08.04.08
Taiga! Taiga! burning bright ..
So the next section of our journey started with a thirty seven hour train ride, that’s right 37! The reason for this being that we had to come down from Tomsk to join the main TransSib line. Seven hours were spent waiting at a station in a town called Taiga, The Moscow-Irkutsk train was to come by at 1am and our carriages were to be joined up to it. At first it all seemed good .. but then it slowly dawned on us that we had SEVEN hours to go. Fortunately there was a little corner store nearby selling food and drink. Some of us ventured into the town to have a look despite the warnings of Yuri, a Russian guy from the next carriage, he was a frequent traveller on this line as he studied in Tomsk but his family were in a city close to Irkutsk.
Â
He was right! It was like been in an American wild west town, there were hoons driving around in their cars taking corners at high speed making walking in town a bit of an extreme sport. There seemed to be a few restaurants in town but they were all shut, I’d have thought they’d stay open to cash in on all the passengers that are stuck in town for so long. So after having a quick look around we wandered back to the station to kill a little more time. There was a bar at the station that was open until 10 so we settled in for a couple of hours playing cards and drinking Baltikas! One discovery had been made by the girls - The station toilet block had stalls without doors. And to make it even funnier it had large windows that opened out on to the platform so everyone could see in. I shouldn’t have been so quick to laugh because I soon discovered that the male toilets were being repaired and so unavailable. Luckily there were toilets inside the station that were nice and more importantly .. usable.
Â
Once the bar closed we bought some more beer to carry with us and headed back out to our carriage (Note I don’t say train because the engine was long gone .. it was just a set of three carriages sitting by themselves at the platform). By this time a small group of travellers had gathered on the platform to have a bit of a impromptu party. There were a few French, a few Austrian, one girl from Luxembourg and of course four Australians. We spent the next couple of hours swapping travel stories, drinking beer and Pastis. Pastis is basically Absinthe without the wormwood. So as you would expect we all had a good time with random bouts of dancing and singing. Every now and then we had to set our bottles down and pretend to be just having a chat as station police would wander past hoping to catch someone in the act of drinking on the platform - illegal. Luckily for us there were no fines issued that night. Apparently we had such a good time that Kelly, Cara and I were snoring like freight trains … Lisa wasn’t impressed but couldn’t do anything about it. I almost felt guilty 
Â
The next day was the beginning of the end. Yuri had come earlier to have chat to us and the discussion moved on to food as Cara was asking if vegetarian Pelmeni existed. In case I haven’t mentioned the before Pelmeni are dumplings in a soup/broth. They’re shaped a little like tortellini. Anyway .. at one of our stops, around lunch time, we noticed a wide variety of food being sold by the vendors. At most stations we would have people selling various goods to the travellers on the train. At this station we found far more edible looking items than at any of our previous stops. While browsing I found a lady selling large pelmeni and also the vegetarian variety. Excited by this discovery the girls swooped in to buy all forms of goodies. I bought some mystery meat patties and some large dumplings while the girls bought the vegetarian ones and also some of the large ones. There has been much speculation as to the cause of our next adventure but I’m fairly sure that this is where it began.
Â
So… you know how, normally, if you saw a person selling food on the street and it was sitting in liquid and out in the sun you’d probably walk right past? Hmm yes .. well this didn’t happen .. we all made purchases and took them back on to the train all excited about the feast we were about to have. Needless to say, by that evening one by one the girls were, to steal an expression, having an intimate relationship with the toilet. You’ll hear mention of this over the next couple of emails because it took weeks for them to recover. This actually led to a few other interesting epsiodes along he way as well. Let me just say, a train is the last place you want to have stomach problems! We finally made it into Irkutsk relatively well and we met there by Damien our transfer guide. We picked up a new phrase from him “This is the system.”. At all of our other stops the guide had known which carriage we were on etc and we were always met on the platform. Damien had been waiting elsewhere and as a result was a little late to meet us. He started the introductions by telling us that we should have been on the lookout for him at one of the exits because this is the system here. So a bit of a bad start to the relationship there…actually calling him Damien at this point is probably not quite accurate since we had no idea what his name was. I overheard the drive say “Vladimir” so I assumed this was his name and proceeded to call him Vladimir for the remainder of the day.
Â
We had a few hours to kill so we went on a bit of a city tour visiting various churches and monuments and then were dropped off at the wharf a few hours early. We sat around for a little while but were soon bored. Kelly and I headed out to explore the surrounding area leaving Cara and Lisa in the “terminal” reading. Soon we had exhausted the exploration possibilities as well. Luckily for us there was a Mexican restaurant across the path from the ferry terminal so we spent the next hour having lunch there. We were soon joined by everyone else that had been waiting at the terminal. The ferry turned up on time and we all piled on and headed to Bolshie Koty, a little village on the banks of Lake Baikal. We were to spend two nights there .. more on that in the next update.