about to get on the train. Marsha, Kristen and moi.
my lovely home for the next 6 days.
my cabinmates celebrated the start of the trip in style. champagne and beluga caviar on crackers with lemon juice. the hoi polloi can have their beer and vodka!
for some reason, games were prohibited in the russian restaurant car. no clue why.
russian restaurant car. zena, the dining car princess is at the very back on the right. (seriously, the woman who ran the dining car was named zena - nice woman)
just getting started. still just past nizhvy novgorad.
ahh, the pastoral beauty of western russia.
i think this was kirov. the stops kind of ran together.
this was a chinese train with chinese guards/porters/guys/whatever you call them. each car had two guys. they seemed to be there to help us out, but none spoke much english.
surreptitious snap of this really cool guy selling dried fish and water.
i bought a water to get a portrait.
this is a pretty quiet stop
the toilet drops straight down onto the tracks. do NOT walk along the tracks in Russia.
at evening, thick mist would start rising in patches from the land and any water. absolutely gorgeous. ghostly and special effect-like.
the night of the great debauch
ekaterinburg.
yogurt for all.
two guys from england
aussie girl, too.
more piles of grass
i love this photo. maybe something about the excess of walkways down the hill.
is that a man in a boat?
yes, it is.
little houses require big trucks.
they ran out of shingles halfway through and switched to tin. same difference.
a bit of color
this is the pool chalk-blue that most shutters are painted. it must be cheap.
be it ever so humble...
nice to visit, i wouldn't want to live there.
i do love the greenhouses in every yard.
the village.
i just like the little road up to the houses.
some creative fencing.
industry
boys playing at a water pump. it was so l.m. montgomery. very anachronistic. they were pumping water to splash each other with.
phallic symbol, anyone?
Irtysh River near Omsk
for some reason, i like the blur factor in this. hey, you try taking photos from a moving train! thank god for digital!
deja vu. it all started looking the same.
babushka from whom i bought a great deal of food at a grossly inflated price.
ungrateful granny protesting my photo. little did she know, i'd already gotten the shot. hah!
another, nicer vendor. i would not recommend the mystery meat. several travellers reported unpleasant reactions.
another platform view. this one was full of people. probably because it was mid-afternoon and people were over their morning hangovers.
truck forcing everyone to move their food displays for it to drive along the platform.
bridge over another tributary of the Irtysh.
hallway of my car 7. funny. i got car seven. for those who haven't memorized my b-day, it's 7/7/77. that's tom at the end looking out the window. at scenic spots, this hall'd be crowded with people leaning out to snap pics. only every other window opens. 8 compartments of up to 4 people each.
they ran out of blue paint.
graveyard
the tilt expresses how thrown about we were on every turn. kind of fun. made the drinkers feel drunker than they really were!
morning between mariinsk and krasnoyarsk. i think. we lost all sense of time, date, and location on the train. 20% stayed on moscow time; 20% jumped four hours to beijing time; 10% (including me) tried to stay at local time; and 50% lived in a timeless state divorced from the rules of modern existence.
sunrise
doesn't it make you smile?
another shot of the train around a curve. you can't have too many of those. love the big red engine!
siberia in summer. the mosquitos were buzzing merrily, but we were going too fast for them to catch us. (evil laugh)
kids on a swing with mysterious dust devil.
they are waving at YOU!
waiting to be hit by a train. oh, no one is allowed to use the bathroom from 10 minutes before a station 'til after we pull out. i should be standing only on oil and dirt. knock wood.
5 liter bottle of beer. i heard there were actually gallon jugs but didn't see one. russians drink beer like americans drink soft drinks. i'm not sure which is worse.
our mean porter, at a stop.
sunset. we had absolutely beautiful sunsets.
that red dot is the moon and the two white dots are headlights. the moon was 1/2 the size of a car and bright red. there were wispy clouds passing over it. absolutely gorgeous. wish i'd had a better camera.
trains around curves. enough said.
Lake Baikal!!!! we're over halfway there!
sunrise over the the pearl of siberia, the world's deepest lake at 1637m. 1/5 of the world's unfrozen fresh water.
now here i would not mind living. in the summer. not in the winter. this lake freezes in the winter, do you know how cold it must be to freeze the world's deepest lake???
back into the real world.
at least it's colorful
the guard tower is a nice touch.
woo hoo! moving out of the taiga and into the rolling grasslands. we must be close to mongolia, right?
still going.
and going.
no sign of the border.
oh, crap. we're stopped. there was a red light on the track. we never found out why the light was on, and we'd passed several other red lights (to my mild concern) so i'm not sure why the train guys were so worried about this one. we stopped for 2 hours.
a herd of goats that seriously started circling the train. scary man-eating goats.
those dots down at the end are the chinese porters squatting and having a smoke while waiting for the light to go green.
the waterpistols came out.
and a little boy was the first to get shot. as in the wild, the old and the young are the easiest prey. :0 for those without a water gun on hand, a liter water bottle with holes poked on the bottom works quite well to shower oneself and/or others.
waiting for the green light.
moving again!!! the red light was still on, by the way.
horsies!!!
steve wearing his thai cocal cola t-shirt.
naushki, the russian side of the border with mongolia.
we were stopped for 3 hours, not bad considering that some people are held up for 11. the family of the little boy who was an early victim of the great water fight, was dragged off the train by the russian army and did not reappear. my roommate, ingrid, was also pulled into the customs building, but turned up again after a half an hour or so. when asked if she was scared, she responded, "scared? psssshhhwaaa." i think it helped that she was off her head drunk at the time.
still at the station.
my paperwork for mongolia. we had one english version of the customs sheet to translate from and 3 mongolian copies. they didn't actually match up, so i probably filled it out incorrectly.
ulan baatar!!!
i am literally in deepest mongolia. hah!
a bit more modern than one would expect.
the mongolian dining car.
gers!!! ger is what mongolians call their yurts.
i like the bright yellow car parked next to the yurt.
herd of cows.
another herd.
i seem to have been a bit obsessed with the herds.
this time, there's a ger, too!
me taking a shower in the tiny, odiferous toilet stall. this involved bottles of water (half tap, half samovar for a nice warm temperature), excellent balance, and a gouch dash of ingenuity. the toilet stalls have drained in the floor. you MUST remember to unscrew the drain plug, or you'll leave soup for your travelling companions.
excellent choice of mongolian foodstuffs. if you like sugar and salt anyway.
zoom in on the front row of snacks second bag from the left. surfing baby buddha!
graffitti is universal. remember pompeii!
mongolian industry.
bactrian camels!!! two humps!
another mongolian station. we're moving into the gobi. there are dust clouds IN the train. everything is covered in it, including my just washed hair.
the gobi through a dirty window. we couldn't open the windows because of the dust.
i don't see any dinosaur bones, but zoom in and make sure.
the mongolian border.
sign in the chinese border station warning of the evils of drug use.
duty free shop at the chinese border. they had yogurt!!! and bananas! heaven. they also had dried sliced kiwi. not something you see every day.
chilling at the border.
breaking out the chinese techno on the ipod.
hello, china!
field of sunflowers.
corn.
hydroelectricity plant.
a quiet mountain town.
the best scenery from the entire trip. maybe it just seems like that since we're only 5 hours from beijing.
i can see why there are so many holy mountains in china. 5 taoist and 4 buddhist.
sanitation not a big concern, yet.
outskirts of beijing!!! still have 45 minutes to go.
the nice porter guy.
mean guy. maybe he's part russian.
