Who are you calling a snob?

Four nights is a long time to be stuck on one train, especially when you come from a country that thinks that London to Edinburgh in 8 hours is a long ride. It also doesn’t help that by the time we get to Irkutsk, we’ll be five hours ahead of where we set off from. Not having a map that shows most of the stations that you stop at along the way just adds another measure of weirdness.

Like anything, there are good and bad points. Smiley Chef Lady, as we’ve come to call her, made it obvious that our assumption that Russians rarely smile was wrong. The Provodnitsa (carriage attendant) also had a shot at proving us wrong, but her seeming insistence to stick to the other stereotypes of her job (drag queen haircut, built like an ox) don’t exactly make it easy for her to manage a smile with any real sincerity.

The beds are… comfortably functional, you might say. They’re quite narrow, but comfortable enough when you’re lieing down. Sitting on them, however, quickly gets uncomfortable as the padding is quite thin, and the train bounces you around like a rubber ball on some parts of the track. The bedding is nice and clean, though, with two sheets, a blanket, a towel, a tea-towel for some reason, and a couple of big pillows.

The cabin is quite small, and thankfully we weren’t in second class where we’d be sharing it with two other people. Fitting two beds into a small room takes up most of the space. Fitting four beds in must be very tight. We’ll find out when we get the train from Irkutsk to Ulaanbataar, luckily only for one night..

The restaurant car is quite pleasant. It’s the one place on the train where you can have a cigarette in the warmth; on the rest of the train you need to get to the end of the carriage by the door to the next coach, where there’s no heating. It’s snowing outside, which makes the temperature even less welcoming. The fact that you can smoke in the restaurant car means that you tend to end up with people sitting in there all day having a chat and a few beers. And a few more. And more still. By the evening, you walk into a carriage that has several very drunk Russians in it, who either glare at you or, worse still, try to have a conversation without the benefit of a mutual language.

The food is also surprisingly good, though the fried chicken had enough garlic in it that it’ll be repeating on me for another week, and the soup was a bit of a lucky dip what with having at least two types of meat, some peppers, olives and even a slice of lemon. It was all served by a man who seemed to know four words of English: soup, beef, chicken and fish. He was assisted by Smiley Chef Lady in the kitchen, and a woman who had a good shout at the other occupants of the carriage when they seemed to be trying to be too friendly with us. Alcohol obviously lends you courage; I wouldn’t have wanted to piss her off, but the lads didn’t back down as quickly as I’d have expected.

I’ll not mention the toilet facilities too much, other than to say that they started smelling bad after the first day, and they flush straight onto the tracks. Pity the railworkers in this country. As if the snow and ice wasn’t bad enough.

The scenery has been much the same since we left Warsaw. Maybe it’s the time of the year, but we haven’t seen sunlight in over a week. Foggy mornings, grey skies, forests and industrial monstrosities do not a pleasant landscape make. Though in the last day or so it’s started snowing, which at least looks a bit nicer. I realise that you’re not going to get the best buildings next to the railway line, but some of the factories that have been thrown up along the route are just concrete monsters with no effort made at hiding or camouflaging them. Most of them seem to be derelict, too.

All in all, I’m glad I’ve done it, though I wouldn’t rush to do it again.