Me again! There was such demand for more of my writing after my last entry that I couldn't disappoint my fans (namely my sister Shaz and my in-laws- thanks guys!).
Obviously it's been a while since our last entry.......we've been pretty busy touring around and the price of Internet usage is a lot higher in Europe (as is everything!).
Anyway, on to our 77 hour train ride to Russia.
There was much anticipation surrounding this part of the train journey. What would it be like for 77 hours (3 night, 4 days) on the one train? The main concern......how much food would we need to bring with us to survive the 4 days? We stocked up at the local supermarket and we may have gone a bit over the top. As well as the usual bread, bananas and noodle soups we also added some luxury items like cheese, gherkins, ham, tinned fruit, nuts, crackers, chocolate and some French wine. Being seasoned train travelers now we deserved a few treats.
Anyway our cabin was the best one yet. It had a nautical theme (in the tradition of Lake Baikal), blue curtains, images of Lake Baikal on the walls, a life ring clock and large mirrors framed in rope, as well as bean bag sizes pillows and great beds.
By now we had made many friends along the way and there was lots of people on the train that we knew, the Australian family from Floreat who we met on the train from Mongolia to Irkutsk, Meryl & Shirley from America who started on the same train us us in Beijing, Mano from Berlin (who we seemed to see everywhere!) and Tom from UK who was staying in the same hostel as us in Irkutsk. On the first night we also made a few more friends, Thomas, a big enthusiastic lad from Munich, Pascal from Belgium, Adam (film maker from UK), Charlie & his Dad Neville (South Africa). I name them all now as you will read what a great time we all had together. Not everyone was in first class so the restaurant cabin was the main meeting place for beers, but ours was the place for coffee!
Anyway, the first night we all had a few drinks together and Thomas, Pascal and Adam had us in fits of laugher with their stories, particularly the one about the Frenchman. About 9.30pm we all headed back to our cabins to prepare our 2 min noodles- its funny actually there is a great tradition for 2 min noodles on the train as the dinners are too expensive so it is quite OK to excuse yourself at any point and say "I have to go to my cabin now for noodles"...so one by one we all went back to our cabins for dinner. Si made it back to the restaurant for a night cap but that was my chance to retire.
The next day was going to be like any other day on the train...breakfast, reading and generally lying about, however, this day was different as Simon met some Russian lads while wandering the train. They invited him back to the restaurant carriage to have some beers with them. It was 10.30am. He came back at 4pm (and by that stage Thomas, Pascal and Tom had all joined in at some point). Now, you would have thought that was enough but he had promised them that he would bring his wife back at 7pm. If you are familiar with Russian culture, if someone invites you to drink, you don't say no....everything is "Russian tradition"...and now I was also brought into the "Russian tradition". They were nice guys actually (Roman, Dimitri and Alexander), a bit drunk by that stage (naturally) but they were all students and this was the first time they were using their English so they were pretty excited to be making English friends. My name in Russian is "Catarina" which I liked the sound of :-)
The next morning though our new Russian friends came looking for us...at 8am....to invite us to the restaurant cabin for more drinks and food and conversation. We managed to hold them off until about lunchtime and by then they had slowed down a bit and were playing cards...phew.
We also made a pretty exciting discovery.....the first class cabin has a shower! Shhhh no one is supposed to know though or they will all want to use it. It's tucked away in the little staff area and they keep it very secret, but if you ask for one they have to let you. So we slinked on in....trying not to make it look too obvious with our towels and toiletries and we emerged very fresh and 'showered' looking. We thought we would share this info with a few people that we liked but it was very much insider information...not to be shared widely.
So after our very civilized showers Si and I just hung out with Pascal and drank some really bad French table wine and had a pretty early night.
Our last day on the train went pretty quickly. We had another shower! Very lavish of us. The Russian boys chased us all up for email address and we all had group photos. Since Thomas lives in Munich he invited us to stay with him for Oktoberfest which would be a great opportunity to catch up with him and Pascal so we promised that we would try to make it. It was a great train journey....probably if Simon had of written this it would have been a very different record of his experience with his Russian mates but I will leave that story for him to tell in person.
So that was the end of the great Trans Mongolian rail journey. Si was only 70 pages from the end of 'War and Peace' when we had to step off the train.
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