Day three on the train was slightly more eventful.
With the daylight hours starting to really separate from official Moscow time, I woke up at about 4.30 (probably really 7.30?) to discover that we weren’t stopping for the scheduled stop at Tiumen, the first major city officially in Siberia, and that we were about 3 hours late. When we didn’t stop for what most people had earmarked on the timetable as ‘breakfast’, even though there a couple of ladies waiting on the platform, the pattern was clear.
But we were still surprised around lunch time (Moscow time) when the Elder Providnitsa literally pushed our tour guide back into the carriage, after reaching out the door to buy a couple of pastries for herself. I’m sure if we could speak more Russian we wouldn’t have had that problem, because we could have asked if the train was running late, and would then have been told, ‘Yes, so there won’t be any long stops for a while.’
Anyway.
What were really surprised by was the Police officers walking the length of the carriage and looking in rooms. They poked their heads into the room next to us (Dinesh, Sharnika, Prashant and the Vet nurse Natalie who lives in NZ but was born in Sydney), and asked them something. Ann (tour guide) was in there at the time, and wasn’t sure what they were asking for, so they all collectively shrugged their shoulders and the cops moved on. Immediately Ann came next door to ask if they had looked in our room at all, or anyone else’s, which they hadn’t. Even now no one knows what went on and why – it could just have been a random train search and they happened to stop there because there were small glasses on the table (Vodka being disallowed outside the dining carriage). But with the ‘inspection incident’ occurring right after the ‘door incident’, a few people were wondering a few things.
After a bit of looking out the window, which was slowly changing to grass land with dense birch groves, everyone calmed down and we went back to another fun evening of playing cards. But with the door shut. We were scheduled to get off the train at 5.34am Moscow time on Wednesday morning, and with this being Monday afternoon, Tuesday night wouldn’t be a particularly good night for card games. So that made Monday night the last fling. We enjoyed it thoroughly and with great efficiency; by skipping stops (and going faster at night) the train had made up the missing time and so the 9.00pm stop at Novosibirsk proceeded as normal. Local time was something like midnight; there wasn’t anything to buy, except for maybe water from a kiosk, but we all needed just to get off the train. It was a 45 min stop so we could really walk up and the down platform in luxury, and I took a few good photos of the station.
Also we managed to fit 11 people into one carriage (a new record) by the simple expedient of having one person sit on the top bunk and play cards from up there. Every time it was there turn a card would simply fall from the sky. And when you’ve been on a train for three days, that can actually be funny.
The long story short is that we went to bed way too late to be anywhere near in line with when the sun would be coming up, but that of course would be a problem for tomorrow.
Greg
