And Away We Go July 18, 2006

Tatiana, Svetta (the lead guide for the Irkutsk agency) and Andrew our driver picked Holly and I up at the guest house around 10AM and we headed for the open air museum that include both original and reproduction buildings. (I didn’t get the name of the museum and we are trying not to pick up brochures for obvious reasons.) The museum had exhibits dating back to the original settlements founded in the 17th century. Svetta has been guiding for 7 years and was very knowledgeable not only about the village but also about Irkutsk. She explained how in the late 18th and early 19th centuries tax was per house so, people being people, a family would just keep adding on to the original family home as the sons got older and married. You might have a house that had six or eight rooms added, usually in a line off one side of the house. The typical house was actually a walled compound made up of a house with a planked front yard with a work shop and storage areas on the far side. The back yard was for holding livestock at night; they turned them out to graze during the day, with a barn and a banya (dry sauna) on the far side. Svetta tells us that the banya was very common on the Siberian frontier, evidently considered a necessity to get through the winters here. The back sides of the perimeter buildings were connected by log walls to enclose the compound with the house being at the center. Multiple bed partners were common - which usually meant very young children would sleep with grandma / pa and older siblings would also sleep together in the name of space and keeping warm during the long cold Siberian winter nights. All buildings are constructed from thick logs preferably of larch or cedar, some of which have lasted for 200 years. The museum with Svetta’s Russian explanation and Tatiana’s translation, was very interesting and we spent a couple of hours there. (Just a note there is very little bilingual signage in Russia or at least in Siberia. This has spurred Holly to start studying the language using a small Russia / English dictionary that we bought in Hong Kong. I will depend on her to get us through the next four days until we meet our next guides.)

Our next stop was the grocery store. From our excursion there I would say that Russia is well on the road to economic recovery as the shelves of this store had all kinds of products including sweets and fresh fruits as well as the infamous toilet paper that we were told to make sure we carried because “you can’t get it in Russia”. We were provisioning for the three and a half day train trip to Moscow and bought apples, pears, bananas, instant noodles and oatmeal, bottles of water and a bar of Russian chocolate for each day on the train. (Another note, each train car has a samovar which is a hot water urn that is available 24 hours a day. The interesting thing about the samovar is that when the train is stopped for extended periods the water is kept hot by burning wood in a small firebox at the base of the urn. When the train is moving it is heated electrically. All electricity is provided by a generator that is belt drive from the train wheels.)

We had lunch at a Ukrainian restaurant where the common theme of portions-way-too-large continued. All the food we have had here has been delicious and we end up eating too much. We are back to two meals a day which as been our norm for the last couple of years but even with all of the walking we have been doing I’m afraid we will exit Russia larger than when we entered.

After a quick driving tour to see some of the surviving magnificent churches and traditional wooden houses in town we made our way to the railway station where Tatiana and Svetta helped us find our train. We said goodbye to our new friends and boarded the train which pulled out of the station at 4:30PM.

We have a first class cabin on this train, which means that the cabin is the same size as on the train from Ulaanbaatar but there is only two berths. We wanted space (a relative term) and privacy since we will be on the train for so long. We will eat three small meals a day on the train for no other reason than to help keep ourselves busy. We have novels, travel books and Ipods to help us pass the time and we expect the scenery to be fascinating at times but three and a half days mostly cooped up in a room 7’ X 6’ (and that is the measurements of the walls) will be taxing. The actual open floor space is 60” X 18” when you take into consideration the berths and a small fold down table.

The train carries us into the long shadows of the waning Siberian day and across a vast amount of country. During the next three days we will cross 60 degrees of longitude, 5185 kilometers (3211 miles) of Russia and move our clocks back 5 hours while averaging 45 mph. If you started your train trip in Moscow to reach the Pacific Ocean and the eastern border of Russia you would travel to Vladivostok. From Moscow you would ride 9289 kilometers or 5759 miles of rail to reach your destination. This is a big country!