On our last day on the train we had to be awake in time to get off at Irkutsk at 5.34am. But with the 5 hour time difference to Moscow the sun came up at about 3am so no one had any real problem being awake.
The problem came when we tried to do what everyone thought would be a fairly simple procedure – getting off the train. When you get on they give you a plastic package with two sheets, a hand towel, and a pillowcase. You’re supposed to give these back when you get off.
Andy couldn’t find his, and after some pondering decided he must have left it in the bathroom, rather than keeping it on his person at all times, and that he would have to pay the 150 roubles that was being asked for.
Meanwhile everyone continued gathering their bags and attempting to look awake but we were interrupted by news from the dragon lady that there were more pieces ‘missing’. I forget what exactly they were supposed to be; might have been a sheet, another towel and a pillowcase, but anyway everyone was sure they had handed all their bedding back. Cue jokes about ‘Yeah we’d love to take these yellow sheets with us.’
Ann (tour guide and 5ft high Thai woman) and Alice (deputy chief negotiator, having made friends with one of the Provodnitsa’s) went forward to the staff cabin to try and sort out the confusion. The lady refused to let us count the pieces to check, but did so again herself, deciding this time that there was one more towel missing.
That we could believe; people had left their hand towels lying around after using them as ‘shower’ implements and so on, but a sheet and a pillowcase? No reason for those to be anywhere but on our beds, or still in the plastic bags as some people preferred sleeping bags and hadn’t even used their sheets.
By this time it was 10.15am (5.15am Moscow time) and there was some doubt as to what would happen if we arrived at the station and things hadn’t been sorted out. The stop at Irkutsk is for half an hour and they have people to let on the train, presumably into our now vacant cabins; surely we weren’t going to have any real trouble here? No, in fact we were, because the dragon lady then sent Alyssia around to try and find the missing pieces. A couple of people mistook her tapping on their bags as an inclination to search, when she was actually trying to say ‘Are you sure you haven’t packed it?’
I went next door to ask Andy if he’d remembered to try to the Jedi mind trick, and he waved his hand across and said,
‘These aren’t the towels you’re looking for.’
‘You can let these people go.’
After some slightly louder negotiations the dragon lady agreed to let us recount the bag of manchester, all the while getting unreasonably angry in Russian about the whole business, at which point our guide decided it would only be fair if she were to shout as well, but in Thai. They pulled everything back out in the middle of the corridor and there ensued a chorus of numbers in Russian, English and Thai as things were accounted for. Further down the carriage the rest of the group stood with bags at the ready, scratching our heads as to what exactly was going on, and scheming about whether it was better to split the cost between us or just use our strength in numbers to push past at the opportune moment. If the carriage door was unlocked.
With the recount finished, and not in our favour, we had no option but to cough up. The total was about 600 roubles ($30), which was about 450 roubles more than it should have been, but at least we got let off the train. And during the last 15 minutes of the debacle young Alyssia was curiously absent.
Anyway. Irkutsk.
Irkutsk, our guidebook informs us, was founded as an outpost for Cossack missions in 1651, and existed thereafter as a centre for suppression of the local Buryat people, until the 18th century when nobles rebelling against Alexander III were sent there as punishment. The town grew into a wealthy trading centre and everyone was quite happy until the 1917 revolution, when the worm turned and the Red Army came from Moscow to inform the locals that things were going to be different. Irkutsk is so far Moscow and St Petersburg that the revolution took 3 years to arrive there; the leader of the White Russian army was captured and beheaded in Irkutsk in 1920.
We were staying in some sub-let apartments in groups, which meant that Alice and I got one of the two double beds in one apartment, with the other going to Prash and Shanika. Liam, Andy, Adam and Steve were put together a couple of blocks away, while Nat, Ann, Dinesh, Chu and Luan had single beds downstairs from us. Then the owner came to explain everything important to us in entertaining but accurate and systematic mime, including the delicate procedure for locking and unlocking the thick outer door of the apartment without snapping the key. Having seen the key demonstration it was to Prash and then myself to pass the ‘Key test’, which we managed to do. We had gained entrance to the apartment.
We briefly celebrated the presence of a bath, showered for the first time in four days, and then everyone else went back to bed, while I sorted photos and wrote some more travel journals, and then washed most of our clothes in the bath, intending to have my quick-dry pants and thermals ready to go by 1.30 when we were all supposed to meet downstairs for a short walking tour around town followed by lunch. In the end none of those things happened; none of the clothes dried, I didn’t catch up on all the travel journals, three of us were still asleep at 1.40 when Ann came upstairs to see what the delay was, and also I’d managed to snap the rotating joint of the shower head. It looked like stainless steel but turned out to be plastic.
In a great rush we threw everything together to go walking, I put on some wet clothes so that they would air-dry and wear-dry, and we scrambled downstairs.
Irkutsk is an odd blend; in places the footpaths are dirt, in other places decrepit or nearing construction, and in the town they are paved with shiny shopfronts and they have women walking down them in short skirts and heels even though it’s about 10 degrees. The houses range from old traditional Siberian houses which are really nice to ordinary modern houses to shanty shacks with stray dogs and drunkards lying around out front. As Alice put it, ‘it still feels a bit like a frontier town.’
Lunch was a debacle as well in a day that didn’t really let up; the restaurant we went to to first had no rice (or not enough for 13 people), then no fish (or not enough for 13 people), and after that only enough pork to give everyone that ordered it a small portion for 310 roubles. When the bill came Adam exclaimed ‘310 roubles for cold pork! Do they take souls as a form of payment?’ Meanwhile I had a rice and vegetable salad which pretty nice but, you guessed it, small portion, which was just the thing for a group of people who hadn’t eaten much since before 10.00am.
There are two streets (‘Ulitsas’) which form the main part of Irkutsk; Ulitsa Lenina, which has the regulation statue of Lenin, and Ulitsa Karl Marx, which has no statue of Karl Marx but leads down to the riverside and has sufficient supermarkets and internet cafes to keep a group of tourists busy. After an hour checking email we wandered off with Nat but failed miserably at finding any of those supermarkets, and arrived at our apartment around 6.30, with not nearly enough time to try and find the Central Market shown on the town map before we were supposed to meet for dinner at 7.30.
Before dinner we had a group stroll down the riverside and back up Ulitsa Karl Marx (not actually up, it’s as flat as something quite flat) to a restaurant called Russian tea house. There we had various tasty meals, again in small portions (Dinesh ordered two of his roast chicken just to be sure), had a great time playing puzzle games with toothpicks on the table and got caught up in a rash of desert orders after two people got ice cream sundaes and several others saw how nice they looked and wanted in too. After dinner we did actually find the supermarket and got some bits and pieces ahead of our journey out to Olkhon Island.
Greg
