We’re on this train for how long?



Ekaterinaburg - where Europe meets Asia

88 hours and 10 minutes. That is the length of the train ride (including stops) from Moscow to Irkutsk. An interesting tidbit about rail (and air) travel in Russia is that all departure and arrival times are set to Moscow time. Russia spans 11 time zones so to eliminate any possible confusion with schedules if you’re on the train, it’s Moscow time. For our current situation (Irkutsk is 5 hours ahead of Moscow), imagine being in New York and having to plan your travel to say Atlanta, based on what time it is in Anchorage. So, our tickets say we arrive in Irkutsk at 4:35am, but that’s really 9:35am. Better yet, the ticket says we leave the 8th at 11:50pm but that’s really the 9th at 4:50am. As I said, this is to eliminate confusion.

To sum up, we don’t know what time it is now, what time we arrive, when we are scheduled to depart or what time it is in Mongolia. Doubtless, all this will be resolved.



birch trees and fireweed



Pooh enjoying the comfort of the air-conditioned dining car



The landscape has been mostly attractive – lush, green fields with wildflowers interspersed with birch stands and every so often punctuated with small rural communities. These places are often quite charming in a rustic way. The houses are small and made of dark wood with colorful decorative elements around the windows and doors. Each has a garden of vegetables and flowers in lieu of a lawn. We were continually moved to ask, “What on Earth are these people doing out here?” There was no visible industry, not even farming. A few were clearly logging towns and some appeared to raise cows but most were far flung clusters of humanity independent of roads, shops or services of any description.



wooden quaint



We played endless rounds of card games, did some journaling and regretted buying only one Kindle, deeply. Every stop of more than 2 minutes saw us racing for the platform to purchase snacks from the babushkas who meet every train. They come with fresh produce and homemade foodstuffs. A lot of it looked great, but we had struggled enough with the Russian concept of “vegetarian” – meaning “I like vegetables with all the meat on my plate”, so we cravenly stuck to ice cream and candy bars. Some of it was somewhat bewildering – giant, split-open dried fish. What do you do with that? Just rip it apart with your teeth? One lady had a giant bin of pine cones in some sort of sauce.

Anyhow, 88 hours is a very long time to spend on a train.