Siberian Travels: An Oklahoma girl's journey from Moscow to the Sea of Japan

By Pamela Olson

Oklahoma Girl's Adventures, Volume 1. In the fall of 2000, 20-year-old Pamela Olson took her first trip abroad to study in Moscow. In December, she and two friends took the Trans-Siberian Railroad all the way across Asia to the port city of Vladivostok in the Russian Far East. This is an account of their colorful, enlightening, and often hilarious adventures, with several full-color photographs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pamela Olson
• Release date: Aug 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465756602

Pamela Olson

Pamela Olson grew up in small-town Oklahoma and studied physics and political science at Stanford University, class of 2002. She lived in Ramallah, Palestine for two years, during which she served as head writer and editor for the Palestine Monitor and as foreign press coordinator for Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi’s 2005 presidential campaign. She's published stories and articles in CounterPunch, Electronic Intifada, Israel’s Occupation Magazine, and The Stanford Magazine among other publications. In January of 2006 she moved to Washington, DC and worked at a Defense Department think tank to try to bring what she had learned to the halls of power. She eventually became disillusioned with the prospect of changing Washington from the inside, and in 2007, she left DC and started writing Fast Times in Palestine. She lives in New York now, and her book was published in May 2011.

Book preview

Siberian Travels

An Oklahoma girl’s journey from Moscow to the Sea of Japan

Pamela J. Olson

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2011 Pamela J. Olson

Other Books by Pamela J. Olson

Fast Times in Palestine

The Brimming Void

Tribute for Ronan

Camp Golden Shaft

The Fable of Megastan

Visit www.pamolson.org or my

Smashwords profile to learn more

Table of Contents

Introduction

Day 1: The Rossiya

Day 2: The First Soldier

Day 3: Nikolai

Day 4: Sasha from Blagoveshchensk and a Sad Good-bye

Day 5: Listvyanka and Lake Baikal

Day 6: Irkutsk

Day 7: Ulan Ude

Day 8: Brush with the Mafia on Train No. 8

Day 9: Sasha from Smolensk

Day 10: Illness and a Tall Dark Ally

Day 11: Welcome to Vladivostok

Day 12: Christmas Eve Exploring

Day 13: Christmas in the Far East

Day 14: Leaving the Country... Maybe

Afterword

Introduction

"The Trans-Siberian Railway and connecting routes comprise one of the most famous, romantic and potentially enjoyable of the world’s great train journeys... [it] makes all other train rides seem like once around the block with Thomas the Tank Engine."

~ Lonely Planet

The Trans-Siberian Railroad is the mainline artery linking Moscow with the vast stretches of Siberia and the Russian Far East. It was built in the years of the last Tsars to strengthen communication ties and reinforce shaky power over the eastern regions. But it was made famous by Communists who used it to transport political prisoners to labor and prison camps. The way was cut with hand tools along the old Great Siberia Post Road by exiles, convicts, soldiers, and foreign laborers.

Before the railroad was completed, the voyage from Moscow to the Pacific coast, a third of the way around the world, took several months of hard travel. Now it takes about a week of sitting around talking and drinking beer. Rolling across eight time zones and 9289 kilometers (5772 miles) of taiga, steppe, desert, and mountains, the Trans-Siberian is the longest continuous line of railway in the world.

Two friends and I planned the trip almost a year earlier while sitting at the Stanford Coffee House. Liz and Rob and I were sophomores at the time. Liz and Rob were both International Relations major and I was studying Physics. Growing up in a tiny town in eastern Oklahoma, I had always dreamed of traveling abroad, and even though it would delay and complicate my physics study schedule, there was never any question that I would study abroad if I could.

I chose to go to Russia partly because they promised to cram a years’ worth of language study into one semester (and I could take classes that would count towards my Political Science minor) but mostly because I was fascinated to see this place that had been so thoroughly demonized when I was growing up in the 1980s. I know virtually nothing about this place except that it had (or once had) borscht, weighty literature, and bread lines. There was so much I didn’t know—so much to learn—it made me dizzy to think about it.

(Little did I know how many more adventures this would lead me to over the next ten years as I eventually abandoned my physics studies and became a journalist, memoirist, and travel writer.)

Liz and Rob and I would be studying together in Moscow during the following autumn. We thought taking the train would be a good way to see Russia beyond Moscow. I also wanted to ask people from the hinterlands how they’d been affected by the changes since the fall of Communism. Liz and I didn’t speak Russian at the time, so we decided to explore Siberia at the end of our four months in Moscow. Of course, that would put us there smack in the middle of the mind-numbing cold of December. But hey, what’s Siberia without a little snow?

The Rossiya is the train that goes non-stop from Moscow to Vladivostok. No. 1 goes west and No. 2 goes east. Several guidebooks said it was never a problem to get tickets on the Trans-Siberian, even the day before, but we played it safe and went to Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station a week early.

Our first surprise as we began talking with the woman at the ticket counter was that tickets from Moscow to Irkutsk—halfway to Vladivostok—cost less than a quarter of what the guidebooks said they would. The reason, we figured, was because we didn’t go through a travel agency, which would have charged a 300% overhead, and we spoke Russian at the ticket office, so they didn’t add the dumb foreigner sales tax of approximately whatever they felt like charging.

We planned to get off the train at Irkutsk and explore for a couple of days before continuing on to Vladivostok. But then came our second surprise: tickets from Irkutsk to Vladivostok were sold out every day that week. We were worried we might not be able to get to the end of the line at all, but she assumed us we could still get tickets going directly from Moscow to Vladivostok with no stops along the way.

It seemed a shame to roll through Siberia without visiting Irkutsk and nearby Lake Baikal, the biggest fresh water lake in the world, billed as the Pearl of Siberia, home of the nerpa and omul (creatures that will be explained in the course of the text). And seven sedentary days on a train with no shower was not the most pleasant prospect.

So I went back the next day and talked and explained and questioned for about an hour (in my still fairly basic Russian) with a different woman at the ticket office. She was very kind and patient, and I finally learned that although there were no tickets directly from Irkutsk to Vladivostok, there were plenty of tickets from Irkutsk to a town called Ulan Ude a bit further down the line, and then from Ulan Ude to Vladivostok. I didn’t bother to ask why they hadn’t told us that before. Russians don’t tend to volunteer much.

So our schedule was set and we were happy. Four days on Train No. 2, the Rossiya, two days in Irkutsk, a night on Train No. 26, a day in Ulan Ude, three days on Train No. 8, and four days in Vladivostok.

The tickets cost a total of $87.