Thread by @patrickgaley

OK, you twisted my arm. The following is a THREAD from the time I took the Trans-Mongolian railway. I was young and idealistic, stupid and proud, naive and trusting, and genuinely believed the answer to any question could be found in a good book theguardian.com/travel/2020/ja…

The Trans-Mongolian, the less famous counterpart to the Trans-Siberian, roughly follows the route of the tea trade from antiquity. It’s 2,215 km and would take you a shade under a week to travel uninterrupted from Moscow to the Beijing terminus

I however did not travel uninterrupted, and the whole thing took around six weeks (the luxury, I well appreciate, of having finished uni and there being no writing jobs keeping you home)

I undertook the trip with my Ukrainian friend, Taz, a medicine undergrad. He spoke reasonable Russian, knew first aid, would do anything if you dared him to (more on this later) and, like me, boxed. A useful ally. Here’s a picture of us in St Petersburg

I won’t bore you with the time we got detained by police in St P for refusing to bribe two traffic cops, or the time we fought off a knife-wielding burglar on the steps of our flat, or the time we woke up to find a body dead from the drink on our doorstep

This story is about the Trans-Mongolian, which at the time departed Moscow’s Kazansky station at 4:45pm local every three days. The route is still a vital artery for Russians trying to navigate their vast country, particularly those who can’t afford to fly

On board, each cabin consists of four foldable bunk beds, two per wall, a collapsable faux walnut table, and a large window, the top quarter of which can be jimmied open to let in the air (this comes in handy when you share a cabin with 3 other men)

The sliding door is lockable

Each carriage has a toilet, with a sink, no shower, a dedicated attendant - always a formidable, pony-tailed woman whose role is part cleaner, part bouncer - and an antediluvian, charcoal-fired samovar that has more than 80 moving parts

There are around 15 carriages, all 3rd-class, and a "dining car, which at least in my experience never served food or drink, but which played Russian techno all night and served as the scene for our late-night, platform-bought feasts of dried fish, fresh cherries and vodka

There's no polite way to say that as we rumbled out of Moscow's eastern suburbs, with around 30 hours to go before our first scheduled stop, I had debilitating diarrhoea

I assume this was contracted from drinking unboiled tap water that morning (the night before was Taz's bday)

There was a first aid kit on board, which consisted of a tourniquet and several large strips of gauze, and the first night was rough for both myself and my fellow carriage inhabitants, many of whom seem to have had the same ailment

We had with us our belongings, each a money/passport fanny pack thing we wore beneath our pants at all times on the advice of the matrushka, tobacco, instant coffee, Russian imitation Sugar Puffs, books, a deck of cards, and two bottles of vodka

Ca va

I bought with me the complete works of Pushkin, Dead Souls, and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Taz had Love All the People by Bill Hicks

I'll leave you to work out who had more fun

We played cards all day and night. As the urban sprawl of Europe's largest city diffused into the flat, pine-needle spiked tundra heading east, we played durak

Durak is the chess of cards, an exercise in annihilation, humiliation, rearguard counter-attacks. We bet with matches

I didn't sleep. A wink. Your body is wedged into these coffin-like beds, mattresses like water biscuits, lateral to the travel of the train, which, while it rarely got above human sprinting pace, was consistently and violently noisy

I smoked a lot and drank a lot of coffee

What you most look forward to, other than a hot shower, is the station stops. The Trans-Mongolian for those who have to take it is essentially a commuter service, pausing regularly at industrial towns strewn along Russia's incomprehensible sprawl

Whenever the train rolls into a town, the women come scrambling over the rails and platforms to flog you whatever they have gathered or foraged over the last few days

It's creaky and inconsistent, but the railway is still the life-blood of these forgotten communities

I should have said at the start it was high summer when we took the train - late July to early September - so it was hot, humid, mosquitos EVERYWHERE, long days and pale grey nights

The produce in Russia in this season is something I'll never forget

Cherries. Omg, the cherries. You could buy a kilo for fuck all, they'd need washing but they were warm and taut and sweet-sharp. Here's me holding a bag of my swag somewhere west of Yekaterinburg

(Yes I still had guns back then)

Bilberries. Redcurrants. Plums. Those tiny, nobbly cucumbers. Home-picked green tomatoes. Ubiquitous vodka. Sometimes (if you're lucky), cold beer

Once, in what used to be Russia's glass-blowing capital, I almost bought a enormous cut glass chandelier for japes, but it was $250

Our first stop was Yekaterinburg, the site of the massacre of Nicolas II and his family and the junction between Europe and Asia

I got my picture taken with one foot in either continent but I can't find it. We got a certificate that said "your enemies will drop dead from spite"

Taz also called in some connections and managed to get us a morning SHOOTING IN A RUSSIAN MILITARY BASE

That deserves its own entire thread, but we were told we couldn't shoot anything super high calibre as the mayor was in a banya the other side of the wall (seriously)

The next leg on the train was the longest - four days non-stop from Yekaterinburg to Irkutsk

I'll now tell you about some of the people we met on board

Alexi, Russia's military boxing champion, who had just lost a title fight in St Petersburg and would therefore have to travel all the way back home to Novosibirsk to rejoin his squadron there. He was wiry and spry, deep black eyes. Smoked like a 1920s publican

Sasha, an army recruit travelling. He had a smartphone (I remember thinking remarkable at the time) and a hunting knife

When he opened a vodka bottle he made a show of throwing the cap out the window. Woke me up once in his y-fronts brandishing knife and an enormous smoked fish

One of the videos on his phone was an obviously manipulated clip of a Russian tank trundling over terrain before miraculously firing jets and zooming off into the sky. He was beaming

An elderly couple, whose favourite snack was sandwich bags full of home-pickled garlic. I had the top, rearside bunk, and whenever they wanted to drain the bag the husband would hold it next to the open window and deposit garlic-pickle liquor all over my head. This happened a lot

Another elderly couple, the wife evidently and sadly dying of tuberculosis. To keep the air clean the husband insisted we kept the window open as we slept. Woke up after a night sailing through the desert with everything (sheets, clothes, body) covered in a layer of fine sand

A German biologist who during one trip out to the country - a full 12 hours from civilisation, collapsed and had a seizure and nearly died. When asked what had happened he said he hadn't eaten anything for six days, just to see what would happen

A Siberian man who really, really wanted the cabin window opening. It was hot and had jammed. He argued with the attendant for a bit, ignored our pleas to calm down, then left and returned, miraculously, with a AXE. He smashed the window and spent the night smiling silently

A senior woman who claimed she had once been a singer in the opera in Perm. She dressed as if in mourning, always perfectly made-up despite the facilities, and had a contralto that made you want to cry it was so life-changing

So after 4 days and nights on the train you develop literal cabin fever. Unavoidable. What you most crave is a wash. We developed a way of mixing samovar water with cold water from the tap, plastic bottle. Stab the bottom several times with a fork and hold it over you in the loo

We got off in Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. There's a bar there called the Yellow Submarine, and the owner looks so much like Pepper era George Harrison you have to pinch yourself while drinking your draft Guinness

Without stopping to rest or wash we took a minibus to Listvyanka, a hamlet on the shores of Lake Baikal. The village inn was full, but no problem, they have a long-established system of home stays with residents

We're assigned the home of an impossibly old woman, who slept above the stove in the single room she owned. We've not showered in like 96 hrs by this point. There's obviously no running water but she offers, too enthusiastically in my view, to give us a hose down in the garden

It's summer but it's also fucking freezing. She tells us to go to this address, which we do, and it's the village banya. In it are 3 heavy-set, very drunk men, who invite us in enthusiastically with threshold vodka shots. They make us do what they do

This involves a rinse-and-repeat cycle of 15 mins in a sauna so hot it makes your brain hurt, a plunge in an ash barrel filled with Lake Baikal water, beatings with ash branches soaked in boiling water, then beer and more vodka. Repeat ad infinitum

The next morning we're told you have to dip in the lake - it has life-enhancing properties and is home to 1/5th of all fresh water on Earth

If you swim out far enough it's so clear and deep you actually get vertigo looking down

I know this sounds insane but during our three nights or so in the village, which barely had electricity, I distinctly remember watching the Hugh Jackman version of Van Helsing

On to Ulan Ude, the home to Russian Buddhism and the world's largest Lenin head. This will be our last stop in Russia as we approach Mongolia, where a change of rail guage means we spend 11 hours under a baking sun

It's all a bit of a blur now, but I remember two things: Eating vac-packed chicken feet and meeting a group of four British girls

Seemed improbable, where we were, but there they were. We sat on the platform drinking Ghengis Kahn vodka, and got talking

Honestly don't know if it's the same now, but back then you had to check in with police at every town you stopped in. It was mundane, normally but not always routine, and usually left you a few hundred roubles lighter

What you absolutely had to get was an exit visa from Russia

So we got to talking, and it turned out none of the girls had contacted a single member of the authorities since they'd left Moscow - six days travel and like 1500 km away

We were... a little taken aback, but they weren't worried, so whatever

After the boggies are fitted to the either wider or narrower gauge they use in Mongolia, you haul ass back to your carriage and await Russian visa checks

We have our exit visas stamped. The girls don’t.

They get escorted off the train and sent back to MOSCOW shit you not

Never heard from them, obviously, but they looked crestfallen. Nothing we could do, so on to Mongolia

Ulaanbaatar is essentially one enormous linear settlement, crowded on two hills housing hundreds of thousands of Mongolians who moved to the capital because the nomadic life is hard

We took a bus to the ancient capital Karakorum, the ancient city of the Khans

It's a 12-hour ride, firstly on decent highways, then on dirt roads. The bus is full of people travelling back to the capital and the driver has a single cassette tape - BONEY M's GREATEST HITS. 12. Hrs.

I still cannot get Rasputin out of my head

We stayed in a ger near a mountain that was shaped perfectly like a molehill and is sacred

I spent a few days with a nomadic family, who, like nearly everyone out there, eat and drank exclusively sheep products. Oh, and fermented horse milk, which I can still taste

It was amazing. One night Taz and I took some beers out into the desert and laid down under the endless sky. You could see satellites whizzing through the vacuum. After 30 or so, we gave up counting shooting stars

Back on the train we finally made it to Beijing and walked a section of the Great Wall. We smoked too much, but were in shape

There are hawkers along the way selling cold drinks. I distinctly remember a tiny elderly woman race past us on an incline, carrying a fridge on her back

Hope you enjoyed this #TransMongolian adventure of mine. More to tell, someday maybe

The photo I like most that I kept from the trip is of this girl, in St Petersburg, who sang the most haunting Russian folk songs for roubles

I often wonder what she's doing now