Lee and Clare, The road home

Siberia

11^th October 2003

Since our last contact from Moscow we've spent 82 hours on trains and are now at our 6th and last stop in Russia, in the depths of Siberia. We are in Irkutsk, a town very close to Lake Baikal, the biggest and deepest fresh water lake in the world - it contains nearly one fifth of the world's fresh water. We're off to look at it tomorrow, staying in a log cabin with an open fire. We're going to need one, as it's minus 3 here today!

From Moscow we went 3rd class to Kazan and arrived there early in the morning and bought ourselves a ticket out for that evening on another night trains, so we just had the day there.

There was a bit more trouble than usual getting our onward ticket from Ekaterinburg, but we managed to get it after a couple of tries and a good work out of our rudimentary Russian skills. Our vocabulary consists of "potato", "cold" (we use that one a lot at the moment), "good food", some of the numbers and of course hello, goodbye, thankyou etc)

Thee was one very funny instance (well now, not at the time): When we got on the train from Ekaterinburg we were just getting settled into our compartment, which we share with 2 other people, saying hello to the lady in there when a man came to the door and barked at us in Russian. He wanted Lee to get of his bed. We were very confused as he had a huge Pit Bull with him and we couldn't quite work out what he was going to do with it. Then it suddenly dawned on us that he was going to take it into the compartment with him. We couldn't believe it!! We had these visions of spending 53 hours in a compartment with a stinky dog!! Next thing he lifts up the bed and shoves the dog in a small metal compartment (taking off his muzzle), just big enough for a backpack and propped it open a bit with a book so the dog can breathe. We'd like to have a video of our faces!! Funny how quickly we forgot it was there. We found out that he breeds pit bulls for American pit bull fighting. He even showed us some pictures of dead mutilated dogs. Nice. Luckily we found some nice people in another compartment to talk to and he got off before we went back to the compartment to sleep!

General stuff about our train journeys (like we said we've been on them for over a hundred hours now!) and the weather:

We've become a lot better at sleeping on trains now. The first two night-time legs were pretty arduous, or rather the days after them.

Up till Ekaterinburg the weather here has been really good to us. We don't think saw a cloud the whole time we've been in Russia, with it being about 20-25 degrees every day. This all changed within one train journey though - when we got off the train in Novosibirsk the big sign at the end of the platform showed a temperature of minus 3 and we haven't felt anything over 0 degrees since then. Lee's rabbit hat is finally getting its outing. I have rechristened him Peter (Rabbit) and sing uma uppity (o ma rapati) to him (kiwis should get that one??). On our journey from Novosibirisk we woke up to snow all over everything out of the windows. No more leaves left on the trees and frozen lakes - pretty cool for us to see more than just one season, but we may change our mind once we've been in this cold weather for a few more weeks!

We've been buying food off the platforms we stop at along the way. One night had potatoes and gherkins for dinner yum yum.

Having lots of fun,
Us