Siberia Mongolia Overview: A friend and I took a 4 week trip. Moscow to Vladivostok on the Trans-Siberian railway broken by a 10 day side trip in the middle, Irkutsk, to go to Mongolia. May-June.

Moscow. Aeroflot Airbus, Dulles to Moscow, day and half sightseeing in Moscow. Moscow subway very extensive, frequent, comfortable, some very long escalators but they go fast, flat rate, 10 rubles (35 cents) anywhere. Internet cafes $2/hour. 21 McDonalds in Moscow (big Mac 42 rubles ($1.47). Our hotel was near Old Arbat Street, a long Pedestrian street. Very pleasant. Traffic heavy in Moscow.

Moscow to Irkutsk (Lake Baikal). Trans-Siberian Train 10, the Baikal, goes from Moscow to Irkutsk every other day, 4 time zones. 19 car train, half 2nd class sleepers, 4 bunks to a compartment, a mattress pad and clean bedding furnished, train leaves at 11:30 PM. One restaurant car, simple, cheap, good food. Most people bring their own food, vodka, and beer, which can also be bought enroute from trackside vendors. To Irkutsk, 3000+/- miles, 76 and a half hours, locomotive changed every 600 miles or so, two attendants in every car, they are constantly cleaning, 2 toilets per car, toilets cleaner than Amtrak, hot water samovar always perking for your coffee, tea, or dehydrated soup (Ramen Noodle or Cup-O-Soup type), total length now electrified, very few Americans on board, foreigners mostly German or other European, English the common language, dress very informal, sweat pants and sandals, men and women share same compartment, one car is a first class sleeper, same layout except only 2 bunks per compartment. There is no shower for passengers, (one compartment in our car had a shower for train staff only), several 20 minute stops, numerous 2 minute stops, passenger and freight trains (mainly coal, lumber, oil) passing the other direction perhaps 4 times per hour, most passenger trains are locals, 3rd (hard) class. Smoking only permitted between cars. Sleeping not easy, roadbed uneven, lousy pillows, relatively hard mattresses. Many people just stayed in their bunks the whole trip. At each 20 minute stop, the attendant on duty puts on her uniform, wipes down the hand rails and stands outside her car, virtually all attendants had red/auburn dyed hair.

Scenery. The Siberian forest is 2.6 times as large as the Amazon basin. You seen a million trees? you are just getting started. Virtually all trees are Russian Larch (White Birch) and to a lesser extent, Pine. Monotonous. Going through each town, the station mistress stands at attention bolding a baton. Armed (rifle) guards in guardhouse at each end of all bridges and tunnels.

Villages: Neighborhoods alongside railway tracks anywhere are never the nicest in town, but from what we could see of the towns they were mostly drab unpainted wooden houses, all with a wood fence and garden, some had light blue painted shutters and carved wooden window mantles. Some had plastic covered greenhouses. All wood heated of course. No billboards or business districts as such. Very few cars. There may be a one or a few stores. Mostly flat forest land with some open spaces, We saw very few cattle although the land looked like it could support large herds. Going through the Urals barely perceptible. The 20 minute stops were at the larger towns or cities to change locomotives and fill water tanks. Room temperature only beer available from trackside kiosks. Many Russian beer brands, good quality beer. Foreign beers, ie, Millers, Heineken and Carlsberg were available everywhere.

Dachas. Unlike the dachas in spy movies, millions of Russians own dachas which are likely as not small simple one-storey cheap uninsulated unheated houses on 1/8 of an acre with a garden a few miles from town and served by a local train. they are not used in the winter.

Irkutsk. Irkutsk is 40 miles from Lake Baikal, on the Angara River, the one outlet for Lake Baikal, 60 cubic kilometers of water passes out of Baikal annually and its hydroelectric potential is being harnessed. Irkutsk has around 600,000 people, a cosmopolitan city, many fashionable shops. Stores full of goods of every description. Decembrists were exiled there and gave a note of culture to the town, a few universities, museums, a large stadium, a very few churches, a pleasant riverside walk, small parks all around.. We stayed at the most expensive hotel in town, The Hotel Baikal, formerly The Intourist Hotel, with a beautiful view over the river to the other part of town across the river. The beds were narrow, the mattresses hard, and the pillows lousy.

Irkutsk's Central Market, with hundreds of food stalls arranged by product, a fish section, a produce section, a meat section, etc, is spotless, not a scrap of food or paper on the floor, not one fly in the meat section. Very colorful, as markets are.. An American supermarket would sell the same amount of food with one-twentieth the employees. There is, like most civilized cities, a pedestrian street which is crowded. the two main streets are Lenin Street and Karl Marx Street.

Taxis are reasonable if you know the proper price. The technique is, you show the cabbie a map showing where you want to go and hand him a calculator. He punches in a price which is roughly double the proper price. You punch in the proper price, he shrugs and motions you in the cab.

The people Many of the women are stylishly dressed. The men's hair styles ranged from skinhead to tight crew cut. The public transportation system is busses and jitneys. On the riverwalk in the evening, hundreds of young men and women, many carrying beer, strolling around. Smoking here, as throughout Russia, is pervasive. Packs can be bought for as little as 4.9 rubles (17 cents) up to 50 rubles (Marlboro). Beer, cigarette, and notion kiosks are everywhere. Many men are private security guards while the women are the shop clerks. Heavy men and heavy women work on building construction and railway maintenence crews. Leather jackets and cell phones are also pervasive. From Irkutsk eastward, right hand drive cars are common. they are used cars from Japan. There are several casinos in town, mainly slot machine parlors but some with blackjack and roulette tables. In the parks, there are slot machine kiosks. In Irkutsk, we had an educated cultivated interpreter/guide, who gave us a city tour and who also took us to Lake Baikal.

Lake Baikal is roughly 375 miles by 50 miles, one-fifth the surface area of Lake Superior but because of its depth, one mile, holds as much fresh water as all the Great Lakes combined, ie, 20% of the world's surface unfrozen water. It is surrounded by hills and 335 rivers and streams run into it. When the Soviets built a huge paper and pulp mill on it some years ago, it sparked the Russian environmental movement. One can now drink from it. On the road to Baikal, there is an open air museum of historic Siberian houses collected from around Siberia and reassembled there. Worth the visit. There is a town on the lake, Listvyanka, whose 'downtown' is a parking lot on the lakeside where a dozen or so merchants place tables and sell souvenirs and smoked fish. We took a one hour boat trip up one side and back. The only really distinguishing feature of the lake is its depth, which of course is not visible. there are no Lake Baikal Monsters to sex up the lake. And it is very cold year round to swim in. A few do, but only a few. No road circumnavigates it. before the tracks were laid around the southern end, trains would go on tracks laid on the ice during winter, and would cross the lake by ferry in summer.

Mongolia. The train from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator (UlaanBaatar or UB) (meaning Red Hero) is 34 hours including several hours to cross the border. We arrived at 6:30am and many guesthouse owners vied for the passengers' business. We chose the Ghinngis Guesthouse near the central square. The guesthouse was simply an apartment in an apartment block with 2 6-person (3 double bunks) rooms ($4/person) and 2 2-person rooms ($6/person). Our double room had 2 beds with innersprings but no mattresses, and lousy pillows.

Ulan Bator UB has a huge central square with a statue of the "liberator" of Mongolia in the center. Government building, museums, banks and Mongolia Telecom are around the square. The communist party has ruled since 1924. Since "democracy," ie, 1990, it is a multi party state and the Communist Party wins. UB is a modern town. lots of shops, cell phones, goods, cars. The Mongolian Railway sponsors a folk dancing ensemble, there is opera, ballet. The Israelis installed the satellite TV system which gets, inter alia, Bloomberg TV "unofficially." The taxis are metered and very cheap. Gas costs less than the US (now). Many street urchins, some very aggressive. There are hundreds of such homeless kids. In winter, they stay in shelters, but in summer, just roam around. Hotels have western prices. Museums not up to DC standards but are pretty good considering their resources.

Gobi Excursion. Our landlady arranged a 5 day Gobi excursion for the two of us with Minibus, driver, interpreter, all lodging in "gers" (yurts) and food and cook for $55/day/each. Half the price of the major Gobi companies equivalent tours. After we paid her, she went out and bought all the food and water we would need for the 5 days.. The next morning, the driver, Suke, arrived with his minibus, a Russian Yaz, shaped like a VW bus but with a short wheelbase, high road clearance, 4 wheel drive and twice as sturdy. It comes in battleship grey and is very common. (The military version comes in brown) An interpreter whom we considered Ms. 50-50 as if you asked her a question to which there were only 2 possible answers, she had a 50-50 chance of getting the right answer. Our cook was a young man who was the handyman for the guesthouse. He prepared all our meals and they were very good.

Gobi Desert. Take Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, New Mexico in 1700, double it, get rid of all that rainfall, and you have the Gobi. About 20 km south of UB, the paved road ends, and contrary to a map I had bought of Mongolia, there are no paved roads south of UB, except maybe, but only maybe, in towns. There are also no roads in the sense of something being surveyed or platted or graded or signposted or milemarked or maintained. There are instead across the Gobi, thousands tracks or trails like the Oregon trail which crisscross, merge, split, run parallel to one another. The first sign we saw was later that afternoon; it had an arrow pointing in the direction we had come and it said, in Cyrillic script, Ulan Bator 275 km. Some places we would simply drive across the hardscrabble surface where there were no tracks. South of UB, the land is dry and further south it gets dryer. The drier the land, the more scattered the livestock. In places we could drive for a half hour and not see any animals. The most plentiful animals were sheep and goats, then camels, then horses. The most interesting were, of course camels, two humped, ie, bactarian camels. Other animal life were birds (hawks, cranes, crows and others), marmot, voles, mountain goats, and antelope.

Our driver, Suke, knew every track and drove fast, even on washboard roads, careening around corners and up and down rises. On occasion, we would be lifted off our seats. Each day was like a ten hour amusement park thrill ride without a safety belt. Suke would spot an antelope in the distance and try to catch up with it but antelope can outrun minibuses, so although we saw several, we never saw one up close. Herders' gers (yurts) were scattered.

The most plentiful animals were sheep and goats, in flocks up to 2-300. Camels are plentiful, grazing on the sparse dry grass clumps sometimes alone, sometimes in groups of 20 or so and sometime in herds as big as 70. The owner of such a herd is rich. We never saw a camel pulling a cart or carrying anything but were told that they carry the gers. In any given group of camels, a few are hobbled and the camels tend to stick together. Camels come with a full coat to bare skin, and are mostly very scraggly looking.

Scattered around the Gobi, by oases of course, are around 40 tourist camps, better described as yurt motels, that is, 12 to 20 gers, a bathhouse, and a larger ger which serves as a restaurant, albeit it is common to bring your own food. Each ger has 3-5 beds, hard mattresses, bedding, and lousy pillows. Suke slept in his minibus to protect it from vandals. We only ate what we had brought, except in one small town the cook bought some groceries. Some nomadic families will have a ger for rent, but without any toilet facilities. Also scattered here and there were gers belonging to the nomadic herdspeople. There may be a motorcycle parked beside it.

In Mandal Gobi, a desolate town by our standards, our guide asked of we wished to stay at the "Gobi Hotel" or a ger camp outside of town. The Gobi Hotel made a Motel 6 look like the Amandari, so we chose the ger. 68 km later we came to the most beautifully located ger camp, in a valley called the Place of Small Stones. It looked like Southern Colorado. These gers had small dung-fueled stoves, very cosy..Camel dung emerges dry and makes perfect fuel. The beds and pillows here were comfortable.

We visited a national park in a canyon where there was an ice cave and scattered petrified wood. We came across 2 minibuses filled with American birdwatchers, all of whom had their telescopes trained on the occupied nest of a peregrine-like hawk across a ravine.

Train back to Irkutsk. We left UB at 8:30pm with a full train, and when we woke we were at the station on the Mongolian side of the border. There was no locomotive and our car was sitting alone at the station. There it sat for 6 hours until the Mongolian Customs/immigration people showed up, did their passport stamping, and a locomotive took us across the border, where we sat for 5 hours until the Russian customs/immigration people came and inspected and we were hitched to a longer train. Then to Irkutsk where we had one day of wandering around and where, somewhat by accident, I wandered into the awards ceremony of the 13th annual Irkutsk International Film Festival held in an elegant opera hall. Most of the awards were won by Russians but one category, I don't know which, was won by an American who told the audience that "he liked Russian films very much." The entourage of "film celebrities" had a banquet at our hotel that night and flew out the next morning.

Train: Irkutsk to Vladivostok. We boarded train 8 whose route is from Novosibirsk to Vladivostok. This 3 day segment was more scenic than the first, as it follows meandering rivers, goes over numerous rivers, goes up and down and around curves a lot. One night we were invited to a vodka party in a compartment where a young woman who teaches English at a university in Komsomolsk on Amur was our interpreter. Still the millions of trees are there, here the proportion of pine trees was higher. A highway, mostly paved, now roughly parallels the train. So one can drive to Vladivostok.

Vladivostok. A sea oriented city of around 700,000, 9288 km from Moscow as the railroad goes. Maritime monuments abound. Numerous ships in the harbor. A sub has been made into a museum. There is a pleasant pedestrian street going down to a riverwalk which has numerous kiosks and cafes and is crowded until late. Our hotel overlooked the riverwalk. We took a city tour and were taken to a high point where could overlook the whole harbor area.

Flight back. The next day, we took an Aeroflot Airbus to Moscow, 7 time zones, 9 hour flight. We stayed at the Moscow airport hotel, innersprings, no mattress, and a lousy pillow, and took the nonstop Moscow-Dulles 11 hour flight back.

Tips. Bring lots of dehydrated soup (it's available everywhere but 3x as expensive as in the states), toilet paper, a pillow you like, a cup (for tea or soup), more film than you think you will need, a wash cloth, flip-flops or slip ons, and I would even recommend bringing a cheap air mattress.

Caution: Totalitarian habits die hard. One needs an invitation to get a visa to visit Russia ($100). When you enter Russia you fill out a card which, along with your passport, must be given to every train and hotel which notes on it which hotel or train you stayed at and when. This is then examined when you leave the country. You must also fill out a currency declaration.