Crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway: Chapter 3 of 6

0 Share 3 Tweet 0

Send this article by email

What is your name?

Please indicate below the emails to which you want to send this article: Crossing Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway: Chapter 3 of 6

Enter one email per line. No more than 5 emails.

Send

Close

[media-credit id=154 align="aligncenter" width="500"][/media-credit]

Day 2

Arrived in PERM, Moscow Time + 2, kilometre 1436, also called the Gateway to Siberia. They say it’s Pasternak’s Yuryatin in Dr. Zhivago -where Omar Sharif escapes to meet Julie Christie. Between 1940 and 1957 the city was called Molotov, after the Soviet Foreign Minister who signed the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact.

[media-credit id=154 align="alignleft" width="249"][/media-credit]

My reason for stopping in Perm was to visit Perm 36, which is I was told the only gulag one can visit in Russia. All others were dismantled by the KGB when the prisoners were freed. A gulag from what I understand is usually rather small, and there were hundreds of them, all over the east. The saying goes that at one time there were more gulags than villages in Siberia.

[media-credit id=154 align="alignright" width="249"][/media-credit]

Walking around Perm

To get to the gulag, which is about 2 hours from Perm, I figured I’d do without the chauffeured car the hotel proposed, and asked the girl in the hotel if she could explain how to get there by bus. She was the only person I met during my trip who spoke English, and when I said “do you think I can manage it” she answered “We Russians are afraid of everything, so we would not go out to an isolated  town in a country we don’t know, but you Westerners don’t seem to mind or to be nervous about doing that kind of thing”. She gave me her cell phone number and said to call if I had a problem. She was the most helpful person I met during my trip and I bought her a bouquet of flowers when I returned the next day.

Day 3

I checked out the station the night before and managed to buy my ticket to the town of Chusovoy, and boarded bus #8 the next morning. I followed on the map and got off 2 hours later at the right stop and the driver pointed the way to me. I knew it was a 3 km walk, but there were no signs, and no sign of life for that matter. I did feel a bit nervous, I was no longer on the main road and if anyone drove by and decided to give me a hard time there was no one for miles around.
[media-credit id=154 align="alignleft" width="249"][/media-credit]

The bus station where I took the bus to Chusnoy

After a while I passed a few kids walking in my direction, limping, with weird, degenerate faces, very few teeth. Didn’t make me feel any better. Then an old woman who stared, I asked her the way, she didn’t answer. Then some more kids burning piles of junk on the side of the road and looking definitely like the kind of person I wouldn’t want to meet in the middle of nowhere. They stared. Finally I saw what I thought was the gulag. Not a sign on the door. Went in. Paid, and a kid who looked no more than 18 came up to show me around, in minimum

English. He stuttered, limped, and in English knew only the words that go with the gulag – prisoners, escape, barbed wire, punishment, forced labour, high security… His shyness was such that he couldn’t actually look at me, he just kept his head to the side and talked to the wall. He took me to a room and switched the light out and walked out. I hadn’t a clue what was going on and I was growing very uneasy at the whole thing standing alone in the dark. It turned out that the panel on the wall opened and there was a screen behind it, and a film went on, in English, going over the history of the gulag. He was standing in the next room, turning the machine on.

The visit lasted about an hour, just him and me, no one else in the whole place except a lady at the entrance.

Outside just a few barracks (the sleeping quarters, the infirmary, the workshop, the “prison” within the gulag, the library with books only by Lenin and Mao, the laundry room). On a beautiful, sunny day those wooden houses look almost cosy and it’s hard to feel the horror of the place. I was rather surprised, much of what I saw out the window of the train looked more sombre to me than the barracks I was seeing here. On the other hand, there were photos and such testifying that this had been no summer camp. Before leaving I handed my guide a tip but he refused it, said “It can be dangerous”. I don’t know what he meant, maybe that was his only vocabulary in English for saying no…

On my way back, on the main road where the bus was to pass in the next hour or so (I stupidly had forgotten to check the timetable for the way back so had no real idea how long I would be waiting outside by -10°C), a car stopp ed and the driver proposed to drop me off in Perm. Hitchhiking, or rather grabbing a car for a few roubles is very common in Russia, everyone does it, cars stop when they see you are looking for a cab. I hitched several time in Moscow and saw how normal it was, so as the guy seemed OK I hopped in. He turned out to be a policeman, and I think he had picked me up because he was falling asleep and wanted someone to talk to. In the beginning he seemed a bit annoyed when he understood that I wouldn’t be much of a chatting companion, but then I tried to tell him about Dr. Jivago, Michel Strogoff (anything to keep him awake) and he didn’t know what the hell I was talking about but found it kind of fun. After the 2 hour drive when he dropped me off he said something to the effect that people in Russia don’t do the kind of thing I am doing and that I should be proud of myself. Reader, you have understood by now that travelling alone in Russia is the best thing you can do for your ego.

Later on I reread the article on the gulag, and got the explanation for the weird looking people in the town. In fact there is a mental hospital right nearby and these people are allowed to walk around during the day…
[media-credit id=154 align="alignright" width="249"][/media-credit]

The synagogue

Back in Perm I stopped by at the synagogue to see what it was like, Bought some dried noodles, black bread and jam in the supermarket and got my 11:30 PM train to Irkutsk.

Now I have to tell you about the time zone thing, definitely the most confusing element of a Trans-Siberian trip. As you travel through 7 time zones from Moscow to Vladivostok, the time changes every thousand km or so, so the only way to make any sense out of this is to have the entire train system work on Moscow time. Meaning that when you buy your ticket, it’s Moscow time that is written on it, for both departing and arriving times. On the train people speak in Moscow time and all train stations clocks are set on Moscow time, as is the clock on the train. So sometimes it’s 3 PM on the train and it’s night time outside. When you go to catch your train in Irkutsk, which is MT (Moscow time) + 5, you have to be there 5 hours earlier than the time it is in town…

Sounds simple, but it can be kind of confusing for the unaccustomed traveller. When I bought my tickets in Moscow, though I knew this, I was so intimidated by the woman at the window that it slipped my mind. So when she gave me the schedules of the trains I couldn’t figure out why all the trains arrived at 3 or 4:30 AM. I was at a loss as to which totally impractical train to choose, and finally another woman took pity on me and walked over and said that this was Moskva vremeni. Moscow time. Of course! The teller knew the whole time that was the problem, but why help out an stupid tourist such as I…

So that night I boarded train # 10, named the Baikal, for the longest leg of my trip, 3 nights, to IRKUTSK (those who read Michel Strogoff will remember this was his final destination), near lake BAIKAL. Again in Platskartny (3d class) and this time my travel companions were a young girl carrying a guinea pig, a younger guy and a very old lady who appeared in the bottom berth sometime during the night (I guess I slept through a few stops).
[media-credit id=154 align="alignleft" width="249"][/media-credit]

Old Lady

Next morning around 10, only the old lady was left. She got very angry with me because I was lying on my top bunk and not sitting on the bottom berth, so I came down and she talked and talked about how in her days women didn’t need to travel all around the world, that nowadays people all run around too much, then about all the “cashmar-nightmare” governments such as the US with negro presidents, about all the foreigners in Russia, the Chinese, Mongolians, Chechens, Koreans, Armenians, Afghans, “even” Blacks. When I said I didn’t understand Russian she said yes you do. She talked away for about 5 hours, I couldn’t stop her as I didn’t have the vocabulary, and every time she questioned me and I tried looking up the words in my dictionary she spat at me “cashmar, cashmar”, clearly meaning that I was a nightmare myself because of my dictionary and multiple guidebooks. She wanted to talk to me but couldn’t stand to. She finally got off, thank goodness, in Omsk, and as I pulled my boots on to help her with her bag onto the platform she just walked away and got off without saying goodbye. I secretly congratulated myself for having changed my plans a month ago, deciding to skip a visit to Omsk.

So, the other thing everyone asks me, didn’t I get bored on the train? No, I read, I wrote – with pen and paper, didn’t want to carry around a laptop with me – wrote post cards, lots, 60 I think, looked out the (dirty) windows, kept a constant eye on the km posts to check where we were, studied the next town I was getting off at to see where I’d stay and what I’d visit, and pretty much learnt the 2 guidebooks I had by heart. Some read the bible over and over again, I do that with guidebooks. It seems every time I look at the same page there’s something new written on it. Something I hadn’t seen before. The places I passed shed a new light on those I was to visit, and the books I had with me (Russian novels naturally), made me want to look over and over again at the map to see exactly where they took place. Spent a lot of time looking for my glasses too, my pen, my eraser, my glasses again, then it’s time to put my boots on and step outside for the 30 min stop, then it’s time to check when the bathroom will be free, then it’s time to go to the samovar to fill my thermos or make instant noodles for dinner, oh, and what about checking out the platform to see if there are any interesting pictures to be taken. I kind of felt like Eloise at the Plaza… And taking pictures. They called me the journalistka, would not believe that I was not going to publish a story (they saw me writing as well), and therefore would not let me take photos of them. I did all I could to convince them I was only travelling for my own pleasure, they still think I’m a journalist. So I have sadly very few photos of people. And no one in a uniform, ever, wants to be taken a photo of, they seem to find it silly, or dishonouring, or maybe source of problems, I don’t know.

As a lady traveller said in 1902, “time goes by very fast on a train such as this”

The Russians I saw on the train on the other hand did pretty much nothing during the trip, aside from crossword puzzles, which they seem crazy about -they all have an old crumpled newspaper that they work on off and on during the entire trip. Very few had books, one or two listened to music, and I saw one young guy with a laptop and one woman knitting. Most of the time they just lied around, talked, ate and the men went back and forth to smoke in the space between the cars where it is allowed. But you can tell they like the train, that they are enjoying a social moment, and maybe they are just enjoying doing nothing for once, much like myself!

At km 1777 we crossed the Europe/Asia border, and at km 2102 we entered Siberia. At km 3332, during the night, we crossed the great Ob river, passed through Novosibirsk and entered MT + 4 time zone. We stopped in Marinsk, which was to be my favourite station, at the break of dawn, passed Krasnoyarsk and the Yenisey river at km 4100, over the bridge which was the other engineering feat to
win a gold medal in at the 1890 World’s Fair in Paris along with the Eiffel Tower. At km 4680 we passed Nizhneudinsk where I opened an eye to check the temperature: -27°C (minus 17 °F), looks like I’m starting to get what I came for!

More to come…

Meanwhile you can browse my Photo Gallery

Copyright protected by DigiproveAll Rights Reserved

Helene Karson (10 Posts)