Day 208: All aboard!

We've been talking about this trip for so long that the details trip off the tongue with ease – Eurostar to Brussels, more trains across Germany and Denmark to Sweden, the ferry to St Petersburg, Moscow, the trans-Siberian to Mongolia, then China, South-East Asia and home. But all along, the big unknown for us, the leg that both fascinated and slightly scared us, was always the trans-Siberian. And now, we've finally begun the first leg.

The day started, once more, with pancakes at the hostel. Kate then took the girls back to the playground that they had so enjoyed yesterday while I packed up and sorted out the final part of the China leg – booking train tickets and rearranging some accommodation. We were blessed with a late check-out time at the hostel and we pushed it to the limit – dumping our bags at reception bang on 12pm. We then retraced our route back to and through the metro to Yaroslavsky Station, where we bought some KFC for lunch and sat in the waiting room waiting for our platform to come up on the board.

After some confusion as to where the trains actually left from, we duly found our platform and... boarded our train! Our nice, new train with a tiny cabin just for us. We had read stories about the stifling temperature of the trains so had come prepared with shorts and flip-flops (thongs) - and as we bumped and shuffled around in the compartment, stowing our bags under the seats, we all quickly acquired a thin sheen of sweat. Thankfully, however, when the train pulled out of Moscow, the air conditioning kicked in, bringing the temperature down to a much more comfortable level.

In fact, little about his train resembled the stories we had read – with good reason. Apparently, the trains that ply the trans-Siberian route can be ranked, in terms of quality, based on their identifying numbers – the higher the number, the lower, the quality. The number of our train was 2 – hence this was a new, state-of-the-art train with comfy seats, air conditioning, a television (!) and cleanish toilets. 

At first, I just sat and read a copy of the New Yorker (I have a large collection of physical copies that had accumulated while we were away on the European leg of the trip and I'm doing my best to get through them as quickly as possible in order to lighten my pack). But after a while, I swapped seats with one of the girls so that I could look out the window and I was instantly hooked on the view outside – a mesmerising parade of conifers and bright, white birch trees, broken by small, rough settlements of tumbledown wooden shacks and crumbling breeze-block edifices, and, rarely, incongruous cities where grey apartment blocks rise from the countryside in dense clusters. There's quite a lot of standing water around, whether snowmelt or permanent bogs I'm not sure. Here and there you can see small patches of snow; I'm a bit sad that we're not making the journey in winter, as we had originally planned, but we're also both rather glad that we aren't, as it certainly makes life a lot easier not having to contend with the snow, ice and frigid temperatures that we would have encountered then. Part of the reason I couldn't take my eyes off the passing scenery was the possibility of seeing some sort of wild animal outside, and after some time I was finally rewarded with a sighting – a lone elk standing beside the fence that follows the tracks impassively watching the train go by.

Kate and I are both fascinated by the settlements we're passing. While some areas look just as you would expect – quaint houses made from dark-stained wood with fenced-off gardens - there are strange areas that have the look of allotments, with much smaller buildings and worked ground in which vegetables will obviously be grown when the weather warms. What's strange is that these areas are extremely extensive, forming what appear to be large villages in miniature. The buildings are larger than sheds but look too small to be houses. 

For this leg, our ticket included a meal, and after some confusion – English is not widely spoken among the otherwise friendly and attentive train staff - we managed to order it. A steward brought to our compartment four plastic containers containing a tasty beef and barley stew and a small, dry, airline-style bread roll. 

And then it was time to make up our bunks and go to bed, the rhythmic clatter of the wheels and the somewhat violent rocking of the train sending as all off to sleep pretty quickly.