Today we officially passed from Europe into Asia. I spent about an hour looking out the window waiting for the obelisk to mark this momentous occasion, but I must have either been looking the wrong way, or chose an inopportune time to blink and missed the fucking thing.
While the countryside has been beautiful- autumnal birch trees, pine thickets and winding rivers- the villages are nothing short of grim; clusters of hunched, wooden houses with a muddy track marking the only escape route.
The first major city east of the Urals is Ekaterinburg, where we're spending one night before embarking on the 60 hour marathon that will take us to Irkutsk and Lake Baikal. Always the master of understatement, Lonely Planet suggests that you need to be a student of Soviet Constructivism to appreciate the architecture here.
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| Just to prove that it ain't all onion domes and tsar-funded glory |
So far we've been riding platskart, (third class), which is basically a carriage divided up into nine groups of six bunks to form a massive dormitory. The bunks are surprisingly comfortable and you can set your watch to the train time table. The only problem really is that the carriages are coal-heated to close to 30 degrees, resulting in 54 sweaty, smelly people and 100% of the Russian male population down to their tracksuit pants (or less if you're (un)lucky) within 10 minutes of boarding.
Tomorrow night we're upgrading to kupe (second class), where we'll be four to a compartment, luxuriating in comparative privacy...and hopefully less man-sweat.
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