Trans-Siberian Railway is like…

The Trans Siberian Railway is not the fastest way to get across Siberia. Nor is it the most comfortable. Assuredly, there are cleaner ways to go. 

But, it might be the most enjoyable, and it’s almost definitely the most beautiful. 

For this leg of our journey, we traveled from Khabarovsk (near Russia’s East Coast) to the provincial capital city of Ulan Ude (near Lake Baikal), over what was supposed to be about 54 hours. As I write this post, we are projecting a total travel time between 57 and 58 hours, due to many mysterious delays. So, it’s not the most timely way to travel, either. 

Imagine you’re back in your college dorm, sharing a cramped bunk-room with people you don’t know. Now imagine it is smaller than that. Much smaller. This tiny space is determinedly rumbling and rocking back and forth with a rhythmic ti-clack-ti-clack-clack. The mesmerizing electronica beat varies with a passing bridge or wayward railroad tie, and it rests only when the iron clad rooms shudder and sigh to stop at the stations. Silence. Murmurs of conversation in a language you don’t understand sift through the stillness. 

Imagine that no one speaks English and that Russian is the hardest language in the world built from the thirty-three crazy looking characters in the Cyrillic alphabet. Oh, and you can’t leave this place for 54 hours. I mean 56 hours. Or 57 hours. Maybe 58 hours. 

Like your college dorm, pajamas and flip flops are expected attire. Cup-o-noodle is your survival food. Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy are on your required reading list.

Unlike your college, there are no classes, so you have nothing to do all day except read, play cards, listen to music, look out the window, and draft a blog post or two. Eat when you are hungry, nap when you are sleepy, stare when you are at a loss for thought.

And then… you meet the New Caledonians! We’ll pretend that you know where New Caledonia is, just like I tried to. But, let’s be honest; you don’t know where it is. Anyway, it is a tropical French territory near Australia… duh. And on our train car, there is not one, not two, but three New Caledonians! And they speak English! And they like to play cards! And they brought instant cappuccino mix (it’s better than it sounds).

You live like this for three days, getting out to stretch your legs whenever the stops are long enough (most stops are only two minutes long, and the mother-hen-like conductor is very emphatic—in a language that I don’t understand—that we should not wander away), hoping at the longer stops that the babushkas will sell you fried bread filled with mystery meat (it’s not a mystery to them, just to us). 

There is nothing resembling a shower, but the conductor did give us a clean washcloth. Anyway, the bathroom smells so-so and bounces unpredictably, so it’s not a great place to linger. By the way, the stainless-steel toilet opens directly to the tracks below. For sanitary purposes, you are supposed to ignore bodily urges twenty minutes before and after the station stops. We’ll just leave that there. I notice after a while that no one else was bothering to change clothes, so why should I?

Where else, though, can you watch pristine wilderness glide past you without a car or billboard in sight? Misted stands of birch trees give way to evergreens, then to meadows, mountains, and the reflection of the moon in a blackened river landscape. Summer gives way to Fall. The changing landscape is mesmerizing, almost hypnotic. Its beauty brought me to tears. 

We tend to value speed so much that we avoid this kind of travel (it takes ten days to go the full length of the Trans-Siberian Railway, assuming it runs on time). In the states, trains fares are often more expensive than planes! (These 54 hours of transport and lodging only cost the five of us $379). After this experience, we can’t help but feel that the train is medicinal in a way. If we were to take the train more often, rather than a car or a plane, perhaps our collective blood pressures would be lower. 

Yes, time is money and all that. But, time is also life. There is life in the community here on this train in the middle of nowhere. There is life in the stories of our bunk-mates who are headed here and there to visit their mothers. There is life in the friends you can make when willingly trapped together in one place for days at a time. There is life watching my boys play another card game together, read another book, and try again to forge a connection through a language barrier. We set out months ago to learn how to live more thoughtfully; this experience is teaching us to slow down, pause for thought, relish the steps along the way. It appears there are classes on the train, after all!