I was reading about Mongolia on wikipedia last night (as one does), which reminded me that one of my life goals is to take the a train from China to Finland one of these days. So, in reading about the various Trans- lines, it occurred to me that somebody here might have done one of these. So, anyone got any experiences to share?
You might want to read this article from this week’s New Yorker.
While we’re waiting for first-hand tales from other Dopers, you might also read The Forbidden Railway, the travelogue of two people who took the train from Vienna to Pyongyang (!) using the Trans-Siberian Railroad for most of their route.
Woah, that’s crazy. I’d love to go to North Korea - although I was actually thinking it’d be cool to do the reverse-trip, being on the west coast. Apparently most people go west to east, might be interesting to do the reverse.
I’ve done Beijing to Moscow a couple of years ago, with my wife as a sort of late honeymoon (we’d got married the year before and just taken a long weekend break after the wedding). It pretty much lived up to reputation, awesome trip. It was really all about the train; we stopped off in Ulan Battar, Irkutsk and Ekaterinberg, but my best memories are all of just being on the train. We only took a few days in those places, so it was just like being a regular tourist, hard to really get to grips with them. Ulan Battar was probably the most interesting spot en route. Another bonus is that you’re starting and finishing in two world cities. Beijing was as good as I expected it to be, but I was also really impressed with Moscow, had a lot of fun there.
That’s just standard sight-seeing, though. It’s the train that is the unique experience. We played a lot of cribbage, read a lot of books, and generally did stuff that doesn’t sound too dramatic on re-telling. If you asked me what was so good about it there is nothing I can really pinpoint as an event, because they’re aren’t really any major events outside of stopping and getting off. It’s more about the sustained experience of travelling 3000 miles by train, meeting other travellers and seeing how the whole thing works. It was quite a contemplative journey.
Practically speaking we arranged it through a company, which seems the standard approach. This meant we knew where we would be staying at each place. It would be difficult to just free-style the whole trip, there seems to be a lot of bureaucracy in Russia with just booking into a hotel as a foreigner. You’d need an appetite for seat-of-the-pants travel to just get on the train and go, and I’m not sure you can even do this; probably be a lot easier if you can speak Russian. It’s common to do it E - W just on a cost basis, I think flights back to Europe from Vladivostok are expensive. Although typing that I’m not sure why a flight from Beijing to London would be any more costly than the other way round.
Yeah, long-distance trains can be a lot of fun. I did a 24-hour Hong Kong-Beijing when I was studying abroad, ended up hanging out with a couple of brothers from New Zealand, and watching the Chinese countryside, which was fascinating (there were inexplicable pyramids). It really made me want to do something similar, but longer.
Anyways, about your trip - what made Ulan Bator so interesting? I’d really like to get to Mongolia, but it’s actually the rest of the country that appeals to me - that’s as close to the middle of nowhere as you can really get by train. How much time did you take off-train? Was it mostly in the big cities, or did you get a chance to see some of the smaller areas? Anything that would have to go on a to-see list? Since you did the East-West trip, how crowded was it? Who was taking the train - tourists, locals, Europeans, Asians? I’d love some more details.
I considered doing the Trans-Siberian a few years ago. A conversation with a guy I used to know who lived in Vladivostok told me that it was better to go the whole way to Vladivostok rather than dropping down through Mongolia to Beijing. The eastermost third of the Russian trip from Lake Baikal is the most picturesque. Other reading and conversations I have had concur with this.
Ulan Bator was a bit of a shit hole, which I found quite interesting. I’d not read anything about it in advance, so it was a surprise to me to see how soviet-ised it was. I’d thought it would be like a Chinese city, but the architecture and feel to the place was much more Russian.
It can be a bit frustrating passing through the stop-offs that you don’t get more time to spend there. We were taking something like 3 weeks total, so never had more than a few days in each place along the way. I like outdoors stuff, for example, and we hired bikes and went cycling out of Ulan Bator into the country side (got chased by a pack of wild dogs, not fun). Later on I was talking to some guys in a bar who had finished up a serious mountain bike trip out in the wilds of Mongolia, shipped their own bikes there etc; it would have been great to have that time to really get off the beaten track. Or seeing Lake Baikal at Irkutsk for half a day was pretty cool, but nothing compared to getting the hiking boots on and really heading for the hills. So unless you’re in the privileged position of being able to devote months to the trip, I guess you need to accept that you’re only going to get a cursory look at the cities you pass through.
You meet all sorts of people on the train - Chinese petty smugglers who ask to put stuff in your bag at the border, a 60 year old American bloke who had lined up a Russian woman in each city via the internet, a lot of wealthy students and a lot of everyday Russian people. It also attracts rail enthusiasts - the rail gauge between either China and Mongolia or Mongolia / Russia, I forget which, is different. To deal with this the entire train goes into a massive wharehouse in the desert with everyone on it, and gets jacked up. The train wheels (called bogies, I believe), are then swapped out. Now, most people would find this moderately interesting and might watch the process for 5 minutes. I recall a German guy practically having a heart attack with excitement - videos the whole thing on his camcorder for well over an hour and shouts out a loud running commentary to his wife! I guess it’s not every day you get to experience a bogie-changing shed.