Moscow-Tomsk, Russia – 09/12 The Trans-Mongolian Train

(Michelle) After the 3^rd nights sleep on the train without a shower, my hair was looking pretty AWESOME. I don’t think there are words to describe it. I was so obsessed about getting into the bathroom though, I didn’t even think about taking a picture of it until it was too late – I had already wet it down in preparation for our arrival into Tomsk. The bathroom situation on the train is one that you have to be very careful with. Whenever we are within a certain distance from a station, they lock the bathroom door and it stays locked for a while after the stop. This means that relatively often, there was an hour so that you couldn’t use a bathroom at all. We understood why you wouldn’t want people using the bathroom at a station (because the toilet just empties onto the tracks), but we couldn’t figure out why they had to lock it in advance and keep it locked for so long after.

So we are meeting our next couchsurfer – Dennis. He is supposed to pick us up from the train station. We actually contacted a guy named Grigory (Grom) first. He happens to be out of town, but opened his house (where his mom lives) to us and sent his friend Dennis to pick us up. Dennis showed up minutes after we got there and took us to the bus stop. We rode the bus for about 30 minutes until we got to Grom’s house. Tomsk is a university town of about 500,000 people, so it is not real small.

(TJ) Michelle’s hair was pretty nasty; I think that we were both donning our hats after the first night on the train. My biggest complaint about the train was the bathroom, it seemed like it was locked for at least a quarter of the trip. This inevitably leads to some pretty antsy people for hours at a time and then a rush for the door when the attendant finally decides to open the door. I think the attendants would play a game to see how far they could push people, almost to the point where people were thinking about trying to open windows to pee out or were eyeing empty bottles. Once in the bathroom by the third day it was pretty nasty, the floor is wet (with what??) and needless to say you don’t want to touch anything, I felt bad for the women. I guess the lesson is try to time your bodily issues with when we will be at a station and the you can pay a few rubles and do your business. This is good rule of thumb for any train trip.

Once we arrived in Tomsk, I was a little worried at how we were going to find who were supposed to be staying with. After only waiting for 2 minutes Denis picked us out of the crowd and got us on to the bus and to our humble abode for the night.