by Jonathan Hayes; Corvallis, OR
My wife, Susan, had signed up for a month-long German-language immersion course in Kassel, Germany, so I decided to join her after the course was over. Instead of flying directly to Germany, however, I planned to fly to Vladivostok, on the Pacific coast of Russia, and catch a train from there.
I’m 69, physically fit and in fine health. Six months of tutoring in Russian gave me what proved to be an adequate (though very far from fluent) command of the language.
MIR Corporation (Seattle, WA; 800/424-7289) made the travel arrangements for me and assisted me in getting a Russian visa. Train tickets from Vladivostok to Berlin; hotels (with breakfast) in Listvyanka (near Lake Baikal) and Moscow; transfers in Vladivostok and Irkutsk, and guides in Lake Baikal and Moscow cost $10,649, not including international airfare.
Olga Hayes (no relation) at MIR did marvelous work in crafting my travel desires into an itinerary and was a font of helpful suggestions. If you plan to go anywhere in MIR’s territory, you would be very well advised to use their services.
Getting there
I am a Rick Steves “carry-on only” convert, and traveling with just a carry-on worked perfectly fine for three weeks in Russia and another week in Germany.
Even if you go on a fully escorted tour to Russia, you should learn the Cyrillic alphabet before you go. It will add immensely to your trip. Since a lot of words have come into Russian from English and French, you might be pleasantly surprised at how much you can understand.
It was 27 travel hours from the time I got on the airplane in Portland, Oregon, on July 4, 2011, until Korean Air delivered me to Vladivostok, where Yuliana from MIR was waiting for me. Fortunately, I had arranged to be picked up at the airport, as it’s located several miles north of town and the highway was being totally rebuilt. Vladivostok will host a major regional Asian conference in September 2012, so the whole place was getting a face-lift.
Russia is still a cash society. I had been advised to take new 100-dollar bills and had no problem exchanging them. I spent $1,200 in the three weeks, mostly on food and sundries.
I already had an unlocked GSM phone with all four frequency bands, so all I needed was a Russian SIM card. Since my visa hadn’t yet been registered (a holdover from Soviet times is that if you are in a place for more than three business days, you have to have your visa registered), I could only get a restricted SIM card, good only for calls to Germany. It was canceled the day I was scheduled to leave Russia.
Hitting the rails
Yuliana began with a thorough tour of Vladivostok. The weather was beautiful, and there was far more to see than there was time for.
Our last stop before heading to the train station was the supermarket to buy food for the train trip. While there is a restaurant car on the train, their selections are limited and overpriced. I bought bread, cheese, dried sausage, fruits, boxed fruit juices and bottled water (about 1½ liters per person per day is the minimum) for a little over $10.
On the train, there were two attendants (provodnitsas) per car. It was their job to keep the car clean, keep the samovar full and, generally, mother-hen the car.
The train left right on time. Russian trains are very precise; a large part of the railroad personnel’s evaluations depend on their on-time record.
Russian trains are numbered and very few are named. The regularly scheduled Vladivostok-to-Moscow train is the No. 1 Rossiya.
In first class, there are two people to a compartment, while the same size compartment in second class holds four people.
It was 9,288 kilometers and seven time zones from Vladivostok to Moscow and another 1,828 kilometers and two time zones from Moscow to Berlin. If you go straight through (not advisable), it’s six days from Vladivostok to Moscow and another full day to Berlin.
All the train schedules are in Moscow time. Anything else would be chaos.
Life on board
All the Russians I met, without exception, were friendly and kind and went out of their way to be helpful. As one example, a teenage boy on the Moscow Metro, obviously noting the evidence of antiquity in my gray hair, got up and offered me his seat. Now, you ain’t going to see that in New York! The officialdom was also uniformly polite, each person helpful and patient in assisting me through the processes.
On the train in July, everybody was wearing T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops. There was a shower somewhere on the train — I saw the provodnitsas coming back from it — but I didn’t know enough Russian to ask about it.
There were two toilets with wash basins at one end of the car and a samovar with water constantly boiling at the other. I’d brought a travel mug and lots of instant Starbucks, so I was well set. Most Russians are not coffee drinkers (frequently, coffee was not available in restaurants); tea and bottled water were the main drinks offered.
The decor was basic — not “interior designer” but everything spotless and nothing worn.
My roommate was traveling with his wife and young son back home to Novosibirsk. He spent most of his time in the next compartment with his family and only came in to sleep. I kept the compartment door open during the day, so his son would come in whenever he got tired of being with his parents. The four days from Vladivostok to Novosibirsk were probably pretty dull for an eight-year-old.
So what is there to do on the train? Read, sleep, eat and watch the scenery. But I never got bored. The scenery was always changing, every kilometer as interesting as the last.
I had thought of the taiga as unending birch and fir. Not so! There were birch and fir trees but also oaks and open meadow. The trees all were pretty skinny — a reminder on a lovely July day that this is usually a pretty rough climate to be in.
The railroad is the main link between cities, so there were sturdily built log houses by the tracks, each with a satellite dish. Cell phone coverage was better than I had been led to believe, but there were still a lot of areas without coverage.
The train stopped at each station for a specified period of time; the provodnitsas stood by the doors to keep interlopers out. Local entrepreneurs sell foodstuffs from the platform, so you’ll never starve.
From Vladivostok, the train went north, paralleling the Chinese border, to Khabarovsk, where it turned west. From there it wound through the mountains (I didn’t know Siberia was mountainous!) to Irkutsk. Westerners doing this trip generally go from Moscow to Vladivostok (or Beijing), so I was not surprised to be the only non-Russian on the train at that point.
Lake Baikal
Vladimir, from MIR, picked me up at the Irkutsk railroad station for the 60-kilometer drive to Listvyanka on Lake Baikal. I spent the next four days there at the Baikalskiye Terema Hotel.
Lake Baikal is the deepest, oldest, largest (by volume) and, arguably, purest lake in the world. It’s a rift lake, on the edge of tectonic plates, and is getting wider by 2 centimeters a year. Eighty percent of the local flora and fauna are found nowhere else in the world, including the world’s only true freshwater seal.
Listvyanka is a small, tourist-oriented (Russian tourists) town. Due to its topography, it’s not going to get much bigger. The hills plunge precipitously down to the water’s edge, so there’s only a very narrow shoreline area on which to build.
The omul smokers set up shop in the port area. Omul is a salmonid fish found nowhere else in the world; it is usually prepared by smoking, either hot or cold. To eat it, you peel off the skin, pick the flesh off the bones, flip it over and repeat. A delicacy!
At the Baikal Limnological Museum, a highlight was a virtual dive to the bottom of the lake using film shot when the Mir diving vessel made the dive a few years before. From there, I went up to the observation point at the top of the hill for some stunning views.
The trees and bushes were festooned with scraps of paper and plastic, but this was not litter. The local Buryat Mongols are shamanistic, and these were their prayers to the gods.
The weather was magnificent again for my boat cruise to the old Circum-Baikal Railway. An Irkutsk native, Lida, from MIR, showed me the Buryat Mongol way to get to know the lake. First wash your hands in the lake, then wash your face. Using the ring finger of your left hand (closest to the heart), flick a drop of vodka in front of you, then behind, then to the right and then to the left. Pour some in the lake and then drink some.
I am now friends with Lake Baikal.
Lida gave me a tour of the Wooden Architecture Museum. The buildings all are original, brought from different parts of Siberia.
In Irkutsk, we went through a house built by an aristocratic exile in the 19th century and heard a concert of cathedral bells — truly magnificent and worth going that far to hear.
On to Moscow
Lida got me to my train and I settled in easily. Russian train compartments are not designated single sex, so I was not surprised to have a lady as a roommate for the journey to Krasnoyarsk. This was not a problem; the required adjustments were easily made. After she left, I had a quick succession of three more roommates before the last left the train at Nizhny Novgorod.
I hadn’t arranged to be met at the railroad station in Moscow, as the Komsomolskaya Metro Station is right at the Yaroslavsky rail terminal, and the Park Inn Sadu Hotel (Bolshaya Polyanka ulitsa 17), where I would be staying, was quite close to a Metro station.
The Moscow Metro is a tourist attraction in itself; the stations all are beautiful, and each one is decorated differently. It is also clean, cheap and easy to use (if you can read Cyrillic) and goes everywhere.
There is far more to see in Moscow than you could cover in a week. My MIR guide for one day was Maria, a third-generation Muscovite and an excellent guide.
We visited Red Square and the Kremlin, of course, as well as St. Basil’s Cathedral, GUM and the zero-kilometer marker — the point from which all distances in Russia are measured.
In the Kremlin, we saw the Armoury (a misnomer, today, as it contains mostly ecclesiastical and aristocratic furnishings), the Diamond Fund (which should not be missed; the only comparable collections are the British Crown Jewels and the Shah of Iran’s personal collection), the Tsar Bell and the Tsar Cannon.
Just outside the Kremlin is the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It would be very difficult to overstate the impact of the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians term WWII, on Russia. Between 1941 and 1945, one out of every seven Russians died as a result of the war.
I was in Moscow for five nights. For two of them I ate dinner at the hotel. On the other nights I ate at Tinkhoff (Protochny pereulok 11), a brew pub with a great menu; Koryma (Pyatnitskaya ulitsa 14), a Ukrainian restaurant (ask for the English menu), and Godunov (Ploshchad 5/1), my upscale splurge.
A journey delayed
The train to Berlin left from Belorussky Station. I had a solo compartment this time.
There was no border control stop between Russia and Belarus, but there was one at the border between Brest, in Belarus, and Terespol, Poland. There they had to change the bogies on the railcars from wide gauge (Russian) to standard gauge, jacking the cars up to do it.
I had been assured by both the Belarusian embassies in Moscow and Washington that a Belarusian transit visa was not required. Not true! A German lady who had been working at Moscow State University and I were both taken off the train until we could get visas issued. She spoke very good Russian and pretty good English and was a magnificent help.
We could not get visas until the next morning and it was late at night, so we were directed to the Bug Hotel (the Bug is the local river) in Brest. My “lux” room ($44) was dilapidated but clean, and it had hot water. (I managed to get a call through to my wife to let her know what was happening. I would be meeting her in Munich instead of Kassel.)
Since our train tickets had been issued in Moscow, we were able to get them changed at no extra cost. The visa office didn’t open until 11 and our train was to depart at 2:00. Just before 11, a French lady, who had been taken off a later train, joined us.
The Belarusian Army personnel, who handle the border control, told us they heartily hoped we would publicize our situation to let others know that visas are required, as it was causing them a lot of work and they weren’t getting anything out of it. My total cost was a fine of $5 and $17.50 for the visa. The agents all were very polite and went out of their way to be helpful.
Our visa issuance was expedited and we were back at the station 1¼ hours after the visa office opened, in plenty of time for the 2 p.m. train to Berlin.
Though we were lucky, I don’t recommend trying to travel without the transfer visa. In Belarus, not having a proper visa at that time was an administrative violation, about equivalent to a parking ticket. At another place or another time, we could have gotten into serious trouble.
We arrived in Berlin at midnight. I got a ticket to Munich from the ticket machine and settled into the open-all-night McDonald’s. I hadn’t really eaten anything for 36 hours, so my McDouble and coffee tasted pretty good.
While I was waiting in the station, a couple of friendly drunks tried to make my acquaintance. Sometimes not knowing the language is a help.
At 5 a.m. I made the easy trip to Munich, arriving at the hotel a few hours before my wife. It had been a very interesting and (mostly) very enjoyable journey.