Trans Mongolian Railway FAQ

Here's a few questions people have been asking since I got back about planning their own Trans Mongolian/Siberian trip:

Do I need to book a ticket on the Trans Mongolian?
If you're going directly with no hopping off, it's possible to book a ticket all the way from Beijing to Moscow, which will be almost a bum-numbing week of sitting on the train. It's better to hop-off and see things for a couple of days. This may mean that you get stuck in a town a day longer (which happened to us in Datong), but once you're on the Trans Siberian mailine (from Irkutsk to Moscow) trains are fairly regular.

Is a tour the only way to do it?
Booking a tour can be a good way to get it all sorted for you, but it's not necessary. We booked each leg as we went. This meant hopping off the train and buying the next ticket as soon as we got there.
Once you're in Russia, the train runs on Moscow time so you'll need to be careful not to muddle Moscow Time and Local Time. There's a good timetable at the excellent Man from Seat 61.

How did you eat?
Forget the dining car. It's usually expensive and the food is pretty sub-standard. Once you get to Russia there are 20 and 30 minute stops (check the timetable before you hop off if you don't want to be stranded on a platform) which allow you to do some hunter gathering.
Platform stalls and kiosks usually sell noodle cups, beer, water and snacks, but the best ones include roasted chicken, vodka, pre-prepared meals, books, CDs and DVDs. Bigger stops will even have mini-supermarkets.
In China and Mongolia stops are briefer and you should pack a few snacks to tide you over.

What should I pack?
It's going to be cold no matter when you go, but the train itself is super-heated. This means you'll need cold-weather clothes for outdoors (I wore man-tights for the first time in my life, but also gloves and woollen hats) and a lighter set of clothes for the 30 degree temperatures in your carriage. Some Russians got on the train and changed into shorts or tracksuits to feel comfortable for most of the trip.
You'll get bedding in most classes but you may also need a towel and a pocket knife will be handy for making your own meals. We also took water bottles which mean less trips back and forth to the samovar. The phrasebook was invaluable and many of our 'conversations' consisted of pointing at words in the book with chatty Russians and Mongolians.

How did you shower?
The grim answer is that when we were on the train, we didn't. The longest spell we had was 57 hours on the train and that was surprisingly okay (though possibly not for the people who shared the cabin with us). Mostly we used the bathrooms and our travel towels to have what the Germans refer to as a "cat's wash". In the deluxe cabin (in China only) we had a share shower which was serviceable enough.

Where the hell did you go?
China: Beijing to Datong to
Mongolia: Ulaan Bataar to
Russia: Irkutsk to Lake Baikal to Tomsk (via Taiga) to Moscow (via Novosibirsk and Kazan) to St Petersburg to
Finland: Helsinki (with a sidetrip in Espoo)


View Our Trans Mongolian Route in a larger map

But that's not the TRUE Trans Mongolian?
No, the true Trans Mongolian runs as far as Moscow and we went a little further (to Helsinki). The stops in Datong and Tomsk were a little offbeat as well.

What are the bits that can't be missed?
Lake Baikal is great and in the summer it's completley different again. Ulaan Batar is a different world, but getting out into the countryside a little gave us a better insight into the country. Yunguang Caves were spectacular, but might only be for Buddha fans especially as it can mean a longer stop in China. Moscow was great, but lengthening the trip to St Petersburg put the capital in perspective.

Any regrets?
Would have like to have gotten to Yekaterinburg and spent longer in Mongolia, but there's always next time.

Lonely Planet workshop

Melbourne will be inundated with travel writers this week as Lonely Planet HQ hosts its annual author workshop. The company has a unique approach in gathering together authors to outline strategy, provide training and listen to opinions.

While much of the week is top secret, you can get a look inside the building thanks to this short film written by a former student of mine, Paul Callaghan, that was shot on location in the Melbourne office. Ironically it also looks at another sort of conference between a group of hitmen. Let's hope this week's event has a few less violent outbursts.

Espoo Exposé

Another challenge with writing a guidebook is word count. There's an art to narrowing a hotel or restaurant down into two or three sentences, but sometimes you feel like you're not doing a place justice. Just as some ideas are bigger than haiku, some places surprise you and will need more verbage.

And so it was with Espoo - there just weren't enough words. It gets dismissed as a satellite of Helsinki, but officially it's Finland's second-largest city and yet maintains its campus feel and boasts the Nokia headquarters. Perhaps all the telecommunications cash has funded the excellent museums housed in the Weegee Centre. The warehouse-like building is the former printing house of Welin & Göös (hence WG and WeeGee) has enough room to host the Espoo Museum of Modern Art, which is better known as EMMA. The industrial-sized space can hold a big exhibition such as the huge paintings of Enzo Cucchi's current exhibition that toys with ideas of scale with tiny images lurking in his large canvases.

Regardless of the featured exhibitions, WeeGee has another good reason to make the half hour ride from Kamppi (the 110 and 106 buses do the trip regularly). Helinä Rautavaara was an intrepid Finn who explored the world as an anthropologist and playgirl. When she died in 1998 she left a large collection of African, Indian and South American artefcats that the city turned into personal museum.

Among her various ethnographic exhibits there's a lot of photographs and footage of a superbly coiffed Finnish woman dancing with tribal leaders and generally schmoozing her way around the world. It's proved to be something of a local controversy with local school children banned from visiting the museum in 2007 because of the ritual objects on display. Controversy aside, Helinä certainly seems to have led an exciting life and, as one of the early European proponents of reggae, was the only Finn present at Bob Marley's funeral. She was a character who was too big even for Finland's second largest town.

Helsinki Redux

There used to be a disclaimer in the front of Lonely Planet books that read:

Things change - prices go up, schedules change, good places go bad and bad places go bankrupt - nothing stays the same.

On returning to Helsinki after researching the guidebook just six months earlier, I could see just how true that was. Things move pretty fast in the Finnish capital and there were closings and places that had fallen off in quality. It's maddening to see all your work change and imagine all those readers letters that will come pouring in telling you how wrong you got it.

But new places have opened. Of course, they also drove me equally insane on one level, but also made me feel like people would be able to discover new things of their own in the city, rather than slavishly following the guidebook.

The first new discovery was Salakauppa (secret shop) just near the post office and Kiasma. It's a tiny little shop that appeared in the summer of 2008 in a nook that had previously been a coffee kiosk. It stocks Finnish designed products of a slightly kooky bent like the winter essential beard-warmer or the little red riding hood-and-bag. Another shop that I would have loved to include was Seccoshop, which specialises in recycled designs like the ironic CD rack made from vinyl records or suprisingly fetching earrings made from mobile phone keys.

And these are just two of the more quirkier places that have popped up since research. And all this change hopefully means there's always a job for pavement-slogging hackpackers to find out what's new.

Second City St Petersburg

Whether it’s Chicago to New York, or Melboune to Sydney, I’m a big fan of second cities. Being runner up means they try harder. And so it is with St Petersburg, the metropolis that’s arm wrestled Moscow for capital status throughout history but was largely shrugged off by the Soviets who liked their capital buried in the middle of the USSR.

Part of the problem might have been an identity crisis. St Petersburg has been called Petrograd and Leningrad, but is known as Piter to its friends. I first came here in the mid 1990s when the country was just working out what the new perestroika (restructuring) would mean. Today on the mainstreet it seems to mean SUVs replacing trams and plenty of sushi. The only thing I remember being able to order from the menus was bifstihk (beef steak) and mashed potatoes.

One of my favorite statues on Nevsky Prospekt are the four horses that rear up at Anichkov Bridge. If you look closely the sculptor, Peter Klodt von Urgensburg, has put in a joke about Napoleon who was defeated during the 19th century Patriotic War. It may not be polite and it takes me a while but I’m inspecting the undercarriage of horses for a while before I spot it: one horse’s genitals resembles the French Emperor – they must have thought he was a bit of a tool.

The real artistic reason for visiting St Petersburg is the Hermitage or Winter Palace. The smaller building was built by the Russian monarch Catherine the Great who wanted a little ‘hermitage’ to get away from her court and enjoy her art collection. This collection has become one of the world’s best. Many art historians reckon the collection swelled in the final days of WWII when the Russians swiped art treasures back from the Nazis.

Whatever the reason, no-one has enough time in the Hermitage. There’s a dizzying array of art here. Without planning a route we see works by Da Vinci, Van Gough and Gauguin. This sweep of European art makes St Petersburg the first city of culture. Then there’s the over-the-top palace itself that boasts chandeliers the size of small cars and a glittering peacock clock that sounds the hour by flashing its feathers. And before we know it our time is up and we’re hurrying for the Finland Station to get the train to Helsinki.

Cracking the Kremlin

At the heart of Moscow – geographically, politically and culturally – lies the Kremlin. If you lived through the Cold War or even just seen early Bond films, even a mention of the Soviet-era landmark suggests KGB plots and political intrigue. In fact many Russian cities have a kremlin, a fortress that has survived since the Middle Ages. Moscow’s has become The Kremlin only because it was the place that Ivan the Terrible ruled from and created his nation.

Getting inside the Kremlin no longer requires a grappling hook and infra-red sights. The greatest obstacle is the tedium of lines – lines for a ticket, lines for the cloak room and finally the line to get in. But once you’re inside there’s a treasure chest of gold domes and buildings to explore. The world’s largest bell is cracked and broken in the grounds here. There’s a massive cannon built too large to actually fire shot – a curious metaphor for Cold War posturing. The tallest building here is the Ivan the Great Belltower - visible from outside the Kremlin's walls but now dwarfed by skyscrapers. The Kremlin was once spacious enough to bring a small city within its walls during an attack, but modern sprawling Moscow is too big for this medieval courtyard.

Red Squares

It would have been easy to bookend the trip by visiting the two embalmed leaders, Mao and Lenin, at either end. But we’re not that keen on either leader and preserving someone after their dead is just plain creepy. So we resolve to skip that part of the itinerary and make for St Basil’s – the grand church that is synonymous with Moscow and indeed Russia.

Also known less catchily as Pokrovsky Cathedral, the church was built to celebrate Ivan the Terrible’s victory over the Tartars in the 16th century. As we approach there’s a small parade of old people marching under the hammer and sickle flag singing Soviet songs. There are placards of Lenin held up and some good-natured shouting so it’s hard to work out: are they calling for a return to Soviet rule or are they just nostalgic?

Out the front of the State History Museum, the reminiscing is even cheesier. Lenin, Stalin and Brezhnev impersonators work the area, allowing tourists to snap them waving the Russian flag or downing a Pepsi for a couple of hundred roubles. Old Joe seems far too jolly and Vladimir Ilyich has let himself go with a bit of a paunch.

Red Square is no less impressive for all its surrounds. St Basil’s seems unreal and the Kremlin walls could still be a fortress. There’s a lot of posing in front of Lenin’s tomb but the embalmed version seems less creepy after the impersonators.

Sleeping for Gold

When we get to Moscow, we’re a bit dazed after almost three days on the train. Getting a hotel seems complicated – the first place we had a reservation at has never received anything about us and prices seem to have tripled. We go for the backup reservation – Hotel Izmaylovo.

It’s not every night that you can lay your head where Olympic champions once dossed down, but this massive hotel is a former Olympic village. With more than 8000 rooms across four different buildings, it remains one of Europe’s largest hotels despite being built way back in 1979. It’s so large that we’re not sure which of the massive four buildings to head for. Are we in Delta or Vega?

We opt for Delta, partly because these are the easiest characters to work out in Cyrillic. Behind the check-in desk they’ve never heard of our reservation either. It must be a Russian hospitality custom. They talk us through the rooms and we ask what the difference is between standard and business.
“Better furniture,” the check-in girl deadpans like we’ve asked the stupidest question she’s ever heard.

The hotel itself is across the road from Izmaylovo Market, a sprawling spot tacked up with fiberglass onion domes. We think we’ll spend an hour there and end up spending half a day with its mix of souvenirs, pirate DVDs, clothes and very familiar looking handbags.

Farewelling Siberia

From Tomsk it’s an bum-numbing 50 plus hours to Moscow. It’s difficult to work out exactly how long this trip will take us because the train runs on Moscow time and Tomsk is a couple of hours ahead. As we travel along we go through three timezones.

We’re prepared though with plenty of supplies for in-carriage picnics. The dining car sounds like a good idea for a change of scenery but on the first night of the trip we get stung for over a thousand roubles including separate extra charges for tomato and cucumber slices. So we opt for self-catering mostly.

It’s really easy to hop out at stations and do some hunter-gathering. There are stalls, carts and hawkers selling beer, roast chicken and even pre-cooked meals at a cart optimistically labelling itself pectopah (restaurant). There’s plenty of time as stops last up to 30 minutes – even longer if the provodnitsa (carriage attendant) has to finish their cigarette.

The provodnitsa can make or break your trip. Mostly they’re overblown characters with garish make-up and white-blonde hair from a bottle. On this leg we thought we struck it lucky with a sweet woman who even smiles when we get on. We wonder if she’s really Russian. When we go for hot water from the coal-fired samovar, she asks if we would like noodles or biscuits. Then halfway through the first evening she transforms into Mr Hyde – an ogrish guy who grunts when we ask a question, sighs if we ask to lock our cabin and thinks we’ve deliberately not learnt to speak Russian just to bug him. We’re just getting used to his grouchiness and expecting nothing when he’s replaced in the morning with Miss Hyde. We try to organise our questions for when Miss Hyde will be there. She mimics a kangaroo to show she’s understood our where we’re from.

Milestones flash past as the train gathers speed. Just after Krasnoyarsk, we pass a white obelisk half buried in snow that marks the halfway point of the Trans-Siberian from Vladivostok. While we’re sleeping we pass through Tyumen, the official start of Siberia. And just after Yekaterinburg, while we’re busy making lunch, another obelisk marks the border between Europe and Asia.

Tomsk is not just a womble

To get to Tomsk we have to make a connection that means 6 hours in the middle of the night in Taiga, an unimpressive industrial town. After some phrasebook fumbling and dodging a couple of Russians passed out from the national drink, we find the resting rooms. Above the station they’re like a mini-hotel where it’s possible to crash for a couple of hours if you don’t mind the whistles and toots of trains coming and going. Many of the trains out of here are bearing minerals and logs from Siberia and if you can’t sleep it’s easy to count trains. We’re out in about five minutes.

The matron of the resting rooms wakes us an hour before our train is due to depart. We’re in the notorious platskart, an open sleeper that has bunks crammed into every possible space – up to three lining each wall. There’s always someone walking by and security is nonexistent. It’s a short hop of a couple of hours so we grab a couple more hours sleep and keep our bags close by. Temperature-wise it’s actually more pleasant than the banya (Russian sauna) heat of our kupeyny (compartment class) of the earlier ride, making it easier to sleep. The thermometer in the kupeyny was over thirty degrees which made an odd disconnection from snowy Siberia sliding past outside.

Just off the Tran-Siberian line proper, we arrive in Tomsk, a buzzing university town known for its wooden houses. Today they range from almost derelict to magnificently restored to slanting into derelict. We walk down ulitsa Krasnoarmeyskaya to admire the elaborately carved Peacock House, with doilies of lattice and slender woodwork birds crowning the building.

By contrast there’s the ugliness of former KKVD buildings that’s variously known as the Oppression Museum or Memorial. The NKVD were the forerunners for/of the KGB and were responsible for some of the most horrific acts of Stalin’s purges. There’s no English explanations at the museum, but you can easily work out the stories of priests, poets and intellectuals who were imprisoned and interrogated here.

Elsewhere in the town there’s Christianity, but not as we know it. At Kazansky Church there’s/are icons and bearded priests reminiscent of Greek Orthodox, because this is the faith that was linked to the Constantine Empire which split from European Christianity during the dark ages. The most obvious difference is the Eastern cross, that includes another cross bar at the base where Jesus’ feet would have rested.

Our final chore in Tomsk is to get out visas registered. This should be a simple process where your paperwork is stamped to stay that you have arrived in the country, but our hotel takes almost 12 hours. It’s boring but important stuff because in Moscow police reportedly work the train stations to fine passengers as they hop off trains. The visa is returned just as we head to bed in marvel of Russian service. On the trains we’d already seen that our food would cool while a waiter finished a chapter of their Mills & Boon novel. In Russia the customer isn’t always right, they’re just always an irritation for staff.

Mushing to Moscow

Irkutsk is the jumping off point for Lake Baikal, the world’s deepest and weirdest lake. Water gushed into the space between two tectonic plates and created a huge crescent-shaped water that runs over 600km. It’s apparently more than a fifth of the world’s fresh unfrozen water. The tectonic plates are slowing moving away from each other and may one day split so that this could be the world’s fifth sea. Isolated within these depths is a unique ecosystem that serves as a sanctuary for freshwater seals, the nerpa, and the omul fish.

You get omul thrust at you as you get off the train at Slyuyanka, but the nerpa are hiding out under the ice. The frozen water lives up to its Pearl of Siberia nickname. As we walk along the lakefront there’s a curl of ice jutting out where the ice has shifted. Because spring sun is coming in you can hear the ice tingling and cracking around the curl. It’s still possible to walk out on the ice though as it’s more than a metre deep. Locals drive their cars out there and there’s regular traffic of hovercrafts and skidoos. Guidebooks are snooty about locals getting holiday snaps in front of the curious ice formations so we ‘fight the cold with cold’ by eating ice cream and posing for even cornier shots.

We shy away from the lake to find some old-school dog sledding. Our trainer Alexander introduces us to each of the dogs – Winston (named not for Churchill but for a favourite cigarette brand) is the leader, Mishka is a blue-eyed girl and then there’s a white dog that Alexander explains is a “crazy dog we usually don’t take him out with the others. He is trouble.”

Bundled up in a neck to toe camouflage ski suit, I hop into the sled. It’s a slower pull than I thought, but still whistles through the snowy birch forest at speed. The snows are melting so the trails are getting muddy and Alexander yells the dogs on. The crazy dog does a good job of crapping as he runs, his legs scattering around the faeces as he scrambles on. Alexander cuts across some little peaks and the sled does short jarring jumps. We swap drivers and the dogs wolf down snow to cool off. On the way back I take Alexander over a couple of jumps and he laughs “Okay, okay” as we slide back home.

Over a post-mushing cup of tea, we look at other dog sports like Canine-cross that harnesses a human behind a fleet-footed pup in an example of dog walking that won’t make your osteopath very happy. There’s also the story of Nicholas Vanier, a modern day adventurer who took a team of dogs from Baikal all the way to Moscow and almost froze to death several times in Siberia. We prefer the train.

Among the Smugglers

When we board at UB, a Mongolian man strikes up a conversation with me. He quickly establishes himself as the Mayor of the carriage – chatting to the Buryat girl who shares our carriage and trading jokes with conductors. His knowledge of a couple of languages puts him at the centre of most conversations.

Do you know Forex?” he asks me and I mumble something about foreign exchange. He brightens and bombards me with questions that would make an actuary queasy. No, I don’t know how to explain hedge funds. Yes, Barack Obama does seem to be spending a lot of money at the moment. No, I don’t know about the prophecies of Nostradamus and how they’ll affect the markets.

Soon several ladies start wandering the carriage with huge bundles of jeans, t-shirts and handbags. At first I think they’re just selling them and a few pairs are exchanged for money, so a simple ‘nyet’ seems to suffice. But one of the conductors comes to plead their case – would I do them a favour of carrying two blankets across the border for them? I’m being dragged into a notorious blanket smuggling ring.

The Mayor is in the same bind: “I already have ten pairs of pants and six of these… what do you say for a lady’s carrying?”

“Handbag?” I offer.

“Yes, they buy them cheap and take them across to Russia but customs says they can only carry so many. So we share and say they are a gift.”

According to the Mayor, Mongolia responded quickly to Russia’s Glastnost with traders bringing in cheap designer jeans before the Berlin Wall was wobbly. Many young Mongolians made fast cash so a generation of traders appeared, who continue even after Russia has discovered softer borders and other cheap markets. They’re following the route of the Russian tea caravan that linked Europe with India and China. The route became less popular when shipping routes became quicker than overland routes. Watching the small squabbles over handbags it feels like the end of the smuggling era.

At Darkhan even more small-time crooks push onto the train. At the platform we poke out our

 tongues at a little boy who returns a flash of tongue like a timid lizard. We start a healthy trade in tongue poking.

The new smugglers have to work fast with the border at the next stop so they shark the corridor, their eyes darting around each compartment for any empty space. Their eyes plead. Don’t we have room? Couldn’t we just take a few pieces? We nod sadly. We are from the land of Schapelle Corby and know not to carry anyone’s boogie board.

The border crossing is arduous with lots of poking through cabins from both Mongolian and then Russian border guards – the Russian bashes the walls for hollow compartments and jumps up like Action Man to inspect the luggage. A twenty-year-old Mongolian makes a show of looking sternly at our passports before whisking them away for eventual stamping. The whole border crossing takes five hours.

We settle in to sleep. It doesn’t last. The train stops just after the border and there’s a mix of noises – a thumping against the floor and something like the excited opening of a thousand crisp packets interrupting the opening scenes of a movie. I step out blinking into the corridor and the smuggling has become a military operation. The corridor is lined with bodies and bags – one unwrapping and stowing the other. I’m pushed out of the way. The Mayor takes me into his compartment.

“Sit down,” he says somewhere between advice and an order.

There’s a renewed bustling, new smugglers have boarded the train with new goods. The Mayor has several salami hanging from his curtain rod and the luggage compartment is solid with T-shirts.

“They pay to stop after the border,” he explains. “They bring more goods up in cars over the border and then take them to Moscow, selling at the stations. Or they give them to friends whoplace orders and bring them in.”

“But salami?”

“Yes, meat is very cheap in Mongolia. Not so cheap in Russia. They smuggle many things. Probably not drugs, but many things.”

Several of the people walking the corridor have lists and are checking them. They are calculating where each item is for quick swaps at stations. In the face of this organised crime, the Mayor is cowed and quiet.

“Please, drink a beer,” he offers me in a way that says it’s best if I stay here while the operation continues.

It must be 4am by the time they finish and the train lurches on. Even then there a few knocks at the door and requests to carry blankets. I sleep fitfully having been tangled in this elicit blanket, salami and jeans trade.

When we pull in at Slyudyanka the smugglers begin their furious work. They hop out onto the Russian platform and begin haggling and hustling. You can barely get to the doors for the trading. Some platform Russians are doing old fashioned barter. And what do they have to offer? A local smoked fish, omul, in plastic bags and swapped for pair of jeans. It’s the modern version of the tea caravan and our first glimpse of Russia.