The Trans-Sibirski Expressway

Well, I'm writing to you now after spending nearly five days on a train that took our gang from Moscow to Irkutsk, covering a distance larger than something really, really large and taking us way out into the Russin wild, where snow-covered lakes of ice and incredible clear blue skies battle for the heavyweight title of 'The Most Beautiful Thing I've Ever Seen'. We're in one of the most amazing places in the world, and if predictions ring true it's only going to get more beautiful tomorrow when we visit Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world, but for now that's inconsequential. We've spent five days on a train, and I've got stories to tell..

The first person we met on the train was the Portly Porter. She was a larger-than-life kind of woman with a cheery, can-do attitude, the red-tinted hair that's so popular all across Russia, and a smile for everyone any time of the night or day. She'd opened the door to our cabin on the first evening and exclaimed, "Mama-mia, Santa Lucia!" at the sight of these four young men she saw before her*.

* And who could blame her? I'm not going to lie to you here, we're handsome fellas who strike a beautiful picture**.

** When I said I wasn't going to lie to you, I lied. This woman must have been off her meds or something.

Regardless..

We'd all been really looking forward to the journey, and everyone was in high spirits from the first second. We were in a 4-bunk cabin which we had all to ourselves, although that didn't stop the adventures from coming our way. We met a whole band of crazy characters on that train, and none more delightful than 'Snorlax'.

Snorlax was an interesting creature. We first discovered him on the first night of the journey. We'd got on board at around midnight, and after meeting the Portly Porter we were all looking forward to getting our sleepy-time on. We bedded down, but quickly realised that the walls to the cabins were paper-thin. The Pristine Marmott had beaten me in a coin-toss to get first choice of the beds, but his choice turned out to be his downfall as the guy sleeping on the other side of his party-wall was none other than Snorlax, a monumental Russian man with a seedy mustache, a reeking odour and a total inability to maintain nasal silence as he slept. All night long the noises drifted through into our cabin, huge waves of sonic dysfunction that sounded inexplicably like a pig being slaughtered. To put it shortly, the guy had a problem. He snored louder and better than anyone I've ever encountered, and he showed no signs of stopping.

The next day, we had a running joke at his expense, with The Marmott delighting in replicating his noise pollution, doing an uncanny impression of the guy that had us all in hysterics. That is, until we heard a fierce knock-knocking at our door. The Hugless Stone slid it open with all the caution of a fox, and when we saw none other than Mr. Snorlax standing strong and powerful looking over us, a raging fury in his eyes and a quiet humming in his nose as he breathed deeply in and out, you could almost hear the spaghetti western music start to play. We were engaged in a battle of looks with the guy, a Mexican stand-off of epic proportions. At long last, when it seemed the silence could go unbroken no longer, the great man spoke. Slowly, and with a side-to-side rocking motion that suggested he might have been drinking continuously for a great many years, he asked us, "Vodka?"

And there it was. The tension was broken. That old Russian favourite had done it again, and pretty soon he had invited us back to his cabin where the promise of vodka was made good, and where he repeatedly fell asleep with his arm draped around The Disgusting Hippo.

He woke us up bright and early the next morning in an equally unexpected manner. He had brought us a traditional Russian breakfast of bread, cheese and boiled eggs. He spotted our vodka, and although it was only 10AM, the drinking started up again nonetheless. Despite him speaking only Russian, our conversations were riveting. He was a war veteran, travelling home from Moscow to see his family. We played cards with him, and he warned us never to gamble with gypsies. As if that wasn't weird enough, he then proceeded to show us some naked pictures of his wife, her rolls of flab eerily mirroring the rolling of my eyes with each progressing photograph.

AWKARD!

The next time we saw him was in the restaurant cart a few hours later. He was with his friend and cabin-mate, a man who wore drab shorts and sandals with socks, and had referred to himself the previous evening only as 'The Professor'. They both looked and smelt like thet had been drinking continuously since that morning, and it was an image they cultivated with skill and precision as the day wore on: at around 3PM, when Snorlax stumbled into me as he came out of the toilet, reeking of liquor and dribbling like no man I'd ever seen before; at around 7PM, when he stumbled into our cabin without saying a word, sat down next to The Marmott, draped his arm around him, spotted an untouched bottle of vodka on our table, grabbed it and lurched out; and the next morning, when he bid us farewell as we neared his stop, waving his hand to reveal sweat-patches the size of a small African nation and a beer-stained vest that would have never made it past the Chemical Weapons inspectors you find at most Trans-Atlantic airports.

He was Snorlax, and we'll remember him fondly. Especially fondly given the other characters we met aboard the train..

The next new acquaintance of note was a man we'll call Nationalist Joe. He was without a doubt the most disgusting, horrible, pathetic excuse for a human being I've ever met. He was openly and proudly racist, a terrifying misogynist, violently homophobic, brutally quick to turn against you and overall just not the kind of person I'd personally choose to keep alive on this earth if such powers and decisions were placed in my hands.

We'd first encountered him on the penultimate night on the train. The Hugless Stone had been running a mission to the restaurant cart to pick up some supplies for our gang, when he'd been stopped in one of the smoking areas between carriages. These areas aren't properly sealed from the outside so even though they're technically covered by a roof and walls, they're packed full of snow that's blown in and are always freezing cold, as you might expect really given that the temperature outside the train can often be a good dozen degrees below zero at any time of the day or night. Anyway, I don't know if it was the packet of dried noodles The Stone was carrying in his left hand or the MASSIVE BOTTLE OF VODKA HE'D JUST BOUGHT that he had in his right hand but either way, something caught Nationalist Joe's eye as The Stone tried to speed through the bitterly cold smoking areas past him.

The next thing we knew, The Stone was back in our cabin filling us in on his encounter with this guy, and telling us that we had ten minutes before we were supposed to meet him in his cabin for some drinking and all the relevant extras that such activities entail. Well, I was knackered and duly excused myself from the celebrations, but the other three fellas went along and two hours later they returned brimming with tales and soundbites from this despicable excuse for a human being.

I was smug and very pleased with my decision not to have gone along with the other guys to meet NJ, but that auro of happiness would be short-lived. The next night, our final night aboard the train, we were preparing to get to bed early in preparation for the 3AM wake-up we had coming up the next morning when we arrived. The Marmott was making moves to start re-packing his bag, and I was getting deep into my latest reading material, "State of Denial" by Bob Woodward, when there was a knock at the door.

Standing there, in a pose eerily similar to that which Snorlax had adopted upon his entrance into our lives, was a new face we hadn't seen before. He introduced himself and quickly accepted an unspoken and unissued invitation for him to sit down in our cabin. I'll spare you excessive hyperbole and unchecked volumes of description of the guy***

*** Regular readers might wish I spared you such luxuries more often, but hey -- this is my blog, I can wax lyrical about anyone and everyone as much as I choose to, so there.

but anyway, you should get a pretty good idea of him if I tell you that we quickly took to referring to him as Mr. Boring. Seriously, this guy was B-O-R-I-N-G. He and Snorlax would have no doubt made a great team -- this guy was so soporific he would have sent our snoring friend way deep into cloud-cookoo land. We did our very best to make conversation with this boring guy, but everything we tried went no-where. He was a 26-year old business man travelling to Irkustk for business. He had studied business at university in Moscow and his hobbies included business and price-comparisons. He wanted to know what cars we each drove, and how much we'd paid for them. He wanted to know how much the tortilla chips I was eating had cost me, and how much our train tickets had been. He then delighted in writing out charts and tables for us comparing the Russian and British prices for good, and then further comparing Moscow prices with those of a smaller Russian city. Did I mention he was boring?

We were desperately trying to get rid of him, making subtle hints about how late it was getting and how much packing we had to do, but given that he spoke not a word of English nor German, we were having a tough time. Then, just when I thought all hope was lost that we'd ever get him out of there, we heard another knock at the door. 'The Portly Porter!', I thought to myself, 'Maybe she's here to clean the room! That'll get him out of here..'

But we weren't so lucky. We opened the door, to reveal standing before us none other than Nationalist Joe from the night previous. "You.. drink.. now?" he asked us, in his best English. "Not tonight, we have early morning tomorrow..", The Marmott replied. This seemed to have been clear enough, as he turned and stumbled off without another word, leaving us alone with Mr. Boring, once again.

However, this too was not to last forever, as mere minutes later there was another knock at the door. We slid it open, to reveal none other than National Joe, now armed with a dozen chilled beers for us all to crack into. "You.. drink.. now!", he told us. Perhaps somewhat fearing for our lives, we did as he said.

Now, apart from the Breakfast Vodka that Snorlax had forced upon us earlier on in the journey, I'd been tee-total since that fateful night back in St. Petersberg when The Disgusting Hippo went missing. This had been a point of contension within our gang, as The Marmott and The Stone resented the fact that I'd been staying sober, especially since I've never been the biggest drinker to begin with. So I think they might have been smirking a little to see me left with no choice but to join in on the alcoholic festivities with our Nationalist friend, and forced to join in I most certainly was. When we finished our first round, the guy made as if he was going to the toilet, but came back sharpish armed with another armful of beers for us all, which he dumped on the table unceremoniously before announcing that the next two rounds were on us, and after that he'd buy some more. So, the drinking continued, and I finally became truly acquainted with the hollow shell of a man that my travel-mates had grown so fond of the previous evening..

He was a big fan of his generalisations, old Nationalist Joe. He sure loved his stereotypes and was stuck-fast in his opinions of particular races. He had been in the army, and told us that his one greatest regret in life was not having been able to kill a German, after what they'd done to his Mother Russia in the two world wars. He hated Estonians and Lithuanians with a passion, and was intent on his belief in national pride and patriotism. "You.. love English..", he told us, "..and I.. love Russia peoples". "And nobody loves the Jews?", I probed him, prompting him to smile with glee and shake my hand vigorously. "I am a man..", he said, "and if I see any man need helping.. I help. But Jew? He does not help any man.. he love only Jew.." He made a gruesome sneer, and mimed taking a knife to a Jewish throat. We all sat there, dumbfounded, as he smiled contently to himself. I couldn't help but wonder what his reaction would be were we to have told him that I'm Jewish, The Pristine Marmott is German and The Hugless Stone is half-Lithuanian, but wisely, I kept my mouth shut.

After an excrutiating four hours of more of the same, I finally convinced him that we needed to go to sleep. It seemed to have been relatively quick and painless, until it came time to shake his hand to bid him farewell. He was drunk, and seemed to feel it was an appropriate time to tell us what he really thought of us. "You.. are not my friend...", he said to The Marmott, pointing his finger agressively in his face. Over the evening, as we'd grown more and more tired of his company, we'd taken to exploiting his limited English skills by talking about him amongst ourselves using deliberately long words and fast speech to make sure he couldn't understand, and none of us had had more fun doing so than The Marmott. Now, I don't know if he'd been playing along with us and understood more than we'd imagined, or if he'd just sensed the tone of the room might be a general amusement at his expense, but either way he'd cottoned on to the fact that not all was quite right, and for a good few moments it looked like he might make good on his life-long desire to kill a German.

That tension diffused, he then moved on to The Disgusting Hippo, who he was convinced hadn't bought him any beers. "You.. owe.. me.. money..", he told him again and again, until he grew frustrated with The Hippo's steadfastly-maintained look of ignorance and dropped the issue.

Then he turned to me. I'd watched the goodbye's unfold thus far with an unsettling feeling of seeing where this was going, and really hoped it wouldn't get ugly. "You..", he said to me, wagging that same finger inapporpriately close to my face as I tried desperately to read him, to see where this was going. "You.. you are my friend. You are OK."

Sweet Jesus, halleluliah!

So, it was all okay in the end, and we can look back on the whole night with a fond nostalgia already. No-one's quite sure at what point Mr. Boring had left our little gathering, but we can only assume it was in an appropriately boring way. Perhaps most intruiging, we discovered later that he'd left us his business card and circled his telephone number in thick black ink. Presumably he'd been sufficiently stimulated by our conversations that evening and understandably wanted more in the future, although we were left wondering about the logistics of a telephone relationship given that neither party spoke the other's respective language.

The train journey was certainly educational about language across the world and how it works and why. At one point on that first evening, The Marmott had told us that he thought the Portly Porter seemed nice, having just been joking around with her. "I started wiping my boots on the step as I came into the train from having a smoke, and she laughed and told me not to worry about it and to come on in all wet and dirty", he told us. "How the hell do you know she said that?", asked The Hippo. "You don't speak Russian". "Well, I might not understand the actual words, but you can still talk to people if you want to..", The Marmott protested. And we certainly found that to be the case as we met the various different characters you've now heard so much about.

And on the second day, we were in the restaurant cart having a bite to eat when I noticed a movie playing on the TV at the end of the room. It starred rapper-turned-actor Ice Cube and was dubbed into Russian, but even though we couldn't understand a word, we followed the movie flawlessly and frankly, I was thoroughly entertained. The end credits revealed it to have been none other than "xXx2: State of the Union", the kind of movie I'd have previously pre-judged as irredeemable rubbish without a second thought, but which turned out to have been some good, no-brainer fun. I certainly plan to pick up the DVD some day and I learned a lesson I've been learning more and more in recent months, and on that's been reinforced a lot having met other travellers on this trip: people love to be pretentious, to talk about high-art or pretend to be gripped by 'worthy' books than I'm sure are entirely boring. Sometimes it's fun to watch a stupid action movie or read a stupid book. If I'm entertained or kept interested, I'm happy, and to hell with anyone who wants to pretend to be someone they're not, just to look intelligent.

There, rant over. I've got to stop writing now because my stomach's telling me it's long past time for eating, but join me next time to hear about just how great Lake Baikal turns out to be, and see what happens when we hit our first big milestone: one month on the road!