same family. Lunch at a local touristy dive of the standard fare consisting of Russian Salad, Borsch, Beef Stroganoff (I wonder if I am now exorcised finally) and crepe’s with unprocessed honey. Drive back in to Moscow has us in some traffic, but they sure know how to optimize the shoulder and drive over each other. We get to the Tretyakov Gallery of Russian art. While I did not care for icon’s from the medieval times, the art depicting life in 16-17th century Russia was amazing. I am surprised that Russian artists have not become as famous as the Spanish, French or Italian impressionists!. Next a gander along the famous Old Arbat street that has restaurants and shops followed by some pizza. We then head to the station for our Trans-Siberian train to Irkutsk. The trains here have multiple classes of service, the cattle class with opening seating and up to 8 sleepers in a compartment to 6, 4 and 2/1st class. We decided to go with the two and are greeted by a platinum blond attendant with what I consider a very short skirt and high heels. It appears to have become the style for a large section of Russian women to dress up in such risqué fashion. When I quizzed our guide on that, I was led to understand that since this is a male dominated society, women need to go the extra distance to find and keep their men. In any case our short skirted attendant also is security on the coach (with rumored KGB men on board), the cleaning maid and generally in-charge. The thing that puzzles me the most is that these 1st class coaches are almost 100% occupied by foreigners who can not speak any Russian, yet the wise Russian railways did not think of having a bilingual attendant. So I have no clue what she is saying to me at this time…..”yeah same to you”! Our train departs again on schedule, amazing punctuality of the Russian railways.
This is last day on the Tran-Siberian leg of the journey as we break it tomorrow early in Irkutsk on the banks of Lake Baikal. The 1st big stop is at Krasnoyarsk about 11am for about 20 minutes. More walking and stretching on the platform while buying more food. The time has changed but the Russian railways on the stations and in the train only show Moscow time and we have to do conversion. One explanation I got was to help ensure meeting their perfect arrival/departures without confusion due to time zone…some logic but I am not buying it completely. I think it has to do with Moscow's control over the entire country similar to China where the entire country is on 1 time zone despite being large enough to have at least 3. The other thing I found fascinating is that Russia does not have an interstate highway system like we would know in the US or Europe. Again considering the rather poor majority of the population does not have the means to buy cars to drive them across the country, it does make sense not needing highways. But the other school of thought is to build them and people will come….I have to think that this is another reason why Russia continues to slip despite being a member of BRIC. Between limited infrastructure outside of Moscow and the general attitude of the people, i.e pure lack of entrepreneurship, I have to fear for the future of this beautiful country. Well that aside, a stop at Ilanskaya gives another chance to stroll the platform, watch all this wonderful local food, but we hesitate to indulge, but not our new German friends who will try anything….brave people. I also find a carriage attached at the very end of train that looks different and so I investigate to find that it is going to Pyongyang in North Korea. There are a few North Koreans hanging around looking miserable and I was tempted to ask them if they want to go with me instead. I am led to understand Russia and China are the only 2 countries North Koreans can venture out to and that the railway lines to Russia and China were built by Kim Jong as he is afraid of flying. This excitement done, its an early night as we are scheduled to arrive real early in Irkutsk tomorrow.
Sunday 8/29: Irkutsk (click for pictures) 6.16am to the dot and on schedule our train pulls in to Irkutsk. This is the end of our Tran-Siberian adventure. I loved it thoroughly and despite my best efforts to articulate it here, it has not done justice to what we felt over the last 4 nights and 3 days. A must for most everyone who enjoys getting out and about. Tanya is our guide/driver here and is on the platform to greet us. We are surprised to find she speaks very little English but does let us know that our interpreter will join us in a couple of hours, so it is of to a very long breakfast. Tanya goes to school here, works very hard and is very pleasant….so we let her take a nap after breakfast while we wait for her partner Katya to arrive. Another young lady going to school, equally pleasant and welcoming. So with our new friends we take in the sights of Irkutsk, the capital of eastern Siberia. There are the usual bevy of cathedrals with colorful onion domes, a few monuments of past heros/villans (depends if they were in the Soviet times or not) and the lovely river Angara that is supposed to be the only one that is fed by lake Baikal. We attend mass at a couple of the cathedrals since it is Sunday morning. Unlike other masses I have attended in the past, the Russian orthodox churches do not have pews for the worshippers, but have to stand for the entire 3 hours. We lasted a few minutes but it was fascinating to hear the prayers and the priestly attires. It is quite cold this morning, about 50 and Tanya does not have a coat. So we drive to her house to allow her to pick it up while giving us a fascinating insight in to the true local life. We then drive to an open air Taltsy museum that has wooden houses, churches etc from different ethnicities for display. I attempt a new career of stilt walking and may have some potential. Next stop lake Baikal. But before dipping a toe in it, it is lunch that is 3 courses of fishes (smoked, soup and fried) from lake Baikal and quite tasty. Lake Baikal is a huge lake, some of its special attributes is that it is the deepest fresh water lake in the world and holds 20% of the worlds fresh water reserve. The weather is beautiful, bright sun, not a cloud, pleasant breeze and if you are not jealous yet a perfect 68F. The water surface looks like a gazillion diamonds shining, the mountains around the lake want you to forget everything and just stay….& we almost do. Mid evening we return to Irkutsk and check in to our hotel that seems to be in the middle of all action. As our guides depart, we tip them as has been the routine these last couple of days and they are overwhelmed by the gesture today….it figures, they don’t work with American tourists here in Irkutsk but mostly Europeans ;~). We decide we did not want to dine out so we stop at the super market across from our hotel on Karl Marx street. Every Russian city has a Marx, Lenin and Gagarin street in it. TV has nothing in English, even BBC is voiced over in Russian. The Russian news are totally focused on Putin or are forced to. Apparently he is now the chief marketing officer for Lada, their local car as the link will take you to a video. He gets in to one, drives it from Vladivostok on the east coast to somewhere in the south and they cover the drive to show his being in touch with the common man while peddling the car that even locals admit is nothing but junk. Then he is of on to a speedboat doing some fishing and deep see diving to be with the fisherman folks before which he was flying a plane to douse the fires south of Moscow….this guy is a veritable James Bond!.....match that President Obama, never mind the real stuff.
Today is a free day as in nothing is scheduled till 10pm in the evening when we catch our 1st leg of the Trans-Mongolian train to Ulaanbataar (UB as the locals say). So we wake up real late trying to recover from the 4 day train journey. After breakfast and late check out about 1ish we venture out in to the streets of Irkutsk. It appears relaxedly busy, typical young Russians in high heels and bad suits, workers fixing pavements, lots of designer label stores mixed with restaurants and other stores on Marx st. and Lenin st. We find a bench and just soak in the sun and people infront of Lenin’s statue. There are no souvenir stores around to browse or much of anything, so we continue to wander and find a German restaurant for a meal which lasts for 2 hours, not so much for the Kraut cuisine but for the relaxed service where my beer took 20 mins to arrive. Since we were not in a hurry but plainly killing time it did not matter. We stop at an electronics store so I can load up on empty discs. There is no clarity on what is supposed to be declared vs. not and it changes based on who is running the border on the day. So to avoid losing all my pictures/stuff on my laptop I burn it on CD’s. so if Ivan the Immigrations or Customs officer thinks I can not take my laptop with me, he can have it without me stressing out over lost content. Time fly’s by as our ride to the station arrives on time drives us. On the way Tanya stops at the famous Irkutsk bread factory and buy’s us bread as gesture of goodwill…very touching. She then lets me listen to Russian blues and I must say they sound a lot better compared to our blues that talk about trucks, dogs, heart breaks and run away women, well then again who knows what they are singing in Russian….must be the same with vodka. On to the train then to find the surprise of our lives. This leg of the trans Mongolian does not have 1st class, so they have converted a 2nd class coupe in to 1st class by having only Saritha and I in there. Not acceptable considering the money they charged…but then I hear the last time some one complained in Russia, they were never heard from again, so we bite our tongues and shut our door and hope the morning brings some cheer as we chug away from Irkutsk.
Wednesday 9/1: Ulaanbatar (click for pictures) Bright and early we are ready to conquer UB. Our train rambles in on schedule and our guide is at the station to meet us. 1st stop is the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park about 60 minutes north east of UB. Our guide is another university student and the guide is a former wrestler who now is a star driver in the Gobi desert. Breakfast in the Ger camp followed by some archery, I must admit I did well to have my arrows get close to the target. We then head to a family living in a Ger, who welcomes us with their cookies, yogurt, butter and dried curd. I imagine the palate for these foods has to be natural for neither Saritha nor I liked it very much. After thanking our hosts we get on to horses to head to a meditation monastery about 2-3 miles away. Amateur riders with little meat on their rears should not be riding horses for more than 5 minutes, never mind the 75 odd minutes it took us. I am sure tomorrow will be a sore butt day. Accompanying us was a precocious tribal kid who had the most pleasing smile and kept humming away and entertained Saritha along the way. I can not finish this piece without mentioning that our Mongolian horses (shorter and set for marathons vs. sprints) were stinky and between them and the cattle here, are most definitely the biggest causes of methane/global warming. The monastery was very calming and we got a taste of Buddhist rituals here. After lunch we visit the Chinngis Khan’s statue. This 250 ton iron giant is 40 meters high and is presumed to be the largest statue in the world of a man riding a horse. The Khan looks majestic and I am pleased again to see that he is slowly being given the right recognition. Our drive back in to UB is uneventful by local standards but I am stressed as the drivers dart in out of incoming traffic as a already narrow 2 lane road has become a 4 lane track. The traffic in UB is very bad as there are more cars than the roads are built to handle and exasperated by the rude Asian driver. We arrive at the Gandan Monastery about 3pm. This is the seat of the head of the Buddhist religion in Mongolia, the Bogd Khan. However the Bogd lives in Tibet now as the Chinese recognize him. That said the monastery does display the picture of both the Dalai Lama and Bogd giving me the impression that the Chinese cannot wedge a difference between the Buddhists. The monastery has a huge standing Buddha, some 100 meters I am told and is busy with believers rotating the prayer wheels. When I changed money to Rubles in Russia, I felt rich, now in Mongolia I feel like a prince ($1 = 1300 tögrög). We check in to our hotel and prepare for a concert by the Mongolian cultural society. This 1 hour program again pleasantly surprises me with Mongolian music and dance. They have something called throat singing and it is incredible and I have attached a video. Dinner is at bd’s a popular tourist Mongolian grill and it is along the lines of what we get in the US, nothing exotic I am afraid. A quick stop at Sukhbataar square, the central square of UB before nights out as we have an early train to catch tomorrow to Beijing. Thursday 9/2: Trans Mongolian Day 1 (click for pictures) We catch an 7.15am train direct to Beijing. The 1st class accommodation on this train is exactly what we had paid for and seen on pictures in our research including semi-private restroom to be shared with 1 neighbor.…very nice. By about 10.30ish we are beginning to flirt with the great Gobi desert, it is nothing I expected but by the afternoon it is certainly looking like I had seen pictures of it. I see wild horses and bacterian camels in the distance and chat with our Australian neighbors. The restaurant cart is very nice and it appears everybody thinks so and the lines are long. Our reservation is not until 3pm and so it is more desert reflection for me and Saritha snoozes trying to recover from a nasty cold I seem to have given her. About 7pm in the evening we arrive at Zamin-Uud, the border town of Mongolia for our processing out of the country. Our restrooms are locked about 6.30pm and this is important since they don’t open it until 1am, more about this below. Again very efficient, immigration officers enter, review and take our passports away for processing and stamping. However we are jailed on the train till they are done. 90 minutes hence we are chugging out towards China. We arrive in Erlian, China at 9pm. The station is lined with guards, police and other officials while belting some sort of communist music, the kind that requires you to march, quite unnerving. Once the train stops, the officials are quickly on board to check passports, customs looks at luggage and then we are in lock down for a few minutes. The Russian and Mongolian rails are 4.11ft wide while in China they are 4.8ft wide. So the train then starts heading to where they will replace the carriage wheels to the lower guage. Each of the carriages are separated and lifted up pneumatically, the old wheels are rolled out and swapped by new ones as this video nicely shows. It appears very systematic the way they go about doing this and takes about 90 minutes to complete. While we are all watching this excitedly, the air is cut as there is no power to the carriages, toilets are closed and generally it is not very human…we joked about this being Chinese torture. As the carriages are lifted down with the new wheels, the immigration officers come on board and return the passports. About 12am, 3 hours since we first arrived to Erlian, the train pulls up at the platform with new wheels for a nearly 60 minute stop. Many of us drop to the platform to stretch and potentially find toilets considering we did not have the facilities for over 6 hours. While I was impressed with the immigration and wheel change processes, what I do not understand is how do they get away by not allowing passengers access to facilities for over 6 hours. What would happen if people had situations that did not allow for this….totally unacceptable and ridiculous. Then again we all know China’s human rights record, so not much to whine about it here about lack of facilities. Another exciting day over, it is time to rest up for tomorrow.
Friday 9/3: Trans Mongolian Day 2 & Beijing (click for pictures) The train seems to be running late this morning by about 30minutes. The Chinese country side seems to be very organized and clean. People are out and about doing their thing, however it appears a lot of people seem to use the country side for toilets as well. The farms and orchards looked very nourishing, but the overall haze over the country side and eventually Beijing seemed to indicate a lot of pollution. I also saw many giant chimney’s that were certainly adding to global warming. At Datong, I got on to the platform and wandered around a bit and got my first taste of Chinese chaos….people everywhere, jostling and shoving. Back on the train I kept an eagle eye for the great wall as I had read that about the 90mile mark to Beijing we get our first view. As I waited, my neighbor explained that there are 2 ways to get to Beijing, one with the view and one without. We were on the one without….I want my money back! As we rumbled in to Beijing I was surprise by the size of things, the roads, building, railway station etc, they all seem to even dwarf things in the US. Beijing west railway station is new and huge which looked more like an airport than railway station as we buzzed by. We arrive in to Beijing 1 hour late and are met by our guide and driver who then whisk us to the Heavenly Temple. The weather is warm but comfortable, a perpetual haze is on, but we are told it is not pollution. I beg to differ. Beijing city is based on symmetry with the 5 elements of nature and Ying & Yang, so it is built on a north-south axis with symmetry on both sides. The temple is my first experience of Chinese royal culture and realize the more I see the more similar they get. The temple complex is quite large and despite the large Chinese population working its way through here, it is clean. After we check in to our hotel in the Dongcheng district, 3 blocks from Tia An Men square, we go around to explore the street food, souvenirs, etc. We feel strangely comfortable here despite the language barrier and largely non diverse population set up. After wandering for over 90 minutes in search of decent dim sum we end up in one of the mall basements. The dim sum and dumplings in this Chamate bistro is good as is the really cold beer. China I must admit in its limited dose has been overwhelming and we need to rest for the night. Here is a country that seems to be getting ready to rule the world, but I may have some doubts. More tomorrow!
As I land and the immigration officer stamps our passport and says welcome home, I reflect very briefly on this adventure, that we completed safely, had a good time, feel more educated and certainly had the time of our lives. Try it out.
