Paris of Siberia onwards

At thirteen minutes past midnight we arrived at Irkutsk. We were now 5,153 kilometers from – and five hours ahead of – Moscow. Known as the Paris of Siberia, Irkutsk is nevertheless relaxed and unpretentious. Memories of this city were refreshed the moment I saw the station building...I remember strolling along the Angara river on a sunny afternoon and visiting the biggest market full of smoked fish and a great variety of Russian salads. I remember the painstaking trip around this poorly signposted city trying hard to find the House of the Decembrists. All along the way, we saw legacy of the Decembrists (rebels in a revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in the early nineteenth century) – streets after streets of cute little wooden houses adorned with hand-carved decorations, built by those artists, officers and the “gentlemen-rebels” exiled here. In every two Irkutsk residents, there was one exiled man or woman, it is said. Irkutsk became the center of intellectual and social life for the exiled, who have shaped the culture of the city and indeed of eastern Siberia.

We went on a 90-min bus ride from Irkutsk to a fishing village called Listvyanka, dotted with pretty villas built by the wealthy people from Irkutsk. This is where we could see Lake Baikal closely. At Listvyanka, this deepest lake of the world - that is taking up 20% of the total global water quantity – becomes approachable. You can see how clear the water is, and take a sip! (It is drinkable.)

As the train pulled off Irkutsk, I remember the diesel train that we took from Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar in 2002 – that slow, very relaxed rail trip that took 36 hours to reach Ulaanbaatar. (The electrification of the railway across Siberia begun in 1929 and completed in 2002. But some diesel trains still run on the Irkutsk-Ulaanbaatar section.)

The current route we were taking was a shortcut between Irkutsk and our next stop Slyudyanka built in the 1950s to bypass the flood created by the raising level of Lake Baikal. The original Circumbaikal section built between 1901 and 1904 despite the greatest difficulty – due to steep cliffs around the lake - had become mainly a tourist-used branch line.

Andre became more and more depressed as we became closer and closer to Naushki, the town he dreaded but must stay at the Russian side of the Russia-Mongolia border.
‘Our two wagons will be disconnected from your train. You go your way. We stay in Naushki. I don’t want to think about the time to spend on our wagon in Naushki,’ he said.

‘I just spend those five days doing bureaucracy, I mean, you know, the paperwork. We have little to do there. Just walking around the village, watching DVDs and trying to sleep.’

‘Five days later, we would connect up with the coming train from Ulaanbaatar and return on a four-day trip to Moscow. The same trip repeats over and over again.’ It wasn’t boredom that I heard in Andre’s voice, but exhaustion.
At 9pm, he was doing the accounts again. This was the hour when he could take off the dull blue uniform and change into his casual. But he still had his sleeveless jacket on.

‘Hey, you’re still wearing your one-thousand-and-one work jacket after work?’ I couldn’t help commenting.

‘I carry all the cash we made from the restaurant everyday. I keep it in this jacket, hidden under my uniform during work time, so it’s safe with me,’ he patted on his jacket, taking out some cash from its pocket and lay them on the table to be counted up.

When Andre has made records of all the cash, he kept it in a safe at the back of the restaurant. Only then he could put his feet up and sip his coffee without much of an anxious look on his face.

Urnaa and Gunje had fallen asleep when I got back to the cabin. I felt like a cup of tsai but didn’t want to wake them up by making it. I lied on my bed watching the darkness outside the window. We must be passing Lake Baikal soon? I couldn’t help thinking of the sleepless night the last time I saw Lake Baikal. That diesel train struggled through high terrains and thick forests in the middle of the night…Everyone else was asleep. I remember watching, from my upper bunk bed, the train kissing the curves of the lake one by one with frightening deep-grey-greenish dark clouds above it…I’d never seen clouds of that colour.

Tonight, luckily, it was fairly warm and I got to sleep without my jacket on this time.

The next morning we woke up to Lake Baikal in its mist. We were passing right along the southern edge of the lake, on the way to the border.

I guess its beauty lies in its calming vastness that evokes different emotions each time you see it in front of your eyes. This time, it reminds me of time ticking away…Soon before we notice, we will be arriving in our destination and we will part. For Urnaa and Gunje, it means getting closer to home. They couldn’t help feeling excited.


At 8am, we arrived in Ulan Ude, on Lake Baikal's eastern shore. From here, you can either go further east and continue on the trans-Siberian rail all the way to Vladivostok, or, you can travel south, like me, on the trans-Mongolian railway to Ulaanbaatar and then Beijing. The rail was built along the old route travelled by ancient tea caravans between Beijing and Ulan Ude. I imagined there were also many traders going all the way to Irkutsk to exchange tea and silk for the Siberian furs.

The Mongolian line has been a controversy for some time. Its operating was a direct result of a changing Russian-Chinese relationship, reflecting Mongolia’s secondary status in between the two powers. In the early 1950s when relations between Russia and China relaxed, the section between Beijing and Ulaanbaatar began construction. The line started running in 1956, but the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s put a halt to it. It was reopened in the 1980s.

We were stopping in Ulan Ude for half an hour. Green hills can be seen from a distance. Mr Yan said that, for those of us who have travelled from the west, this is the first Siberian town on the rail that may surprise us with its Asian appearance. Following his encouragement, I felt the need to witness the world’s biggest Lenin’s head situated here. ‘Doesn’t Lenin look Asian? Look at his eyes,’ Mr Yan said.

Ulan Ude is the capital of the Republic of Buryat, a member of the Russian Federation. The Republic of Buryat is one of the five republics located east of the Ural Mountains in Asian Russia.

But there’s a lot more to Ulan Ude. The city reflects the diversity of Siberia – rich in terms of varieties of ethnicity and linguistic origins as well as religious practices. Three religions converge and coexist here: shamanism, Buddhism, and Russian Orthodoxy.

The peoples of Siberia fall into three major ethno-linguistic groups: Altaic, Uralic, and Paleo-Siberian. The Buryats are one of the Altaic peoples and their language is called Buryat, part of Turkic languages. The Buryats number approximately 436,000 and are the largest ethnic minority group in Siberia. As the northernmost Mongol group, the Buryats share many things in common with their Mongolian relatives (also part of the Altaic family) despite being annexed and colonized by Russia in search of furs and gold since the seventeenth century – many still maintain a nomadic lifestyle and some live in gers.

Since Ulan Ude, the landscape was gradually transforming from Siberian taiga to Mongolian steppes. The heavy greenness was diluted, and then broken down and given way to the vast brownness of the pure land. I couldn’t help saying to Andre: ‘Isn’t it beautiful to see!’

‘Yes, beautiful,’ he nodded, shrugging his shoulders again in his usual cynical manner, ‘And I’ve lived with this for twenty years.’ It’s hard to imagine this fascinating landscape is just another person’s daily view outside the window.

Andre seemed depressed this morning. Maybe because he was getting closer to the Naushki that he resents so much. His intensifying pessimistic tone of voice was almost contagious. I began to feel down, too.

Then we passed a river, as plain as others along the way. ‘This is Selenga river,’ Andre told me. He knows every river and stream like a page in a book that he has read thousands of times over the past twenty years. He knows it by heart. Selenga river.

He went to the kitchen and fetched me a bowl of borch and a plate of bliny (pancakes). I’d never remembered borch so tasty! The thick cream soup was utterly comforting. And these greasy little bliny with a simple but perfect combination of sugar and salt – I could have another dozen. Andre refused the money when I tried to pay for the food. ‘Keep for your journey to China.’ That was actually the nicest thing he’d ever said.

‘Come. Come to see this,’ he directed me to the front of the corridor between the two wagons. The door was wide open, allowing in a cool breeze. The rail was rolling on slowly. I could reach out from here and feel the wind from the steppes blowing in my face! I could almost touch the grassland…

‘It’s good?’ Andre asked innocently.

‘It’s very good,’ I said.