The overnight train journey to Kazan took around 14 hours. We were in a kupé with 2 Russian guys from St. Petersburg. We got in our beds, exchange a few words in English with them and went to sleep. When we woke up, one of them was gone already. The other one, a very friendly guy, kept us entertained until reaching our stop. Read More
It was a sunny and warm day when we arrived at Yekaterinburg. But shortly before arriving we had a small argument between us and we spent the next couple of hours sitting at the front of the train station trying to solve our differences. A couple sitting next to us could sense that we were not having a nice conversation so the guy interrupted us and showed us his phone. On the screen we could see that Google Translate was open and the text translated read: “We think you are a nice couple. Please don’t argue. It is a nice day”. Then they smiled and left. We were both surprised. We decided to walk to a coffee shop to have some food and solve our discussion. Read More
The train journey from Krasnoyarsk to Tomsk was 12 hours in total. As Tomsk is not on the Trans-Siberian Railway line, we had to stop at Taiga station and take a local train from there. When we arrived, we took a taxi to a hostel that was suggested in our travel guide. Unfortunately, the hostel was not existing (or we couldn’t find it). We asked around and checked with the nearby shops but nobody seem to know this hostel. So the taxi driver took us to a nearby hotel he knew. The location and price was good for us so we decided to stay there. Read More
The train ride was really good. We had the kupe for ourselves and we used the time to do some writing, enjoy the views, and Mariana used the time to recover too. Read More
At 23 pm Moscow time and 4 am local time we took train number 077. The train stopped for 20 minutes at the station and we had time to settle in our sleeping compartment while the train was still. This train was older than our first train but still confortable and clean. We had a kupe (second class) which has 4 beds, but luckily we were the only ones in this compartment. Read More
Rainy morning in Ulan-Ude so we spent some hours at our room booking train tickets, responding emails and planning some further stops along the Trans-Siberian train. We had some breakfast and spent some time talking with our hosts Anfisa and Rusland. We said goodbye to our nice hosts and got ready for a day tour. Read More
Our day started not so early as we went to bed late and Mario still needed time to recover from the vodka he had on the train. We had breakfast with Anfisa and Rusland and then we followed their advice to start exploring the city. Read More
We woke up early to have breakfast and get all ready for our first train ride! It was raining but that didn’t stop our excitement. Our train was at 11, we had our e-tickets ready (we bought them online in advance), so we left the hostel in the direction to the train station. An important thing to point out is that all trains run on Moscow time, so we made sure we had one clock set with Moscow time (Mario’s phone) and one on local time (Mariana’s phone). From Vladivostok to Moscow we were going to cross 5 different time zones so we were getting ready for adjusting our clocks almost every day. Read More
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