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Crossing continents

October 10, 2007
Venetia Rainey

From Moscow to Mongolia, riding on the Trans-Siberian express is a humbling, once-in-a-lifetime adventure, says Venetia Rainey.

It is 21:19, and I am clutching my mobile while standing on platform number three (and no quarters) in Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station, wondering why my call is connecting not to the voice of my female friend but to garbled Slavic grunts and recorded Russian messages. I am a little panicked, not least because at 21:25 exactly – the Russians are incredibly punctual when it comes to trains – the hissing vehicle by my side will pull out and begin its seven-day-long journey to the other side of the world, and, unless I get seriously lucky, it will be minus two, currently petrified, English ladies. A loitering group of burly soldiers size me up menacingly, whilst metres away a babushka is scrabbling for change on the floor, her grubby layers of skirt clenched tightly in her fist.

This scene is typical of Moscow, an unashamedly industrial city riddled with fantastical characters and racked with contradictions. Note, for example, the shrine to capitalism (a designer shopping mall) sitting smugly on the other side of Red Square from Lenin’s mausoleum; or the Disney-like magic of the multi-coloured, bauble-adorned St Basil’s, compared with the stark, towering statements of functionality embodied by the old Kremlin Palace of Congresses, where Stalin used to gather with his Politburo. It is gritty but magnificent, giving off an air of century-old grandeur and resilience.

I wish I could say I warmed to St Petersburg as much as Moscow. I had been there just hours before, and found it soulless – an artificial shell of former splendour. Cracking nightlife, though; I guess you can’t like everywhere you visit.

Four days, 37 packets of Russian krekers (crackers), five pots of instant potato mash and a frankly stupid number of cups of tea later, I am still on the train I had, eventually, managed to board days before. I have one more night in our four-person berth, which we are sharing with Lyuda, an old lady who smacks her gums incessantly and is irritatingly keen to communicate with us via my Russian phrasebook. All she has told us so far is that the tea we are being given five times a day is a padarak (present) and the obligation to look surprised yet pleased by this information is getting really old, really quickly.

For the most part, however, it has been a pleasant train journey, generally consisting of conversations meditating on the state of the world, reading books, eating, sleeping and taking pictures. It is a soporific yet fantastically indulgent lifestyle; you are forced to slow down completely and just sit and watch towns and the Siberian countryside fly past you. Every few hours the train stops at a station, which is the only chance you have to get off.

Food can be bought – usually potato-stuffed pastries, fresh fruit or dried fish – and stagnant air enjoyed, but only for ten minutes or so, after which the provodnost (attendant) chivvies you back onto the train.

Tomorrow we will reach Irkutsk, the biggest city in Siberia, more famous for its presence on the Risk board game than its proximity to Lake Baikal (the deepest lake in the world). After that we are going on to Vladivostok, a city closed off to the world (including the Russians, due to its eastern location) until 1991. Tonight, however, the seedily lit buffet car and its supply of vodka await. Well, as they say: “When in Rome…”
I am now in Outer Mongolia, the most sparsely populated country in the world, and I am feeling further from civilisation than ever before in my life. Breathtaking, hostile and unbelievably beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe earth’s second-largest landlocked country.

People live here as they did thousands of years ago, and the landscape humbles the soul almost violently

On each of the last few days we have been driven for hours on end down sweeping valleys, through unchartered torrents of water and over rocky, vehicle-upturning precipices. We have ridden wild Mongolian horses in the driving rain, killed and eaten a sheep the traditional way (make a small slit in the stomach, reach in and squeeze the heart until it bursts; chop up roughly, boil in a pot, dip in a vat of salt and eat), been drunk on Genghis Khan vodka whilst sitting round in a yurt (basically an igloo made with sheets rather than ice, but no warmer), showered in an icy Shamanic waterfall, and ridden camels into the Gobi desert to the sound of Mongol deep-throat singing.

Every single sense is alive at every single second out here. It is not always enjoyable (they hardly have any roads outside of the capital, Ulaanbaator) but it is one of the few countries that still makes no concessions to the western lifestyle. People live here as they did thousands of years ago, and the landscape humbles the soul almost violently. Shame we have to go back to Ulaanbaator today; its semi-modernised atmosphere will be depressing. Still, the show must go on.

Beijing is everything Outer Mongolia wasn’t: a mind-boggling mesh of empirical dynasties and vast crowds of people. We frequent markets (which have all been crammed into malls at the government’s insistence), perfectly maintained parks, massage parlours (because our feet hurt) and a million and one museums. The Forbidden City is a disappointment (it is mostly under renovation and Roger Moore no longer does the audio guides), but the Summer Palace is the most spectacular thing ever built, and richer in detail than you could possibly imagine.

We climb the Great Wall (the JinShanLing section, for those in the know), which takes five hours and more energy than I would usually care to expend in a day. The views were postcard-perfect, however, and our efforts to get away from the more tourist-infested sections paid off; we were alone most of the time save the regular cries of, “Water! You need water! No? What about a hat?” from opportunistic hawkers along the way. We meandered through the city’s hutongs (tiny alleyways) on our bicycles, picking up quail kebabs roasted in various spices along the way.

Beijing is an outdoors kind of city. The houses in the hutongs do not have their own toilets, so there are communal ones everywhere. It is not uncommon to live in one small room, so by night, card and dice games litter the street in place of house-orientated gatherings. Gyms are for the very rich and come early evening, gaggles of women exercise on public step-machines on the pavement. They smile and laugh a lot, although this could have been because my friend and I must have looked like a spectacle. Tonight I have promised myself I will try dog, as a local has promised me it will taste just like English chicken. I can’t wait.

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