Train - Vladivostok to Irkutsk - Day 1

Our first train is the Rossiya (#001), which is one of the premier trains of Russia, making the 9289 km journey from Vladivostok to Moscow every second day, and similarly the return journey from Moscow.

A top Russian train has three classes. First class has two sleepers to a cabin and second has four sleepers in a similar sized cabin. The third class is a more open car, which holds six sleepers in a similar space to that of the first or second class cabin plus its adjacent corridor. Prices are roughly in line with the space (second class is 50% of first class; third class is 30% of first class).

We were in a first-class compartment. The carriage is only about 25% occupied, so we certainly aren’t bothered by people. Each carriage has an attendant (for a male, he is called a provonik; a female is a provodnitsa). There is a boiling water urn at one end of the carriage and two toilets at the other end (one permanently locked; reserved for the provodnik?).

Russian first class carriages vary in interior design, though the layout is generally the same – two beds, a curtained window (which doesn’t open), storage under the beds, a small table and various hooks and small storage areas. Our interior design is from the “general hospital” school of design – everything off-white and clinical.

Our train left on Tuesday 24^th at 10:20 pm Vladivostok time. As the train crosses multiple time zones, all the timetable information on-board is at Moscow time (seven hours behind Vladivostok), so it’s wise to set your watch to Moscow time. We had some bread and cheese with some Baltica beer and settled in for the night.

The beds are comfortable and the cabin warm (even over-warm), so it’s possible to get a good night’s sleep. In any case, there’s no urgency to meet a deadline the next day.

The next morning (Wednesday 25^th) found us at Vyazemskaya, which is otherwise unremarkable except that it is a stop where locals sell red salmon caviar. Matthew bought some and we had a Russian breakfast of salmon caviar, bread and a little vodka.

The train continued through the day, heading north and then turning to the west. The line tends to parallel the Chinese border, though is 50 to 100 km back from the border.

This is a big country, so there is lots of open space, with light or heavier coverings of birch or like trees. There is plenty of water about and much of the ground seems marshy. There are also some very big rivers, which were (and possibly still are) and important means of transport and trade. At one point, a 2.6 km bridge, the longest on the railway, spans the Amur River.

There are plenty of smaller towns and some large cities – Khabarovsk at 690,000 is the largest, but there are others of 60,000 to 80,000 and numbers with 15,000 to 30,000.

You fall into a rhythm on the train – reading, resting, watching the world go by and getting off at the stops, which occur about every three hours.

For much of the day, we travelled though the Jewish Autonomous Region set up by Stalin in 1928. It wasn’t a great success and today less that 6000 of the 200,000 inhabitants of the 30,000 sq. km. territory are Jewish. The fact that Stalin’s anti-Jewish purges even extended to this area, closing synagogues and banning Yiddish, may explain some of this, as does the significant migration of Russian Jews to Israel, particularly at the end of the Soviet era. Train station signs here are often in Russian and Hebrew.

The traditional Trans-Sib lunch is packet noodles, so that’s what we had. We checked out the dining car for pre-dinner drinks (more Baltica) and for dinner. Dinner was something that translated as meat & potato stew, but which was quite palatable. As we found elsewhere, Russian wine is a rare commodity in Russia. Continuing our world wine tour, we had a light Spanish red with our meal.