Back on the train, my new cabin friends are another young couple, Vasily and Tatiana. They hadn’t left Siberia ever, let alone Russia, and are inquisitive and generous. “This is our dog … and this is our house,” Tatiana says, showing me photographs on her phone.
For the next couple of nights, we all fall into an easy chatty mode; broken English, broken Russian, dictionaries to hand, and the cabin feels like home—or more, their home where I’m a guest and they make me comfortable. “Please, here, vodka. Another tea bag, take! A cup of ‘champanski’ with us, it is Valentine’s Day.” My sloe gin, too sickly, too sweet, is not to Tatiana’s taste. But the shortbread is. All too soon, Vladivostok comes and I disembark, emails exchanged, legs wobbly like stepping off a boat. The following day, it would take me nine hours to fly back to Moscow.
When I return home, books still unread, my head is full of snow, taiga and frozen lakes. A Russophile friend tells me: “Russians love train travel because of the togetherness it provides.” I keep thinking of that, and realize that was why I liked it too. It’s togetherness that makes 143 hours and 9,289 kilometers of train travel in the depths of a Russian winter not only doable, but fun and rewarding too.
