Well, Albania and I have parted ways, and I’m heading into the second of three legs of the Trans-Siberian railroad. Technically, I guess, it’s the Trans-Mongolian, but everyone knows it best by Trans-Siberian, so I’ll continue to refer to it that way.
Right now I’m in a coffee shop in Siberia, in Irkutsk, Russia. It is a proper city of over half a million people and it is farther away from home than I have ever been. It feels like it, too. There is a strange disconnect between this busy city and the fact that we are in the middle of so much isolation. It makes me wonder what being in Mongolia will be like. I’ll find out soon, since I get on a train tonight bound for Ulaanbaatar, the second stop.
7 days of steppes and yurts and horses? I can’t wait. My long cherished dream of galloping across the grassland with my hair streaming is finally coming to fruition. I had to make sure to do it while I still had hair to stream and hips that could a) hold me on a galloping horse and b) not break so easily if I fell off of said horse.
This trip was on the “Want to do sooner rather than later” portion of the bucket list, and now that it’s finally here I can definitely say I’m glad I’m doing it now, when I can roll with all the crazy Russia throws my way. It’s definitely been interesting so far- we are the only English speaking tourists, and in fact have seen only one other family of tourists on our train at all.
I can forgive my roommate for pissing in my boot, because he and his buddies in the next room over sang folk songs and played guitar and got drunk off of vodka, which created the vibe I was looking forward to when I planned this trip, to be honest.
Here’s a map of where I’ve been/where I’m going. It was supposed to be all overland, including trains and buses from Beijing, China, to Vientiane, Laos, but Bobby and I decided in St. Petersburg that we’d rather spend 5 hours on a plane than 5 days on trains and buses. I think overland from Albania to China is enough to say we gave it the old college try. Oh, we also cut out our planned stops in Latvia and Lithuania in favor of more time in Estonia. Best decision ever.
Here are some photos of stops we made along the way. More to come later.
Bobby and I planned and booked this entire trip on our own, so at every stop we have gone on a fun adventure looking for the random travel agency office where no one speaks English and they give us paper tickets. In St. Petersburg, it was in a random apartment building. We’re off to find out where it is here, and then it’s back on the train.
Until the next time I can be bothered to sign in and post something.
Well I’m changing all my strings I’m gonna write another traveling song
About all the billion highways and the cities at the break of dawn
Well I guess the best that I can do now is pretend that I’ve done nothing wrong
And to dream about a train that’s gonna take me back where I belong
Bright Eyes
*Nope, never told anyone “all about it later”. This was another trip I wrote about in my diary and never put together in a story. I can’t say I regret not having to worrying about documentation, and right now, as I create this site in September of 2020 in the thick of quarantine, I guess I can tell myself it was all part of the master plan so I would have something to do while the world burned down. Originally published August 1, 2013, on Blogger.
