beyond Krasnoyarsk

It was slightly warmer in the cabin tonight – the Chinese train staff had put more fuel in for us. I managed to catch up with some sleep. The train arrived at Malinsk at 0:44am. It is a small town that became rich as the centre of the gold rush in Siberia in the nineteenth century. The train passed the small town Achinsk at 4am while we were asleep.

At 6:50am, we got to Krasnoyarsk, situated on the Yenisei River. We were now 4,065 kilometers from Moscow. Krasnoyarsk is the third largest city in Siberia with a population of over 900,000. In the days of the empire, this was a major centre to which political exiles – such as the eight Decembrists – were banished. During the time of centralized industrialization after the Russian Revolution, numerous large factories were constructed here. Today, the appearance of the city is a curious mixture of post-Second-World-War dull-looking, concrete apartments and a number of timber mansions and Art Nouveau buildings.

Time on the rail is very much about adjusting to a different pattern of living and fulfilling the day-to-day basic needs. For instance, what could possibly freshen up your day on this journey? I’d say definitely a proper wash with wet wipes! It made me feel alive again… It was a leisurely spent morning. I drank tea with Urnaa and Gunje in our cabin. Urnaa seemed to have got over Oleg. She was lying on her bed, chewing a large piece of Hungarian chocolate and practicing English with my Mongolian phrasebook. ‘What is your trade,’ she repeated the sentence.

Gunje looked out the window thoughtfully at the Siberian villages. ‘What are you thinking, Gunje?’ I asked.

‘I think of Budapest. My jobs,’ she answered quietly. ‘Time is gone.’ Did she mean to say that time was wasted?

Then she smiled with a few wrinkles at the tip of her eyes. I imagined the years she had sacrificed her youth working in a Chinese kitchen in Budapest.

‘Did you go out much in Budepest?’ I asked her.

‘On day off, we go out, to swimming pools,’ Gunje said, showing me the pictures of her and Urnaa in a crowded swimming pool in the centre of Budapest.

‘Look!’ she laughed at a picture of her revealing the size of her breasts. ‘Good mother I will be!’ She meant to say that she will be having lots of children and breastfeeding them.

‘But no time to look for husband!’ she laughed again. Then she surprised me with her knowledge of Chinese language: ‘Bu hao! Bu hao! (meaning ‘no good, no good!’)’

‘No time because too much work! Bosses, bu hao! Restaurant work too bad. Factory work no good. They pay us $50 a day in garment factory. No regular hours. Work late often. Only us Mongolians and Chinese do this work in Budapest.’