We’re sitting in a coffee shop surrounded by half-a-day’s worth of tea and coffee cups. Batteries are running low and I think the WIFI is running out. And we’re still not quite sure where we are going next or how we are going to get there.
We have been somewhat reliant on the big omnipresent map makers of the world. They seem to know roads and train schedules everywhere. But, well, not everywhere. If you go far enough off the beaten path, if you go deep enough into Siberia, well, then you’re kinda on your own.
According to one website there is no way to get from Khabarovsk to Yukutsk, according to another you can only get there via two day train trip and a 14-hour taxi ride. According to one source there is now train service there that was began July 29th 2019–roughly a month ago. According to yet another website the train only runs every other day, but we don’t know at what time. The plan now is to find somebody at the train station to ask, but of course we don’t know Russian. Oops.
Optimistic that we can sort this out. If so, we will take a taxi to the train station, get on an overnight train, take a taxi to a different train station, take another overnight train, take a taxi to a ferry, take a ferry into the town of Yurtuk, and from there we think that we can take a river cruise to see a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
…
Update, we failed. The train that makes the first part of the journey seems to be sold out a month in advance. There is some debate as to whether or not the second train line actually exists. Two people at the train station insisted that it didn’t; quoting an English language website that it did was unpersuasive. In the end we put our proverbial tails between our legs and chose a slightly more beaten path and went to Ulan Ude.
