Asleep in Siberia

Russia continues to provide the best kind of travel experiences, the ones that confound your expectations. A small case in point: my brief ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway, from Irkutsk to Blagoveshchensk. It’s only brief by Trans-Siberian terms – when you look at the map of the whole route it’s just a slice, less than a third of the total route from Moscow to Vladivostok. But that still totals 2,800 km (about 1,700 miles), and took 54 hours.

I had expected a boisterous trip, a rolling party, with pickles and sausages being passed around and long vodka toasts to Russian-American friendship. I’ve had some rowdy trips in this part of the world. Last year I flew from Milan to Kiev on a flight that was almost all Ukrainians and as soon as the seatbelt sign was switched off, people jumped out of their seats and stood around in groups talking, drinking beer, like it was a house party. And several years ago, on a flight from Tel Aviv to Sofia with a group of Bulgarians coming back from a soccer match, one actually busted out a boom box and subjected the whole plane to it. Even on this trip, on the bus I took from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude, one exuberant Buryat bought a bottle of vodka as soon as we got across the border into Russia and shared it with all the men on the bus. So I figured, what else are people going to do on a train for 54 hours?

The answer, it turns out, is sleep. I shared my cabin with a well dressed middle-aged woman who, as soon as the train pulled out of Irkutsk, put on a nightgown, made up her bed and climbed in. She didn’t go all the way to Blagoveshchensk, but stayed on the train for about 46 hours, at least 40 of which she seemed to be sleeping. (That’s really not an exaggeration.) And she wasn’t alone. Everyone was sleeping. To pass the time on the third day of the trip, I walked through the whole train at about 11 am. At least a third of the people were asleep. And even the people who were awake were as quiet as they’d be in a library.

Maybe it’s the place: One of the books I read on the train, In Siberia by Colin Thubron, said that the name Siberia is “a mystical conflation of the Mongolian siber, ‘beautiful,’ ‘pure,’ and the Tartar sibir, ’sleeping land’” and that Herodotus described a tribe of people in Siberia who slept for half the year.

More likely, it’s our mode of transportation: Riding the train is definitely soporific. The sky was gray throughout the trip, and the rocking of the train is extremely relaxing. The scenery along the route is pleasant, but relentlessly monotonous. The massive forests are only occasionally interrupted by a tumbledown village, and even these tend to look all the same. While I slept nowhere near as much as my cabin-mate, I did sleep until 10 am the first night on the train, and then followed that up with an afternoon nap. And so I arrived in Blagoveshchensk rested and ready for the final two weeks of the trip. A report from here soon…