A chaotic journey across half the planet by train — where bad planning collides with blind luck and sheer stubbornness keeps the story moving.
Chapter Four: An Idiot Abroad
About the only preparation I did for this trip other than checking train schedules and applying for visas was to watch an episode of Ricky Gervais’ “An idiot Abroad” on the Cathay Pacific flight out of Vietnam. Gervais and his comic partner, the bug-eyed Stephen Merchant, are the geniuses behind the original ‘Office’. Gervais is close to certifiably insane, they say. I’ve heard that a team of psychiatrists and nurses need to be available 24/7 to keep him on this side of sanity. The humor of “The Office” works by evoking a strange empathy in the audience. It somehow makes you internalize the embarrassment that the lead characters are incapable of feeling because they are such utter dorks. You watch the scenes unfold as you would a train about to slam into a stalled farm truck packed with migrant workers. You know he is going to insert foot into mouth again, hope that he won’t, and still cringe in embarrassment for him when he does. For their latest series, Gervais and Merchant are running what they claim is their most expensive practical joke to date. They send their punching-bag patsy, Carl Pilkington, a less than average man from Liverpool, to exotic locations as a reluctant tourist. He is a total moron in a harmless parochial way. We get to enjoy his utter idiocy in the face of what should be fantastic visits to Egypt, the Amazon or Rio. Gervais and Merchant game the system, of course. They arrange his tours to stay at the home of not so famous drag queens in Rio or drop him off at gay nudist beach early in the morning before the guests start to arrive. It’s sick entertainment. I like it.
I am feeling a lot like Carl Pilkington now. We are in the no-man’s land between Mongolia and Russia. The Mongolian immigration officials have already been on board and stamped Odile’s single entry visa as ‘used’ (for some pleasantly surprising reason, American’s don’t need a visa for Mongolia). The train has rolled down the track a bit and Russian officials have been on board. A burly, jack-booted sergeant has inspected every nook and cranny for hidden illegal immigrants. This includes the ventilation compartment in the ceiling of our cabin. His tall blond counterpart has taken our passports. With a frown she points to the visa entry date and says “June Twenty Sixth??”. It’s now 11:42pm on June 24th. Oh shit.
Somehow, during my impeccable planning process, I have requested visas for an arrival almost two days after the train tickets we ordered. I can probably find some twisted semi-logical excuse for this colossal screw up if I work hard enough. But it’s hardly worth the trouble. It won’t change a thing. We are on the wrong side of the paperwork and at the mercy of bureaucrats. In short, we are screwed. The immigration duo come back and hour later. It’s now the 25th but that still doesn’t help. They ask for copies of our onward ticket reservations and disappear again. We have been sitting here sweating it for a few hours. We are quite sure they will march us off the train, fine us and leave us to fend for ourselves trackside until the 26th. Then when the visas are good we probably won’t be able to get a berth on the next train. We can’t go back to Mongolia. (Well, I can, but I probably won’t exercise that privilege. The consequences would be far more severe than anything a Russian immigration official could ever do to me). We talk about bribing our way out of the predicament. A quick cash check tallies up a handful of useless currencies from Southeast Asia, twenty-four US dollars and five Euros. Crap. I meant to get a stash of US dollars before we left but forgot to do that too. We doubt they accept credit cards.
This is especially embarrassing because we were determined to be a bit more prepared than we were on the last train. Just before getting on this train, we managed to contact a travel agency in Irkutsk who is affiliated with our friends and Great Ghengis Expeditions. We have a car and driver waiting to take us directly to Lake Bailkal and Olkhon Island if we ever arrive. We were intent on being more organized travelers but we are failing miserably. Visa screw up aside, we found out that there is no restaurant car on this train. We’ve brought a couple packets of instant noodles with us but realize we have neither bowls to put them in nor chopsticks to eat them with. We have a can of sardines but no bread or crackers to put the slippery things on. We have a bottle of Chingiss Premium Vodka but no mixers and no cups to drink it from. We really suck at this traveling thing.
To add even more embarrassment to our idiocy we find that everyone around us is extremely well prepared. A young Danish couple returning from a work study gig in China has an awesome picnic spread out every time I walk past their cabin. They even have a jar of Nutella for the morning. The entire car ahead of us is occupied by an Australian tour group. They are taking the train non-stop from Beijing to Moscow and then flying home. This seem strange to us. What’s the point in spending 9 days on the train and never getting off to see the half of the world you are rolling past? They are very well prepared. They have a schedule printed in English that tells them what towns they are passing through and what the towns are known for: leather tanning in such and such a place, ceramics in another. I think they have a couple of kegs of beer stashed away somewhere. They always have beer. The more adventurous stumble off the train and wander around nearly identical trains stations platform for the 8 or 10 minutes that the conductors take to unload and load the train. It’s a wonder they all find their way back to the train.
But the most organized are the Mongolian traders. There are many, many more than when we crossed the China-Mongolian Border. Several cars worth of second and third class cabins. There is a ballet of logistical going on. Like a massive ant colony, the scene looks to be total chaos at first glance, but on closer inspection we can see that there are generals, foremen, foot soldiers and porters involved. They arrive on the trains with huge bundles of merchandise. At each station before the border foreman direct new arrivals with more merchandise to specific cabins and dispatch more porters guarded by soldiers to pick up other supplies waiting on the platforms. Once on the train, the bundles are broken down and distributed to all the participating smuggler-passengers. Plastic packaging litters the passageways of the trains. Runners move from cabin to cabin distributing bits and pieces of merchandise. Stumbling down the passageways I see the occasional lone back backpacker lying flat on his back in an upper bunk while his supposedly shared cabin has been turned into a sorting station. Poor fucker…. I hope he didn’t pay much for that berth.
But by the time we hit the border all the litter is cleaned up, each ‘passenger’ has an equal amount of each product and they are sitting quietly looking very innocent in their cabins when the Russian customs officials go by. Once across the border, instant markets will form at each Russian station. The Mongol smugglers will alight to sell Chinese made clothing and other paraphernalia. Local residents will sell dried fish or beef to the smugglers. All transactions need to be complete before the train rolls on to the next stop. A few of the younger smugglers wait to the limit and need to run and jump onto the moving train.
It’s now 2:30am. We are wondering if our visa issues are holding up the whole train. That will be a great way to make friends with our fellow passengers. Then we hear the jack-boots coming down the passage way. Burly Sergeant and tall blond immigration lady are at our door. They smile. I think, why do bureaucrats always smile with such maliciously sadistic pleasure when they know they have you by the short and curlys? Then she hands us our passports, says “Thank you, enjoy your trip”. We say “thank you” in about every language we know. And we mean it.
We can’t believe how lucky we are. Later we are told by every Russian and every experienced traveler we meet that they have never heard of such fortune. We celebrate with neat Mongolian Vodka (no ice, thank you) and some uncooked instant noodles. They taste great.