Monday, June 10, 2013

The Tran Siberian Railway (Siberia, Russia)


 
After a six hour wait at the border, our train rolled on through into Russia.

Russia is a mystery wrapped around an enigma inside a riddle, said Winston Churchill. Classed as neither European or Asian, the world’s biggest country straddles the continent with its expansive wilderness, Siberia, known as the ‘lungs of Eurasia.’  It’s a truly epic country to venture across.

But you know what? This country is a joke.

Where do I even start?

Thanks to corruption, which festered out of control in the communist times and has carried on since, this is a country going backwards. Once a superpower of the world, Russia now has a crumbling economy and a life expectancy that is decreasing each year. For a country with so many natural resources and former wealth, which is funnelled to a small per cent of corrupt individuals in the cities to west, its bewildering how many people in the west and backwaters of the country are starving.

The government runs the media and has no valid opposition. That's a problem. In Russia you don’t talk about corruption – you don’t even say the word. Don’t even think about questioning Putin. People go missing, and that’s no exaggeration. Russia ranked second last on the World Transparency list for 2012. Political critics call Russia a ‘mafia run state.’

After China and Mongolia, I’m sick of government overcontrol and corruption, but here we are again, at the world capital for both. New pet hate.  

On our first morning off the train we visited a small ‘Old Believers’ village. These folks are descendants of the people who were exiled to Siberia because of their religious convictions; communism tried to exterminate religion and even turned a few churches in the big cities to the west into Atheism museums.

This village was interesting to see, and we met some of the local grandmothers (babushka’s) who took us into their little home, fed us up with more food than we could eat and poured us shot after shot of homebrew vodka. Yep, this was lunch time. The women complained about their pension and spoke about their grandchildren and how their husbands had died (probably from drinking too much of this drain cleaner, I thought. And it’s true, alcoholism is absolutely rampant in Russia, especially Siberia). Of course, they spoke only Russian, but we had a guide who translated for us.


Next we went and spent a couple of days on the shores of Lake Baikal. This is the world oldest, deepest and largest freshwater lake. It’s as big as a sea and it’s easy to spot on any world map. The whole thing was frozen over solid, and it was so endless that it looked like Antarctica. It was so beautiful to see it at the different times of the day and just go walking around on the big white plain. Not far from the shore was just pure silence punctuated by the occasional creak or crack of ice.


There were plenty of cars driving across the lake and many people ice fishing – the rewards of which we had for dinner one night (with the compulsory vodka shot, of course).  Baikal blew me away.

 

The Trans-Siberian Railway is the world longest railway and our longest stint between getting of was 3 nights. That’s a long time to be cramped in a small, four person sleeper cabin. And I would love to say that the scenery was breathtaking, but for the most part it was a boring blur of pines and birch trees. I occupied my time by reading, writing, trying to learn some Russian and sleeping.  I took of my watch because we were passing through a different time zone every day, and added with the really long dusks this high up, my sense of time became so warped in nearly felt like I had jet lag without even being on a jet.

For food we stocked up before we boarded and thanks to the availability of water at the end of each carriage I had noodles for most meals. I got as creative as you could with no refrigeration and limited space for three days; see photo of my glorious carrot and pepperoni noodles. That was by far the best part of that particular day.

We stopped at small towns to break up the journey. At one we wandered around the small river town and visited a lady who did a little cooking demo for us. She then called her daughter downstairs and they sang for us. At another, less pleasant stop, we visited a Gulag. Gulag were the prisoner camps of the communist times, set up across the whole of Russia, but mostly Siberia for common crooks, but mostly as a form of exiling the intelligentsia; writers, artists, professors, scientists, etc, who went against the communist values. They were simply arrested and shipped out to one of these camps (or if they were a real threat then they were killed). That was the communist solution to the problem of dissent. And it worked for a good. Shockingly, the last ‘political prisoner’ to leave the Gulag we visited was 1992.  As I said, this country is a joke.

But I say that not in reference to the common people. The woman and her daughter who sang for us, our hosts at Baikal, the people we met on the train, the old ladies in the village: these are all normal people like you and me but they are so caught up in the system that they just have to suffer the consequences and get on with it. Russians have the reputation as being grumpy and cold – and for good reason I think! But the locals I met were warm and friendly if you could get past that protective exterior. And that’s just more reason to be angry about the few people in power who are letting the rest of them down.

Once again I’m brought back to the thought that Australia is a good place to be born and Japan is downright utopic. And even though I think it’s a ridiculous thing to do, I’m glad that in Australia the Prime Minister can get pelted with sandwiches from school children. I think it’s important.

And the Trans-Siberian express rolls into the West…

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