Moscow to Tashkent - 3 days on a Russian train
Sounds fun, doesn't it? A jolly jaunt on a Russian train through the Steppe, down through massive Kazakhstan, and onwards through the deserts of Uzbekistan.
In my infinite wisdom, I didn't take any food with me, and decided to rely on the restaurant carriage on the train. So on the first evening I went to the restaurant car to get a nice bowl of borshch or something, and took a seat at a table together with the two English girls I was travelling with. We were the only ones in the restaurant car apart from the waiter and a rather scary-looking skinhead with staring eyes that suggested trouble. Never mind, we thought, we'll just avoid eye contact and all will be well.
But the skinhead said something to the waiter, and then the waiter came over and politely explained that he thought we should leave because the skinhead was a mentally ill soldier with a gun who had recently returned from a killing spree in Chechnya and had just told him he was going to kill us, and the waiter didn't think he was joking. So we didn't even get our borshch and had to beat a hasty retreat back to our compartment with empty stomachs. Oh well, an evening of vodka drinking instead then.
The following day I tried to go back to the restaurant car. Alas, some vandals (maybe the skinhead and his mates) had completely trashed it, and a sign had been put up saying the restaurant car was closed for the rest of the journey - still 2 days left to go! Bugger! What do we do for food now?
At the next stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere, I jumped out and found an old woman on the platform selling boiled eggs. "Salvation!" I thought. I'll get a load of boiled eggs in. So I bought about 20 off her. Got back onto the train and settled down to a few boiled eggs. Cracked the first one open and raw egg spilled all over me. Turns out I'd bought raw eggs, not boiled! Dammit! In desperation I even tried "boiling" them in hot (but not boiling) water from the carriage's hot water tank for making coffee and tea - but no joy, of course. So it was back to another day and night on the vodka on an increasingly empty stomach.
Shortly afterwards I started hallucinating due to starvation and excessive consumption of home brew vodka, but I do remember that things became dramatically less civilised in Kazakhstan (home of Borat) - at one station about 5000 peasants with sacks of agricultural produce boarded our carriage without tickets and squeezed into every last available space. We had random stinking peasants sleeping on the luggage racks above our bunks and under the seats for the rest of the journey. One of the Kazakh men engaged me in conversation in broken Russian and asked me how much my girls cost. "They're not for sale" I said. "Two camels!" was his response. "Look, I don't own these girls, they're not mine to sell!" No use. "OK, four camels!" he replied. And so it went on. By the end he was offering me vast numbers of camels for my increasingly alarmed companions, and I must admit I was just a little bit tempted.
Day 3 of the journey was a complete blank. But I'm reliably informed that I lost an arm wrestling contest to a Ukranian policeman and as a forfeit I had to drink vast quantities of yet more home brew vodka, and later was almost murdered by a gang of enraged Uzbeks and Kazakhs when I put a towel on my head and pretended to be an Arab and ran down the corridor shouting "Allahu Akbar!". Without doubt the longest, toughest, hungriest, scariest, most drunken journey of my life.
( Biffins Bridge, Sat 9 Sep 2006, 13:48, Reply)