The Trans-Mongolian line

As we boarded the train to Irkutsk, we realized that nearly everyone else in the carriage was an English-speaking tourist. The majority of the compartments were occupied by an Australian-based tour group, evidently all retirees going from Beijing to Moscow. Our roommates (for we were four to a room) were a newly engaged couple in the middle of a year's journey from southeast Asia to Italy. They were kind and pleasant people, and they talked with us for a long time over the next 36 hours, sharing tales about their journey and their lives in Hawaii before traveling.

A bed makes a world of difference. The hours really did fly by, and it seemed like we reached the border in minutes. Rick from our compartment performed a bit of a song and dance for the border guard, as he had changed significantly since his picture was taken. "Tilt your head. No, to the left. Open your eyes more. Hmm..."

But we were eventually let through and we watched with amusement as some minor smuggling ring was broken and about a dozen bottles of vodka were confiscated. The customs agents had been extremely thorough, shining flashlights into air vents and pulling back rugs, even though they didn't open any of our bags. I found out later that it was actually the railway workers that had tried to sell it, and all they had to do was pay a small fine. The forests of northern Mongolia became the (very similar) forests of Siberia, and we continued into our third country of the trip.

When you're on a long sleeper train ride, you get to know the others in your carriage, first by voice, then by sight. I first spoke to some of the others when I caused a minor incident by unplugging somebody's charging iPad so I could snag one of the precious electrical outlets on the train. But of course it was fine, and now that the silence was broken we said hello when we passed in the hall. I talked to one couple and shared my same story about where I had come from and where I was going, finding it a bit new and different to deliver this speech in English to other native speakers. They were very unsatisfied with their trip so far, which told me immediately that they were used to the kind of travel pampering rarely experienced by young people like me.

Later, though, I chanced upon a woman, Allison, staring out the window in a kind of rapture. She was in Siberia and amazed by this fact. In talking to her it became clear that she was quite different from the other couple I talked to. She looked perfectly ordinary, like someone you'd see in a grocery store, and so as she revealed how much of a lifetime adventurer she was I was amazed. She told me about selling cigarettes on the black market in Burma in the 1980s, and then another woman who had done the same thing joined in with her own stories. Allison's husband walked by and was dragged in with the introduction "Pete got stabbed in Indonesia," which was about the point that I realized my own adventures were terribly boring. I stood and listened for half an hour to tales from the 1970s and 80s about bribing border guards in Pakistan, motorcycling to Iran, meeting Thai drug kingpins, refusing to smuggle hashish in Morocco, and more. I had started the train ride thinking of myself as the Paul Theroux figure next to the more ordinary travelers (this is a feature of his books), but as it happened I was very small potatoes indeed.

The hours kept flying by, and in no time at all it was early morning in Irkutsk. We shook hands, said goodbye, chose a direction, and walked off again.

Pictured: Siberia.