I really really really want to go on the trans-Siberian railway.
All the websites I can find about how to do it make things cost way too much. In the multi-thousands of dollers.
I know that can’t be right. I took a train across the US for $160.00, and that wasn’t even the cheapest deal I could have gotten. There has to be better way. I am perfectly happy in coach, and I can pack my own food. Is there a way to get really cheap tickets?
Have a Russian buy them, and then impersonate him/her. For many popular Russian attractions, including most museums, there is a “Russian” price and a “foreigner” price, usually orders of magnitude apart. Good luck impersonating a Russian on a 10-day train trip, though.
What sites are you looking at? Are they for tour operators and such? If so, I imagine they’re marking things up rather severely. I don’t know how difficult it is to get walk-up tickets for the Trans-Siberian, and also you should keep in mind that to get a Russian visa, you are going to either have to show hotel reservations or a formal invitation from a Russian citizen. I don’t know how that works for the Trans-Siberian.
Also, 10 days is a really, really long time to be on a train. I did a 36-hour chunk of the Trans-Siberian (Novosibirsk to Irkutsk) and was completely stir-crazy by the time I got off. Of course, if you have company you can actually tolerate, it might be different. Be prepared to drink lots of tea, and bring your own snacks, because the food on the train (although not the tea) was pretty vile. (Picture cold, overboiled spaghetti with chunks of half-rancid hot dogs and ketchup on it. And that was the “vegetarian” meal. Russians still don’t get the whole “vegetarian” concept. I’m told you can generally buy food from vedors in the train stations when the train stops.)
This site seems to have a ton of useful general information, and this one addresses booking tickets specifically, although it seems a bit UK-centric.
If you manage to pull this off, I highly recommend a stop in Irkutsk/Lae Baikal. The lake is unbelievable, and extremely clean! When I was there in 1995, we went out in a boat, and you could see every pebble on the floor of the lake at 40 meters. My main regret was that it was a motorboat, which scared away all the wildlife. We tok a tour of the oceanography museum, and they told us that there are 4,000 species in Lake Baikal that don’t exist anywhere else, including freshwater seals. You should be able to find books in English, but I don’t think anyone in the museum speaks English. There is also a solar telescope on Lake Baikal, but I don’t know whether they still give public tours, either.
Prices around Irkutsk are on the high side, though. We saw lots of British and Japanese tourists. Maybe things have changed a bit since the economic crash of '98. If you do end up doing this, an acquaintance of mine may have some tips for you; he’s done it himself. (And has very entertaining stories about being telemarketed in his Vladivostok hotel room by the local working gorls.)
This isn’t anything I’ll be able to do anytime soon, as I’m flat broke, but it’d be a good thing to save up for.
Getting an invite from a Russian citizen actually shouldn’t be that hard. I guess I should learn a bit of Russian because spending ten days on the train surrounded by people I can’t talk to seems like not such a good idea. I survived a four day train trip pretty well, so I’m guessing this won’t be too much of a problem. I’d like to a few stopovers. I’m still not sure if I want to head to Vladivostok (which I have a certain facination for- I read the Vladivostok Daily every day) or Beijing, which is certainly more exotic.
Well more things to dream about. Now if only I could afford to pay my rent…