Day 214: Back on tracks, part 3

We had breakfast this morning in the hostel – some really nice cherry dumplings made by a friend of Kate's. We then went out and bought some supplies for today's train journey and then got a lift with Anton to the station, where we bought some burgers for lunch.

Now, remember I wrote earlier that the lower the train number, the newer and more modern the train? Not true. This was the Number 12 train, but it was an older style like we were on a few days ago. This one had more effective air-conditioning, however, and was more than comfortable enough for us. The tenants who lived in our house while we undertook the European leg of the journey had left behind a big packet of anti-bacterial wipes, which we brought along on this leg mainly because they were there. And because we have them, we've been wiping down the seats and head rests in these older trains (and the toilet seats, too...). In this case they came away distinctly brown, so we gave everything a double wipe.

Our carriage attendant on this train was a cheerful young and very chatty Bashkir, who spoke decent English. When he discovered that we were from England, he asked whereabouts. Although he hadn't heard of Winchester, when we said it was near Southampton he reeled off an impressive list of past and present Saints footballers.

After we had been on the train for a few hours, the attendant came to the compartment with a big bag full off random merchandise (stuffed toys, a pocket watch, USB sticks shaped like trains and so on). He plonked himself on one of the seats and proceeded to pull bits and pieces out and show them to us, presumably so that we could buy them, although when he got to the end of his presentation he made no attempt to actually sell anything to us. He also made no attempt to leave the compartment – staying for ages, chatting away in broken English about football, the seasons, his job...

When he eventually left, the girls did a bit of schoolwork, I read the New Yorker and we watched the scenery go by. We're back into mixed pine and birch, and the little settlements look much the same. The dominant colour out here is definitely brown – dry grass, dead trees, the wood of the houses – with a bit of green and some brighter colours from the fading paint on some of the buildings. The one primary exception to all of this comes from the cemeteries, which are a riot of colour. I'm not sure exactly where it's all coming from – certainly some is from real and plastic flowers left on the graves – but that doesn't early explain the prevalence of lurid fluorescent pinks and oranges.

On this leg, we've also noticed a rise in the amount of litter scattered around the countryside. It appears that the locals haven't really embraced the idea of landfill, and just dump their rubbish wherever it can't be easily seen. The wind then picks it up and disperses it far and wide, much to the detriment of the scenery.

In the afternoon, the train made a lengthy stop at a station and we all got out to stretch our legs and buy some water and sweets. An enormous coal train was parked on the opposite side of the platform and there was quite a lot of spilled coal down around the tracks, which offered me a chance to give the girls an impromptu geology lesson.

Day 213: So that's a stolby

This morning the alarm went off at 4am Moscow time and by 4.40am (9.40am local time) the beds were stripped, our bags were packed and we were stepping off the train in Krasnoyarsk. It was a sunny day but quite cool, with a gusty breeze that brought the temperature down a few degrees. We walked out of the station to the fountain where we had been told we would meet our ride to the hostel. Sure enough, not long after, a young, bearded Russian man greeted us and took us to his car for the short ride to our accommodation for tonight.

The softly spoken Anton and his more ebullient wife Kate had set up the Granada hostel after staying in similar places during their travels in northern Spain. It seems to be doing well, but we got the impression that the business had completely taken over their lives. They kindly upgraded us from two double rooms with an external bathroom in the hostel to a larger room in a different building around the corner with a double, single and sofa bed, and our own bathroom.

Bags deposited and suncream applied, we walked into town and to a bus stop (stopping on the way to pick up some supplies and for a really good coffee at Mark's Cafe - a super cool coffee bar set up inside a small van parked by the side of the road). After a short wait, we hopped aboard the number 37 bus, which took us way, way out of town to the local ski resort. The resort borders Stolby National Park, which is famous for its, yes, stolbies, which are large granite outcrops that rise up and above the mixed pine and birch forest (the rock formations attracted climbers, who developed a new method of cliff climbing called Stolbisty, hence the name). We took the chairlift to the top of the mountain and walked up to a lookout from which you could see a number of stolbies. A path led away from the lookout and down into the forest, so we decided to explore further. The weather had started to close in and before long, it was raining and then snowing. The path was becoming progressively muddier and the weather progressively more miserable so we decided to turn back. By the time we reached the top of the chairlift, however, the sun was out again and we headed over the other side, where we had a good view of another stolby. The slope we walked up here was the baby run for the ski resort, and beside it were numerous little wooden platforms with roofs, seating and simple charcoal grills – clearly the food concessions for the resort. 

We then caught the chairlift back to the bottom and the bus back into town and stopped off for a few pelmeni (dumplings) at another cafeteria restaurant. As we wandered back into town, another bank of black clouds rolled in and as the first drops of rain started to fall, we ducked into a coffee chain outlet to escape what looked like a nasty downpour. Unfortunately, the coffee was horrible and horribly expensive, but by the look of the puddles outside when we re-emerged, it was probably worth it.

Back in our room, we surveyed our options for dinner and chose a place that was fairly close by. However, when we were on our way there, we changed our minds – opting for a trendier place that was about 40 minutes walk away. Unfortunately, however, we hadn't brought the details and were relying on our memory of where it was what it was called. Bad move. We spent I hate to think how long wandering around the streets looking in vain for the restaurant. Kate tried asking a few pedestrians but they just looked at her with frightened eyes and hurried off.

Thankfully, we still had the directions to our original choice, so off we trudged, eventually sitting down sometime after 9pm. The restaurant served traditional Russian/Siberian food - I opted for a venison steak (which I assume was probably reindeer) and Kate had borscht. It was a nice meal, but were all absolutely exhausted by the time we finally made it back to our room.

Day 212: Back on tracks, part 2

Igor arrived at the apartment this morning just before 10am to take us to the station. Once there, we staked out a spot in the waiting room and then attempted to purchase a few last-minute items for the train. Unfortunately, however, we had given Igor all of our small-denomination notes to pay for the apartment and everyone we approached with our 5,000 rouble note just shook their heads and turned away. 

Soon enough, we were on the train, where we were pleasantly surprised to discover that although our train number was quite high – 56 – the train was a new one, like our first, so the seats were comfier, the bathrooms cleaner and there was a power outlet in the compartment. We had read stories about how important it was to ingratiate yourself with the carriage attendants, prompting Kate to attempt to learn the Russian for 'Hello' (a horrible word so fiendishly difficult to pronounce that we gave up on the idea long before we boarded our first trans-Siberian train), but once again, we had a really sweet middle-aged woman in charge of our carriage, so no ingratiating was really necessary. It's interesting how many middle-aged women are employed by the Russian railways – not just as carriage attendants, but also in other support roles, such as refilling the water tanks at the stations.

Once again, we had a meal included in our ticket and once again, it was the same dish of beef and buckwheat (not barley, as I had previously assumed). This time, however, it arrived as lunch, not dinner. The scenery passing our windows today was quite different. More open areas of grass and no conifers – just silver birch. The small settlements, however, were much the same – cute little buildings of dark wood in varying states of disrepair. We've solved the mystery of the mini settlements now. The buildings we're seeing are dachas – seasonal second homes typically used by urban dwellers as summer retreats and for growing crops.

For dinner, we ate our pot noodles, all comparing notes on the relative merits of our relatively uninformed choices. Kate was horrified to discover that what she had assumed was chicken-based was in fact turkey-based (the clue was in the picture of a turkey on the lid), and that it came with a sachet of actual turkey meat that bore a more than passing resemblance to cat food; and we were all slightly envious of Zoe's choice – a grilled-meat version that actually tasted of grilled meat, along with a flavour that we decided was fresh basil.

After dinner it was time to make our beds, a process made considerably more trying by the fact that we were doing it as the train went around some tight corners, tilting over alarmingly and throwing us around the compartment.

Day 211: Here we are in sunny Siberia

Last night, we set the alarm for 5.30am Moscow time (an hour before the train was due to arrive at our destination), but Kate was awoken just before it went off by a tap on the arm from our carriage attendant. We climbed down from our bunks and began packing up and stripping off all of the bed linen and were calmly sitting on our seats as the train pulled in to Omsk.

We were met on the platform by Igor, the mostly Russian-only-speaking representative from the company that lets out the apartment in which we're staying tonight. He led us to his car and then drove us to the apartment, along Omsk's very wide streets – which lack lane markings, giving it the slightly Wild West feel of a developing world metropolis. Omsk is a sprawling city of about 1.1 million people situated on the confluence of the Irtysh and Om rivers, both of which we crossed on the way to our apartment.

Once there, we dropped off our bags and Kate chatted on Igor's phone to someone else from the letting agent who spoke English. Through him, she arranged for Igor to drive us to a nearby supermarket, where he dropped us off. We then indulged in one of our favourite pastimes – wandering around a foreign supermarket admiring the unusual foodstuffs (in this, case mostly the bizarre dried and smoked fish) and putting together a menu for the next few days (in this case, a roast chicken for lunch and dinner and lots and lots of pot noodles for tomorrow's train journey). 

After lunch back at the apartment (and several loads of washing – we've pretty much been wearing the same clothes since leaving the UK) we headed out to explore Omsk, revelling in the glorious weather – paradoxically, our arrival in Siberia has offered us our first chance to ditch our coats. We passed a typical Russian church, complete with shiny gold domes, and a big theatre (you're never far from a theatre in Russia), and when we reached the main shopping street, we came across a series of interesting metal statues. 

We then crossed the Om River and then turned off the main road and walked down to the Irtysh river. I walked back to buy some coffees from a guy with a machine in the back of a van, who introduced himself as Rashid and refused payment, saying that the coffees were a present to me. The stories about the levels of crime and general lawlessness in Russia that we had read in the media in the months and years preceding our journey had made both Kate and I a bit nervous about visiting the country, but this was just one of numerous random acts of kindness that we've experienced since arriving here. As a general rule, the anonymous Russians we've met have been a pretty dour, unsmiling, uncommunicative lot, but on an individual level, we've met numerous very friendly, helpful and warm people, who've bent over backwards for us, even when they couldn't communicate with us.

Back at the river, we sat on the grass and drank our coffees then walked back towards the apartment on a path along the bank. Stopping for photos at another sculpture, we fell into conversation with a Russian woman who had visited Sydney and the Blue Mountains – her ex-boyfriend was Australia and she had travelled there about a decade ago.

Back at the apartment, the girls spent a little while playing in the decidedly idiosyncratic playground adjacent to the block's car park, but even they found it a bit too hazardous for their tastes and it wasn't long before they had retreated upstairs to the apartment.

Day 210: Back on tracks

We were up fairly late this morning, and while I finished packing up, Kate and the girls went back to yesterday's restaurant to get some breakfast. By the time I was ready to join them, however, they had returned as the restaurant didn't open until 11am, so we all headed out to a supermarket we had passed earlier to see what we could find - some pastries for breakfast, and some fruit and veg and pot noodles for the train. Then it was back to the hotel, where a taxi came to pick us up to take us back to the station (a bit less than £1 for the bus or £2 for a taxi – an absolute no-brainer). On the way there, we passed several large parks that were alive with large groups of people of all ages participating in some sort of working bee - tidying up, raking, digging, bagging and so forth. 

Once at the station, we found the waiting room and dumped our stuff. I then went off to determine how to actually get onto the platforms – which turned out to be a good thing as it was far from obvious, with very little in the way of signage. Suitably prepared, we made it onto the train with the minimum of fuss and were soon on our way again. This was train number 92, so it was correspondingly older and more basic than our previous train, with harder seats, less-effective air-conditioning, no power outlet in the compartment and a very grubby bathroom. We did have a very sweet plump, middle-aged female carriage attendant, however, who passed by every now and then, vacuuming and mopping and so forth. 

With the novelty of train travel having diminished a little, we filled the time with some School of Mum and Dad. Later, the girls returned from exploring the carriage with news that an old woman in one of the nearby compartments was travelling with her cat. 

After a pot noodle dinner, the girls played in the corridor with Katya, a rather excitable and apparently unexhaustible Russian toddler from another nearby compartment.