From Siberia with love

I have always felt happy on a train, unlike many travellers who rush to airports where they are frisked and searched before jetting over exactly why I do train travel: to peep at how real people live – the back gardens, the cowsheds, the shantytowns, people plodding along dirt roads, grimy children playing alongside the track, hideous apartment blocks in the middle of nowhere, ugly steel mills, golden-domed cathedrals and bewildering landscapes painted in the hues of the season.

Any conversation with a train enthusiast like me always turns to the inevitable question: Have you done the Trans-Siberian? The world’s longest railway continues to captivate, even in this era of instant-gratification travel.

It’s an iconic trip yet few do it, perhaps because of the immensity of the journey, the inhospitableness of the land, the language barrier and the thought of dealing with Russian red tape. Yet it’s actually easy to organise; it’s relatively inexpensive and South Africans no longer need a visa to visit Russia.

Those who have done it tell tales of gently gliding through an icy wilderness, navigating the planet’s largest swamps, hugging the shores of the earth’s biggest freshwater lake and stopping in cities that were outlawed to foreigners under Soviet rule.

But the train is also about living among strangers, tolerating their stink and perfume and eavesdropping on opinions and arguments in strange languages. Those travelling in second and third class tell of everyone sleeping in their clothes, the windows shut, oversized luggage blocking the doorway, damp boots steaming under the seats, old leather jackets and glazed-eyed Russians swigging vodka for breakfast.

You will circumnavigate about a quarter of the planet and cover an expanse that is greater than the flying distance between Johannesburg and Moscow. The Trans-Siberian is a small Russia rolling through big Russia. It is not only an astonishing feat of engineering, but it traverses a nation’s turmoil and volatility; its enormity