Baikal, Day 1: Arse End Of Nowhere
When I jokingly wrote in my school yearbook that in 20 years’ time I would most likely be somewhere in Siberia I certainly did not expect this to in actual fact happen fewer than four years later. I certainly had not expected to end up on the world-famous Trans-Siberian Railway. Yes, I am writing this as I travel all the way from Tyumen’ to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal – a journey which will take 50 hours in total!
Having left our общежитие just after 10pm we set off for a 24-hour cafe as our train was not due to leave until 04:30am the next day (Wednesday). Various misfortunes regarding a bus service stopping early and an inability to hail a taxi resulted in us taking an hour to get into the centre of town, which was not exactly filling any of us with confidence in our ability to successfully make it the full 2,500km to the world’s deepest lake.
Nevertheless, everything else went off without a hitch and we boarded our train just after 4am, positively giddy, like children on Christmas Eve.
Our home for the next 50 hours…
After only a short sleep I was annoyingly woken by a screaming child boarding the train and was unable to get back to sleep so instead decided to enjoy the scenery – which mostly consists of trees…
So many trees!
I don’t think I will ever come to terms with just how vast this country is. The taiga forest which we have spent most of our day speeding through makes up around 25% of the world’s forests – Chekhov once said that, “Where it stops, only the migrating birds know”. Indeed much of Russia’s northern and eastern territories are still effectively unexplored – or at least as unexplored as anywhere can be these days.
Of course, this is not to say that nobody lives out here and we have passed through many settlements, big and small, including Omsk, which gave us an opportunity for a leg stretch and a couple of photos.
Омск
Whether of not the novelty of all of this will have worn off tomorrow remains to be seen. I am just hoping for a slightly longer night’s sleep tonight. I am yet to decided whether the constant swaying of the train is soothing or annoying – it has certainly caused problems when trying to write anything, such as this!