Trans-Siberian Diary

I originally thought about giving a day by day account of the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, but have since come to the conclusion that nobody really wants to read things like "Day One: I slept a little bit, woke up ate an instant noodle for lunch, read some of my book, and went back to sleep again and Day Two: Diarrhoea today etc."- You get the general idea. So I'll just mention a few of the highlights and lowlights and give some general advice or ideas to those of you who maybe thinking about doing the trans-siberian sometime.

Okay so the first piece of advice is, as anyone who's done the trans-sib will tell you, take plenty of water, food (e.g. Doshirak, the Russian pot noodle), a lot of reading material and some toilet paper. There were times during the journey where I inevitably had a shortage of at least one or two of the items mentioned above and it can make a leg of the trip a lot less pleasurable. As can belligerent Babushkas, irritable train attendants, the odd smelly drunken travelling companion and the god awful music playing on the train's speaker system. However that's just all part of the adventure and for me, the appeal. And I must admit, I did kind of giggle to myself everytime I heard "Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia's greatest love machine" piped through to the carriage.

I met and made friends with some wonderful characters both on and off the train and despite being a foreign traveller threre's an amazing 'we're all in this together' feel to life on the train and people really do look after each other. Some guidebooks will tell you that you need to take extra special precautions to safeguard yourself and your belongings on the train. I certainly didn't feel that this was the case; I felt that my things which given that was on my way to live and work in another country; were pretty much my worldly possessions, were much safer than they would be on a British train for example.

I chose to make my brief stops for sightseeing and just to break up the journey a bit to get off the train to stretch the old legs properly at Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Irkutsk before finishing up in Vladivostok. Ideally, I would've put in another stop at Chita or Kharbarovsk probably and I missed Ulan Ude also, which was a bit of a shame. However I did have a job to get to, so was under a little bit of time pressure. Plus I was only in the country on a month long tourist visa at this time and things aren't very pleasant if you overstay you're welcome in most countries, let alone Russia.

The highlights of Yekaterinburg: the friendliness of the people there and a great relaxed vibe to the city, that reminded me of St Petersburg which I love.