Day 15 - 5/8/11 - Friday

I start this days entry by saying that 1 year ago I met a very special girl, who I share this adventure with. Although I can think of more comfortable surrounds in which to celebrate 1 year, I can't think of too many more adventurous locations....or any more wonderful girls. :-)

Our celebration dinner!

Cruising across Siberia, at, you guessed it, cruising speed. The railway line cuts like a swathe through dense forest surrounds, with the occassional town spotted periodically. These days Siberia is not the wilderness it once was, pre the Cossacks, however thankfully there is plenty of Siberian wilderness left, thanks to its sheer size.

The towns are normally charming, with most houses still made from wood, and what looks like a fair degree of subsistence farming. The generations of Russian peasants, or serfs, as they once were. Whilst they may not be hobnobbing with the Russian billionaire oil oligopolists in the modern Moscow nightclubs, theirs is a more simplistic lifestyle, integrated with the land, heavily influenced and adapted to the Siberian weather. Having spent just several days in Siberia, there is something wholesome about the environment. In summer, that tripartite combination of glorious sun, crisp fresh air, and lush forest surrounds makes for pleasant scenery. For these Melburnians, thoughts of grey winter days and cold Antartic southerly winds have quickly faded from memory. Winter would however be extremely harsh in these lands, and particularly pre the industrial revolution and the mass use of coal for home heating.
Cinthia particularly loves the houses, and more specifically the windows. Although we have already mentioned the windows and their beautiful shutters, we since learned from Ivan that the colours of Blue, Green and White are seen as lucky colours, and this explains why so many windows, and even houses are painted in this colour combination.

Tomorrow I look forward to arriving into the Ural mountains, and Yekateringburg. If my undertanding is correct, this is a heavy mining and industrial area of Russia, a key supplier of WWII equipment, including the numerous Tanks used to fight back the Germans, in battles such as Stalingrad. The Germans desperately wanted to take the Ural region, to deprive Russia of its industrial heartland. Fighting in Stalingrad was threefold for Stalin, it was his birthplace, it was seen as better to fight there than Moscow, and it denied Germany access to the Ural region. For today I'll enjoy the heart of Western Siberian, as tomorrow Siberian landscape fades for the Ural mountain range.

The train we are on today is much, much nicer than the one we took from Mongolia into Russia, which is lucky, as this stint lasts 50 hours, quite a long time for a single journey. Even longer than a V/Line trip to Bairnsdale! This stint, Irkurst to Yekateringburg, is approximately 3,300 kilometres, with a train cruising speed around 75-80kmph. When combined with occassional stops and passing loops, the train is going at an average trip coverage of justover 60kmph. Comparing the journey to Australian distance, it would be like going from Melbourne to Cairns. The fact that Irkursk is not exactly Eastern Russia, and Yekateringburg not exactly Western Russia, shows the sheer size of the world's largest country.