On The Rails — Sochi to Ulaanbaatar

As I write, it’s 5:30am in Ulaan­baatar, the cap­ital of Mon­go­lia. Through the win­dow of my host’s flat I can see the pale orange of the morn­ing sun pick­ing out the shapes of the new indus­trial com­plexes and apart­ment blocks that are sprout­ing at great speed. After a couple of years they will be crum­bling, plaster fall­ing from the walls; vic­tims of overzeal­ous devel­op­ment com­bined with corner-cutting for profit max­im­iz­a­tion in the name of the free market.

Behind the city sky­line, a range of low moun­tains is sil­hou­et­ted against the sky. They will be my tar­get for the day. Tonight I’ll be sleep­ing under the stars — an invig­or­at­ing pro­spect. I’ve spent about 5% of my life camp­ing and I never tire of it.

It was a 15-day over­land jour­ney just to get here. It’s funny to think that for many, 15 days would be a year’s worth of for­eign hol­i­days. On the ferry from Trabzon to Sochi, I tried to work out how Rus­sia fit­ted into my concept of the world. I’d never been before, but I’d spend the best part of two years liv­ing amongst the fal­lout of the Rus­sian cen­tury, with all its faded grandeur, remin­is­cing of the days of denial and plenty, and the folly of post-Soviet opportunism.

But my first impres­sions of Sochi were far from what I was try­ing to avoid expect­ing. I imme­di­ately felt that I was in a place where the sys­tem appeared to bene­fit more than just the ultra-rich. People looked healthy, middle-class, dis­trac­ted by whimsy and were far from strug­gling to eke out a living.

I’d made friends with an Armenian woman on the boat. She lived in Rostov-on-Don, Russia’s so-called ‘father of crime’, and was head­ing for the rail­way sta­tion. I shared a taxi with her and she sor­ted out my train ticket for Moscow — a great help, as my Rus­sian exten­ded to “Good day, I don’t under­stand Rus­sian, thank you, good­bye”. While I was wait­ing I got chat­ting to one of the sta­tion police­men. He also turned out to be Armenian. The train’s guard was Armenian, the bag­gage porter was Armenian and refused to believe that I spoke his nat­ive lan­guage, and I walked past another pas­sen­ger who was on his mobile phone, speak­ing Armenian (“…and it was five thou­sand dol­lars! Can you believe it?!?”). Between Yerevan and Moscow, trav­el­ling through four coun­tries, I spoke more Armenian than any other language.

Andy came to meet me in Moscow. He’d trav­elled by bus from Lon­don via Dortmund and Riga and had arrived the pre­vi­ous day. We booked tick­ets on the week­end train to Ulan-Ude, 5,600km away in Burya­tia, Siberia. The four-day jour­ney in 3rd class cost just 45 pounds — about the same as Lon­don to Leicester — and included a bed, free hot water and the enter­tain­ment of an assort­ment of enig­matic local char­ac­ters. Chores over, we met up with some local Mus­cov­ites, wandered ran­domly through the streets of the gigantic cap­ital, got repeatedly lost on the metro and stocked up on the cheapest instant noodles we could find.

The Trans-Siberian train is a bit of a mis­nomer. There are loads of trains ply­ing all or part of the clas­sic route to Vla­divos­tok, includ­ing vari­ants head­ing for Mon­go­lia and China and other Rus­sian des­tin­a­tions. It is very dif­fi­cult for an islander such as myself to grasp the concept of a coun­try which spans no less than nine timezones and has swal­lowed count­less inde­pend­ent states over time along with their inhab­it­ants, cus­toms and lan­guages. Rus­si­ans have almost as much dif­fi­culty trav­el­ling in Rus­sia as for­eign­ers do. Ima­gine you lived in Lon­don and decided to go to Edin­burgh, for example, but dis­covered that you weren’t allowed to stay for more than 30 days out­side Lon­don without spe­cial per­mis­sion, and that you had to register your pres­ence in any town or city out­side Lon­don in which you spent more than 3 days at a time!

My train jour­ney passed in a blur of flat, unchan­ging swamp, steppe and wood­land. The Trans-Siberian rail­way is itself an intensely mono­ton­ous thing. The only vari­ety came on the second morn­ing, when the cli­mate had under­gone a drastic change overnight. When we’d left Moscow it had been 28 degrees and we’d slept with the win­dow open. In the dim grey light of that morn­ing, step­ping off the train to stretch our legs, we were sur­prised to find that it was ever-so-lightly snowing.

Being the only for­eign­ers amongst the 3rd class wag­ons we attrac­ted a fair amount of atten­tion, and were kept occu­pied by a vari­ety of elab­or­ately mimed con­ver­sa­tions. All was going well until the final night, dur­ing which I was unable to sleep. Our stop was sched­uled at 3:47am, and it arrived on the dot, being as it was a Rus­sian train, the stal­wart mode of trans­port for cross-country jour­neys, highly punc­tual and reliable.

Ulan-Ude was another chore-stop, this time for Mon­go­lian visas which were luck­ily quick and easy to obtain. It would have been nice to have spent some more time in Rus­sia, but I decided that it would be bet­ter to do so when I had an Armenian pass­port and didn’t have to worry about a visa. Before long we were on the little Taiwan-made bus, boun­cing along the pot-holed road towards the Mon­go­lian bor­der and — finally — the start of the ride itself.

Thanks for read­ing. You might also like these recent articles:

• The Long Road Back To Yerevan
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