it was a joy to be back on the train. for me, taking the trans siberian train, albiet the trans mongolian and trans manchurian in our case, was the realisation of a dream. i've always been excited by the sense of being on the move, from a small girl going on outings in my dad's car to more recent expeditions in our elderly camper. so settling into our compartment and taking up my customary spot by the window (how did i always end up with my back to the engine?) propped up on the provided pillow and glued to the passing landscape.. grubby windows mean all the photos will have a spattered effect, sadly.
in the waiting room at beijing we spotted a few european faces, most of them russian apart from a skinny chap. he got on way back down the train and we only glimpsed him at the russian border drearily waiting for the train to come back from the bogie changing shed as we all were (twelve hours to cross the border!)
the rest of the passengers appeared to be chinese from their language and the way they sprinted to the kiosks to buy pot noodles at each station. we never encountered anyone else in the dining car, usually the social hub of the train. it had been on the way east, filling up with sober types like us at lunchtime and beer swilling aussies in the evening!
our carriage was equally deserted. there was a chinese chap at the far end and a russian couple next door. lou nicknamed the wife 'hattie' as she was rather large and we could hear the crunching of crisps most of the day! :)
a diversion was caused by the arrival of nikolai at irkusk where we had expected an influx of tourists from the area around lake baikal. nikolai waylaid lou in the corridor that evening and when i went to find lou (rescue?), the two of them were sitting in front of nikolai's computer, looking at photos of shanghai! an hour later we had seen photos of nikolai at home on sakolin (an island off the east coast of siberia), nikolai and his 'boys', with his workers at his construction business (prefabricated buildings), at a motor show, on a jolly on the river at moscow with scantily clad belly dancers, with his 'woman'... not the mother of his boys i deduced from her youthful appearance.....
tall, broadshouldere and moustached, nikolai came across as a bit of a charmer and, sure enough, when he left the train at krasnovarsk with the chinese chap and hattie and husband, he wished us 'good travel' and told lou he had 'marvellous wife', flashing me a wonderful smile! :)
on what slender evidence he based this we can only wonder at! i was stripped of makeup and in my very sensible pyjys when i went looking for lou and our conversation was limited in the extreme relying on my russian phrase book! he works a long way from home and must be a lonely charmer...but never for very long i wager! :)
after that we were in splendid isolation apart from random railway personnel who got on, held meetings in the compartment next to ours and got off again, often at tiny halts. we soon got used to the sight of the train 'boss' as we called him, shouldering his way along the corridor. 'broad shoulders' i said to lou, 'padding' he said to me! :)
48 hours out of moscow, the dayshift 'prov' cleaned everything within an inch of its life, even wiping over the windows, (it didn't help!) and then locked the loo. 'legs', lou's favourite 'prov'. a girl of amazonian height with a blonde cockscomb on top of her dyed red hair and a very short skirt, explained that from now on our loo was 'clow-zed' and we were to use their's.
and i'm about to run out of time! i'll finish later! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment