55 hours on the train

The train is the best way to get a feel for the immensity of Russia. With that in mind, we bought tickets for a 55-hour train from Vladimir to Tomsk, a quiet university city a few hours off the Trans-Siberian main line. We skipped over several large cities such as Nizhniy Novgorod, Yekaterinburg, and Omsk. The transit was faster and cheaper that way, and we felt they would be less interesting than the Golden Ring or central Siberian cities.

We were in 3rd class, which I described in the Travel entry. It was comfortable enough for me--bedding and tables were provided--but the bed was too short for my father. (Different seat numbers have different lengths due to the layout.) There were sufficient bathrooms for everyone, although several times a day they would be locked without warning for half an hour as we passed through a city.

We expected to find food vendors at every major station, but they were almost all deserted. So we ate and drank what we brought with us (boiling water was also available). Once we ate in the dining car, which was expensive, but it was a hot meal and it gave us a change of scenery.

The Siberian taiga (boreal forest) is very pretty, along with its poor but handsome wood hamlets. Unfortunately, there was also a lot of heavy industry (oil and gas, pulp and paper) which scarred the landscape.

We didn't interact much with other passengers. We slept, ate, looked out the window, and read, while some other passengers played cards or listened to headphones. A few of them were truly Herculean sleepers... they seemed to sleep the whole trip! Across from us was an English teacher, so we spoke English from time to time. At one point, three skinheads cornered me in the bathroom and tried to bully me into buying them vodka. They were unarmed and half-drunk, so except for a broken travel mug, nothing came of it. (We needed to be vigilant that night as well as when we got off the train in case they felt vengeful.) Later they browbeat a university student into interpreting in English for them; but they didn't have anything to say, so I ignored them and they wandered off. The student was very strange: he said he was a biology student who was sneaking into a conference on ticks in Tomsk "as a journalist." (Tomsk has a dangerous pandemic of encephalitic ticks.) Then he talked for half an hour about outlandish conspiracy theories (which, he assured us, he obviously didn't believe). Basically, anything that happens anywhere is controlled from Buckingham Palace, and Russia is really a vassal state of England. So this conspiracy group writes letters to the Queen of England complaining about the poor state of Russian infrastructure and services.

There were no announcements whatsoever, so I didn't always know which city we were in. As well, we were on Moscow time the whole trip, which was rather strange. If I recall correctly, we crossed 3 time zones.

We arrived in Tomsk at 9am local time and had an uneventful cab ride to our hotel.