Since I was 14 years old and read a travel biography called "To the World's End" about a journalist traveling in Siberia during the 90s, my dream has been to do the same. I can't tell why Siberia of all places has interested me so much. I think it might be the mystery about this remote and rough part of the world, so far away from the ordinary tourist destinations as possible. Although it has become easier for the ordinary tourist to travel along the Trans Siberian railway nowadays, it's still not a very typical trip to do. Inspired by many books and movies I'd seen over the years, I had dreamt about the adventure of going there myself. I wanted to see the wild nature, the uninhabited vast forests and the ugliness of the abandoned Soviet cities in the far East.
When I left Thailand, my partner and I decided to make something fun out of the trip back home to Europe, and travel by land all the way from Asia to Europe through Siberia. After having an extended layover in South Korea for some days, we finally arrived in Vladivostok where our journey through Siberia was about to begin. We had pre-booked all the train tickets all the way to Moscow some months in advance since it was summer and high season and the trains usually tend to get overbooked.
We were very surprised about how easy it was to manage the booking by ourselves. The official train website in Russia is nowadays in English and very smooth to use. There is really no need to book train tickets for the Trans Siberian railway through some third party travel agency, as they get much cheaper if you book them directly on the official train page yourself. In total we'd booked 14 train tickets whereof most of them where night trains that would save us some time. We had less than 3 weeks to complete our journey to Moscow and limited time to spend at each stop. We had spontaneously booked tickets between random cities we found on the map, mainly small towns in Siberia to get the most out of the local culture and really get to explore the genuine and untouched part of Siberia.
After reading the book "To the World's End" I had learnt about the BAM-railway (Baikal-Amur) 700 kilometers north of the more well-known Trans Siberian railway. This railway was built during the Soviet times initiated by Stalin with the intention to transport valuable goods with a safer distance from the Chinese border (the Trans Siberian railway goes alongside the Chinese border). Stalin wanted to finish the building of the BAM-railway in 5 years, eventually it took more than 50 years to build it and many human lives due to the rough climate and difficult nature with permanently frozen ground. Many prisoners from the Gulag working camps (prisons) were used to build the railway, and many of them died within a few days due to the extreme temperatures and the hard work. There is a lot to be said about the history of the BAM-railway, however, that would take up most of this post, which is why I recommend you to keep on reading here if you would like to know more.
Despite the dark history of the BAM, I found it interesting and was curious to explore it as more westerners traveling through Siberia would go by the Trans Siberian railway. The BAM-railways would lead us to the North side of the Baikal lake (the biggest lake in the world) to Severobaykalsk, from where we would re-connect with the Trans Siberian railway again on our way West.
Our arrival in Vladivostok was not the greatest experience. Our flight arrived very early in the morning and we had barely slept anything at all. Tired we made our way downtown to our hostel we had booked. It was one of the cheapest hostels, but soon we realized why. The place was awful, extremely (!) dirty and unhygienic and the guy who worked there looked more like a drug addict dressed in dirty clothes than a hostel manager. He was rude and not very welcoming and didn't even let us leave our heavy backpacks in the reception while we waited for the check-in hour, and seemed more bothered by our appearance. The world "customer experience" must have never even crossed his mind. When we could finally check in our room smelled like pee and the only common toilet on our floor was so dirty, it was hair everywhere and someone before us had clearly had diarrhea in the toilet which had not been cleaned. Again, I had to realize the hard way that booking the cheapest hotel in town wasn't the best idea.
Luckily the day got better after having a great breakfast in a café called Akademya (a common chain in the East Siberia which later came to be my favorite café during our trip). After living a couple of years in Thailand it felt so amazing to be able to eat yoghurt with muesli and normal bread with cheese for breakfast again - not to talk about drinking good coffee!
A lot of things with Vladivostok reminded me of my home country Finland. The atmosphere, the rainy weather, the people (not very smiling...at least not before you got to know them) and the food (rye bread and oatmeal for breakfast!). The first day in Vladivostok we were simply amazed by the great selection of restaurants and bars. We even found a small cozy wine bar where we had the most amazing cheese board ever the first night. The best thing of all was that it was so cheap. In Bangkok you had to pay three times more just to get a nice wine. In general, Vladivostok felt very westernized and modern, with many hip cafes and bars - not really the way I had pictured the far East of Siberia. I was excited and a bit disappointed at the same time. It was too nice to be Siberia.
The next night we started our train trip with a night train to our next destination: Habarovsk. We had to go along the Transsiberian railway all the way to Habarovsk, and after that the railway would divide into two separate railways and we would continue along the BAM all the way to Lake Baykal. After that the two railways would merge again.
On the train there we made friends with a young boy named Stefan who was 17 and a girl in our age called Angelina. She was originally from Krasnayarsk but was studying in Vladivostok. Stefan was from Habarovsk but had been visiting a university he wanted to study in in Vladivostok. Both were surprisingly friendly and outgoing and spoke a pretty good English. They were curious to know why Sam and I were going to travel along the non-touristy BAM-railway, and helped us out with the beds and showed how things worked with the bed sheets. We had many interesting conversations with them during the ride.
In general the Siberian train experience was nothing like I had pictured it. Times had changed in Russia since the 90s indeed. The trains were more modern than in Scandinavia, and clean and fresh. No one was allowed to drink vodka or party on the trains. Everyone slept and behaved the whole night. Again, I was both happy about it and slightly disappointed: a part of me had hoped for more adventure and craziness happening.
In the morning we got served the train-breakfast we had pre-ordered, which quickly turned into one of the first lessons learnt traveling with train in Siberia - never order breakfast. Stefan and Angelina explained to us that the pre-ordered breakfast you get on the train was commonly known to be awful, thus everyone else in our compartment besides us had brought their own breakfast. We tried to eat at least a bit of the thick tasteless porridge and dry bread we got served, but didn't repeat the same mistake on the next trains.
The train food was pretty dull in general, which was why most other passengers brought their own food with them. We quickly learnt the routines and ways of traveling by train by copying the locals, but a few times we still ended up ordering food on the train, especially the noodle- or "mashed potato" cups that you mix with hot water. It was something awful and fairly tasty about these meals at the same time, and I still associate these kind of "cups" with the Siberian trains.
When we arrived in Habarovsk I asked Angelina if she wanted to hang out the next day as well since she was traveling alone and seemed to really appreciate our company, and she seemed overwhelmed by happiness over the simple question. In these regions it clearly wasn't very common to see foreigners, and our appearance seemed to have made an impression on both Stefan and Angelina. One of Angelina's dreams was to learn better English so that she would be able to travel more, and now we offered her an opportunity to spend another day practicing her English. She wanted to take us to the local Zoo that she'd been visiting as a child, and we agreed to meet up the next morning by the main square.
In Habarovsk we had our first positive hotel experience at Hotel Asti, that didn't look like anything special from the outside (a typical grey Soviet-style apartment building) but turned out to be really clean and nice inside. The receptionist was welcoming and actually helped us register our passports and visas so that we could continue traveling legally in Russia (something the unfriendly receptionist in the dirty hostel in Vladivostok had refused to do). The receptionist told us that she was working 24 hour shifts, which seemed tough, and yet she seemed so happy.
Habarovsk was a nice little town, that once again reminded me a bit about small towns in Finland. We spent the first day just walking around, eating ice-cream by the Amur river (where people were swimming to cool down during the hot day) and eating some of the nice local "piroshki" filled with potatoes and mushrooms. In the evening we went to have dinner at a (locally) famous restaurant where we had the Russian "fur-coat" (translated) - a cake-salad with herring, beetroot and cheese. It might sound like a strange combination, but I liked it, maybe because it reminded me of something similar we used to eat for Christmas when I was a child. After the dinner we ended up in a local pub, where we were seated next to a bunch of drunk men downing shots, watching sports at the TV and not really talking to each other while the Heavy Metal was blasting on high volume from the speakers. We tried a few local beers which seemed stronger than normal pilsners but nowhere it said the alcohol percentage, meanwhile we were wondering how many Russian stereotypes that could fit in one bar. It was not the last evening we walked back to the hotel slightly more drunk than intended.
The second day we met up with Angelina as planned and took a taxi to the local Zoo. Angelina was excited and told us the whole history of the Zoo on the way there. We got less and less excited the more we saw of the Zoo though. Lions and tigers were locked up in very small cages, walking around in circles or just laying in a corner looking depressed, and a lonely wolf was running around looking scared and sad. I have never been a fan of Zoos exactly because of these reasons, but this Zoo just seemed a tiny bit worse than most other ones. Relieved we left after a while and instead Angelina took us to a local restaurant to have some traditional food which was a much more pleasant experience.
Angelina kept being our local tour guide the rest of the day, and we got to know each other even better - so well so we eventually stumbled upon the topic politics. As many other young Siberians she strongly disliked Putin and his regime and wanted to know our opinion about him. At the same time she told us that politics is nothing you talk about loud in Russia, especially not if you dislike Putin. If the wrong person happens to hear, you might end up in prison for 10 years. Angelina disliked the injustice in Russia, where she and everyone else are paying taxes, but the money never end up where they are supposed to. Instead their tax money goes to politicians and to buildings and projects in Moscow. But most of the taxpayers money never goes back to the villages in East Siberia where they would be highly needed. Because of the corruption and dishonesty that has long defined Russian politics, the poor towns in Siberia would never get a chance to improve their societies and the situation for their citizens. Angelina told us that in the East they never get any financial support from the government (for being unemployed or sick), only the citizens of West Russia would get this support from their government.
It was very clear why she was feeling mistreated by her own government, and once again I realized how divided Russia was. The differences between East and West (that we were going to continue experience on our way) were significant.
Angelina also told us about her personal dreams for the future. She wanted to move to the city Amur Oblast with her boyfriend, marry him and have many children. Then she wanted to stop working and be a house-wife. She told us that in Russia it's still expected from the man to be the "family-captain" - the most important thing is for a man to earn more than his wife or he wouldn't be much of a real man. She thought this was because "men have brains and women don't have a brain, they have hearts instead". I didn't really feel like it was the moment to start explaining the Scandinavian view on gender equality here, but rather accept these cultural differences and let her share her way of living and her values. The only good outcome of Angelina's gender views though, was that Sam had to start behaving like a Russian man. She required him to always open the doors for me, carry the bags from the store and pay in the restaurant which I didn't complain about.
The following night we took another night train to a small town we'd just been looking up on Google Maps called Ledyanaya. Sam had seen on Google Maps that there was a space station a bit outside Ledyanaya that he wanted to visit, which was the reason we stopped by for a whole day. This turned out to be another lesson learnt - just spontaneously looking up random villages that you don't know anything about and decide to stop there isn't a great idea in Russia. When we went off the train in the morning, we quickly realized that we were the only ones getting off. I had to pee, but the train station was closed and it seemed like we'd basically been getting off in the middle of nowhere. After a little while an old bus came driving up to the station and it seemed like that was the public transport to go with if we wanted to get to the center of Ledyanaya 5 km away. Only a few other locals sat on the bus all steering at us in a weird way. When we were about to enter the town of Ledyanaya we came to a big fence and by the gate the bus got stopped by the police. We were naive and thought we could just show our passports and continue the ride, but the police strongly directed us to step out of the bus. No one of the policemen spoke any English, but they still made it clear that if we'd enter Ledyanaya we would go to prison. We felt stupid, realizing how naive we'd been thinking that we could just visit a space station in Russia. Something that for us seemed like fun sightseeing was (still) a Soviet/Russian state secret. Even visiting the nearby town wasn't allowed - I guess we were lucky just getting a warning by the police and then help to get back to the train station. Some friend or brother of one of the policemen came to pick us up to drive us back to the train station (wasn't really a taxi anywhere nearby) and then the 12 hour long waiting for our next night train started.
The 12 hours were long and cold, since the train station was closed. Eventually we were hungry and the little food we had was finished, so we walked around a bit until we found a small village shop. In there sat all the elderly from the countryside it seemed like, and they were all very curious and kept talking to us in Russian even if we couldn't answer. We wanted to support their shop and bought loads of snacks, piroshkis and two liters of local beer in these plastic bottles they filled up. Getting a bit tipsy definitely made the time pass faster, and when we could finally get on the train in the evening we were just relived that we had not planned to stay overnight in Ledyanaya. We agreed that it was good we'd only been planning to stop by slightly larger towns during the rest of our trip. On the train our neighbors in our compartment, Sveta and her husband, offered us train-cookies and tea and talked to us in Russian for an hour before it was finally bedtime.
Our next stop was Tynda, where we had 4 hours to walk around and explore the town before getting on the next train. This was also the third day without showering, but the real life on the Trans Siberian railway had finally started.
In Tynda people looked at us in a hostile way and we didn't get nicely welcomed in any small café or bar we walked into, so it felt almost nice getting on the train again. Now we had 18 hours on the train ahead of us until we'd reach Taximo - 18 hours that turned out to pass faster than expected, thanks to our compartment neighbor Roman who introduced us to the real Russian train-drinking experience. He was in his 30s and spoke a tiny bit of English since he'd been working in South Korea for a while, and suggested already at noon that we would go and grab a beer in the restaurant compartment. Sam had to study so I went to have (what I thought was) one beer with Roman. He kept ordering beers in a fast pace though, and soon I was already feeling tipsy. We ate the traditional Siberian smoked cheese snacks with the beers and soon Roman also ordered herring with potatoes and vodka served in teapots.
When Sam came looking for us after some hours, the restaurant compartment had turned into a party. Some other old Siberian men had joined us and the vodka-teapots kept coming in a fast pace now, and our shot glasses got refilled against our will. I realized it would have been rude to say no and that this was Russia - here you simply have to accept vodka. When the vodka increased in everyone's blood the topics got more tense and suddenly were were talking about politics, where Roman told us that Russia was the greatest nation and the most powerful country that can destroy any other countries in no time if they'd want to. We quickly tried to change the topic, and instead one of the old men who had joined us started talking about how he thought I was sexy, which pissed off Roman who almost started a fight. After this my memory went black until 6 am when we arrived in Taximo.
In Taximo we barely got out of the train in time, still drunk and hit by the 8 degrees Celsius freezing air. Again, we'd not really been doing much research about Taximo and it seemed like finding accommodation wasn't very easy. Thanks to some help from Roman, he managed to find some kind of motel where we could stay. This motel was more like an ordinary apartment for railway workers to sleep in, and we were truly the only tourists who'd ever stayed there. The walls where the thinnest we'd ever seen, and we were forced to listen to the same music as the receptionist the rest of the day. My hangover was real, and I promised myself that this was the first and the last time I was going through this Siberian-vodka experience. When I could finally get out of bed, we walked around the town which was 5 blocks, looking for a restaurant. We found the only restaurant in town (they are never advertised, usually it's some kind of hidden place in a random building) and tried to order everything on their menu before we realized that they only had one thing on the menu: herring and potatoes. At least we survived the day.
The next morning we woke up early to catch our next train, only to realized that we had been booking it for the wrong day: our train was only going the next day. There was nothing we could do about it and no other train going towards West during the whole day. A bit uncomfortable we walked back to the railway-workers-motel and prayed that they would have a room available for us for one more night. We tried to make the most out of it and even managed to find the only other restaurant in Taximo that actually served more than one thing on the menu, and had both lunch and dinner there. And we walked around the 5 blocks again, exploring every tiny bit of this small village.
The following night I woke up in the middle of the night by hearing a lot of noise and a woman screaming in panic. I soon realized that it was the receptionist lady getting harassed by some of the other guests: it seemed to be several drunk men being both aggressive and violent. I quickly made sure our door was locked and because of the thin walls Sam and I tried to be very quiet, not to attract these violent drunk men to come into our room. It felt extremely horrible to just hear the violence and not being able to involve and help the receptionist, but at the same time we had seen which kind of men were staying at this motel. These were alcoholics who were terrifying also when they were sober, and also these kind of men who would think we were Americans if they'd heard us speaking English (we actually had a problem with that a few times, as Sam and I always speak English together. I always had to try to explain that I was from Finland, not to upset anyone local. Finland most of them knew and liked way more than the US). It was a scary and stressful night.
The next morning the poor receptionist showed us her bruises and tried to explain that the police had come to help her eventually, and they had been taking these aggressive men away. She kept repeating "vodka" and made it clear that this is how bad the alcohol problem is in this part of Siberia. Vodka is a quick relief when living in a small village where the temperature differences are extreme (+30 in the summer, - 60 in the winter) and the poverty forces most men to work on the railways and the infrastructure looks like Finland in the 40th century.
A year later I still feel very bad for this poor old receptionist lady and for not being able to help her that night, and often my thoughts go back to Taximo. It was something very depressing over the whole village, and I hope that one day someone will fight for this small village in the East to make sure they also get their fair share of the taxpayers money so that young people will at least get a chance to a better future (away from the bottles).
It was a relieve to finally leave Taximo the following day. We spent the whole day on the train, sharing compartment with a family with two young kids. After some hours, the kids where as bored and restless as we were, and despite the language barrier I managed to entertain them with some games and gestures. In the evening we finally reached our last destination on the BAM-railway before it would eventually merge with the Trans Siberian railway; Severobaykalsk on the north side of Lake Baykal. Most travelers traveling along the Trans Siberian railway would stop by Irkutsk on the south side of the lake, but we had heard that the north side would be more beautiful.
Severobaykalsk was like many other Siberian towns; some soviet-like apartment buildings in the middle of nowhere. We learnt the history of the town, that was built during the same time as the BAM-railway was built. Severobaykalsk was meant to be one of the main attractions for young Russian families to move to Siberia and for the young men to join the team of railway workers building the BAM. Stalin had promised a luxurious brand new town that would represent the new Russia (that the east of Siberia and the BAM was about to become) with everything that could be offered: schools, newly built apartments and center with restaurants, cinema and so on. For many of the young Russian families moving out to Severobaykalsk, their experienced didn't turn out as promised. The buildings weren't built to last long (but to be cheap), and the winters were rough and extremely cold. The young and excited men moving out to Siberia to work on the BAM, also quickly realized that the work "for the great new Russia" wasn't as glamorous in real life. Many men working on the BAM died in the process, most of them where prisoners from the camps though, who's lives didn't mean much and where "used" until they died.
A lot of this history of Severobaykalsk and the building of the BAM-railway we learnt at the BAM-museum in Severobaykalsk, where we surprisingly had a guide who spoke almost fluent English telling us all about it. This was definitely one of the most interesting parts of the trip, if you ever make it to Severobaykalsk, this museum is worth a visit.
One of the most exciting things during our stay in Severobaykalsk was the green market in the center. After living in Asia for so long and not being able to get berries, we were amazed by the cheap blueberries, raspberries and other Nordic berries that you could buy at the market. And of course, the candy market wasn't too bad either...
Our trip continued to Bratsk and then Krasnoyarsk where the BAM merged with the Transsiberian. Do you want to read about the rest of our trip all the way to Moscow? Check out my next post coming soon!