Around the World in 80 Trains

by Monisha Rajesh

  Watching the clock tick closer to the minute of departure, we gave up on the pair and crossed the tracks to our train, which had a bright blue engine and a big red Soviet star on the nose. Climbing the ladder to our carriage, I came upon the familiar sadness of premature departure, like a kid being dragged home early from a birthday party: if only we’d been able to say goodbye to Marzhan and Azamat. Throughout our journey, we’d been scooped up and looked after by wonderful people. As though adding pearls to a necklace, I’d now gathered a priceless string of friends that extended around the globe. Pacing down the carriage and pulling open the windows, Marc was taking photographs of a man standing in the doorway of the train across the tracks, while Jem stacked our bags. Stifling heat was already blasting from the air vents, along with clouds of dust, so I wandered down to the vestibule for some fresh air, just as Azamat leapt up the ladder in a huge fur-lined coat, and landed on both feet, his fists raised in celebration.

  ‘I made it!’ he shouted, Jem and Marc cheered and grabbed him in a hug. ‘I was not going to let you leave without saying goodbye.’

  Livid, our provodnitsa screamed at him as he turned around, and he replied in Kazakh: ‘It’s okay, they are all celebrities.’

  ‘Where’s Marzhan?’ I asked, hearing the engine rumbling.

  ‘She is coming,’ he said. ‘I just spoke with her.’

  ‘You got her number then?’ Marc said. ‘You should ask her out.’

  ‘I am not taking advice from you. You’re thirty-six and still single.’

  ‘Thirty-seven.’

  Losing her patience, our provodnitsa dragged Azamat out of the door by his collar, just as Marzhan came running down the platform, her cheeks pink. The ladder had been pulled up and the train was on the move as she ran alongside, reaching up with a soft, cold hand. As I crouched down, she managed to kiss me on the cheek, the sweet smell of strawberry on her lip gloss. Our fingers came apart as the train picked up pace, and the three of us huddled in the doorway watching the pair wave, until the train began to bend and they were no longer in sight. If the romance of train travel was still alive, it survived in moments like this.

  With less than a day in the Kazakh capital, we’d chosen to be kind to ourselves and spend the time lolling around in the hotel’s spa in preparation for the fifty-eight-hour journey up to Moscow. It had snowed the previous night, which wasn’t so remarkable as Astana spent a third of the year covered in snow and ice, but the latest precipitation had surprised even local Kazakhs, for whom a daily snowfall was as normal as drizzle. Venturing out into the drifts, we’d gasped for breath in the sub-zero temperatures. Unlike damp cold, though, which made my joints ache, this was a bearable, dry cold, made all the more pleasant by the blue sky and sunshine. Attempting to go for a walk, we’d realised that Astana had no pavements, and any pathway that may have existed for pedestrians was at least a foot below. Making it no more than twenty metres out of the hotel car park, we decided we’d seen enough of the city and hurried back inside, foot-long icicles hanging like daggers above the doorway.

  With no incentive to venture out, we had every incentive to stay indoors, where we were currently being treated like royalty – as the only guests in residence at a hotel that resembled a run-down stately home. Pleased to have something to do, the staff had laid on a full banquet for lunch, the three of us sitting at a round table for eight in the centre of a ballroom, while several waiters stood at the edges watching in silence. Featuring doughy breads, noodles, indiscriminate cuts of meat – and many cups of tea – the Kazakh diet was geared to suit the weather, slabs of fried fatty meat and thick soups providing insulation from the cold. After devouring a delicious plate of sweet horsemeat and lambs’ hearts in a bourguignon sauce, we decided to sweat it all out in the steam room. Pacing the dungeon of corridors, we climbed a number of spiral staircases before giving up the search and seeking out the receptionist for guidance.

  ‘Where’s your steam room?’ Marc asked the young woman at the desk, who had just applied a new layer of eyeliner using the camera of her iPhone, and had smudged it so she now looked like a tearful clown.

  ‘No steam room.’

  ‘No steam room? Then where’s the sauna?’

  ‘No sauna.’

  ‘What? Your website says you have a sauna and a steam room,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have them or not?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So, you’ve just stuck it on your website for the sake of it,’ said Marc.

  The woman now looked not only tearful, but guilty.

  ‘The only reason I booked this hotel was because your website said you had a steam room and sauna,’ I said.

  ‘Can we have some money back, then?’ Jem asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Taken aback by her compliance, I watched as she pulled open a drawer, counted out a few thousand tenge and pushed the notes across the table.

  ‘Well, this is useless currency, I can save it as a souvenir,’ said Marc, folding it into his wallet. He looked back at the woman. ‘I’m assuming you don’t have the Jacuzzi or gym then? No, didn’t think so.’

  Just then, I received a message from Azamat.

  ‘Azamat says he’s given my number to his friend Asem who’s going to come and pick us up and take us out for the afternoon.’

  ‘That’s amazing, I love that guy,’ said Jem.

  ‘Asem? Is that a dude?’ asked Marc.

  ‘I have no idea,’ I said, just as my phone buzzed with a second message from Azamat. Asem is my girlfriend read the message, with a winking face on the end.

  ‘Player,’ said Jem.

  We’d barely put on our jackets and hats when Asem pulled up outside in a Mercedes C-Class sedan.

  ‘Such a player,’ said Marc, as we shielded our eyes from the glare of the snow, and slid into the warmth of her car.

  Astana’s skyline looked as though someone had gathered together the contents of a giant geometry box. After moving the capital from Almaty in 1997, President Nazarbayev had guided the city’s development towards showcasing the country’s post-Soviet independence and economic power. Its modern architecture had a delightful insanity, enhanced by the vast dry steppe from which it had emerged in just under two decades. Between the gold, dalek-shaped skyscrapers, Norman Foster had had a field day, designing the Palace of Peace and Reconciliation, a 62-metre-high pyramid with a stained-glass apex, and his most recent creation, the Khan Shatyr Entertainment Centre, a 150-metre-high translucent tent that looked as though it was melting into itself. Packed in by ice and snow, Astana was a futuristic vision of Dubai once climate change had taken hold.

  By Asem’s own admittance, there wasn’t very much to do in one of the coldest cities in the world, where most activities centred on making the most of the cold, or hiding indoors from the cold. She and her friends went ice-skating and shopping, or spent their days in the myriad communal baths where most of the city migrated to in winter, staying inside until spring. On her recommendation, we were driving to Keremet, one of Astana’s biggest public baths.

  ‘Oh, it is not so cold today,’ she said, glancing at the dashboard.

  ‘It’s minus fourteen,’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, that is not cold. Usually we have anything below minus twenty.’

  ‘What’s there to do here when it’s that cold?’ Jem asked.

  ‘It is not a very interesting city if you are from here,’ she said. ‘For others who come from around the country there are many things to see and to try, like the indoor running track, bowling alley, and the opera house, but for me it is boring. I am going to leave to study in Dublin.’

  ‘Why Dublin?’ Marc asked, leaning in from the backseat.

  ‘I have many friends who have gone away there, and they are having a good time.’

  ‘Are these your school friends or university friends?’

  ‘University friends,’ said Asem, checking the rear-view mirror as she overtook a BMW and deftly wove us around
the patches of ice on the road.

  ‘Most of my friends are studying postgraduate degrees, others went to join Isis.’

  ‘Ah, okay … wait, what?!’

  ‘Mmmm,’ she said, glancing over her shoulder. ‘They pay well.’

  ‘So does banking,’ said Jem.

  ‘Hang on, your friends went to fight for Isis?’ I asked, pulling my seatbelt to breathe better, and turning to face her.

  ‘Well, not so much my friends, but yes, some of the guys I studied with. They are paid very well, and they are able to save more money in one month than they can make in one year working here, so they go and send the money back to their families. We are here,’ she said brightly, snapping off her belt.

  Asem got out of the car as the three of us sat stunned, taking in the impact of her casual chatter. She’d made it sound as normal as going to Thailand on a gap year.

  ‘Imagine being that bored that you want to go and fight for Isis,’ said Marc, shaking his head as we entered the baths.

  Asem had insisted on dropping us off at the station, and we were huddled in her car just before 9 a.m. listening to Ja Rule and psyching ourselves up for the big push. The 1,854-mile journey through Kazakhstan and Russia was the missing link that would carry us back to the other side of the world. From Moscow, just five trains would take us home to London. Getting out of the car, I took a moment for myself, picking my way through the snow, the wind burning my ears. The muffled hoot of a train rang through the numbness in my head. Not so long ago, the journey along the railways of the world had lain ahead of me, an open railroad leading to the unknown, and now it was almost over. Almost.

  14

  Homeward Bound

  No one spoke. For the first few hours, Jem read in the dining car, and Marc leant against the window staring into low-hanging cloud like the spurned lover in an eighties power ballad. Propped up on my elbows, I lay in my berth watching the Kazakh landscape deteriorate into snow-covered steppe littered with miserable housing. Corrugated-iron roofs were barely nailed into place, and thin sheets of plastic billowed across broken panes of glass. The glitz of Astana had died a swift death, decrepit farmhouses and abandoned homes rolling past the window as we crawled northwest, stopping for two minutes at a time at Soviet-era stations, nothing more than pastel-painted concrete boxes. The scenes reflected our mood as we slumped around with the Sunday-evening feeling of school the next day. Jem and I were carrying on back to London, but Marc was meeting friends in Moscow, and we had only two days left together. As a child, I’d had a ‘Peanuts’ calendar with a picture of Charlie Brown carrying Snoopy on his shoulders with the caption ‘In Life, It’s Not Where You Go – It’s Who You Travel With’, which I’d never given much thought to. I didn’t care for famous quotes by famous people: they were usually reeled off by the emotionally incontinent, but this one was as simple as it was true. It wasn’t easy to spend weeks confined to a space the size of a shoebox, stacked one on top of the other, battling hunger, tiredness, and toe jam, yet we’d survived by tapping into the spirit of gezellig, and coming together as a train family.

  Moving towards the window, I spotted a bundle of blankets and tins in a doorway where a rough sleeper had made his home at the edge of a ramshackle barn. A small fire smouldered where he sat rolling a cigarette. As we inched past, I stared at his bowed head wondering where he had come from, and what had happened to bring him here. This was the very essence of what drew me to trains: for a few seconds at a time I was privy to strangers’ intimate actions; a vagrant rolling a cigarette, a mother nuzzling her baby’s head, a banker checking his breath. Exposed, they would walk on, unaware that someone had shared their moment. On a day-to-day basis, the insularity that comes with living in a big city means that we don’t see each other. Sometimes we look over, but usually we keep going with no more than a cursory glance at the other person’s hair or untied shoelace, but we don’t really see or listen to each other any more: empathy is fading from existence. For so long, I’d taken for granted having a front-row seat to unedited, unscripted footage of other people’s lives, that I wasn’t sure how I’d adapt to the isolation of life off the rails.

  Sliding open the door, our provodnitsa appeared with two cups of tea with string hanging over the rim. Mostly Russian, the staff on board this service were an unusually friendly group, with more gold teeth than a rap video. There were few passengers on board, and like Oksana on the Trans-Mongolian, the staff had taken to mothering us, bringing tea, biscuits, and extra blankets – despite the tropical temperatures on board. Like the Kazakhs, we’d taken to wandering around in the universally accepted train gear of flip-flops and vests, sweating in our compartment, then darting about on the platforms in the snowy wind to avoid passing out in the soporific heat. A sip of tea lifted my mood, and I looked out to where the evening light had softened the landscape, black, naked trees outlined against a warm peach backdrop.

  Unfolding our map, I traced the line that Jem had been updating since London: starting with a tangled mess around Europe, it arced across Russia, Mongolia and China, unravelling down Vietnam and tailing off in Thailand. Curving through Japan, it then formed a plough shape around North America. From North Korea, the thread then extended up and back into China, looping like a lasso around Tibet, before running off through the northwest and into Central Asia. Digging out a pen, I drew in the latest segment of the journey, pausing at Tobol, where we were now around five hours from the Kazakh–Russian border. Until now, I hadn’t absorbed how far we’d come: hopping on and off had become second nature to me and I’d taken each day as it came. Balancing my tea as it splashed across the map, I counted up the countries we’d crossed, tracing the hundreds of fine blue capillaries of river, darkening as they flowed towards the seas. Branches of blood-red railway arteries pumped up mountains, ran along coasts, and cut across borders. With just the odd break here and there, they threaded thousands of towns and cities together, binding countries, and breathing life into the furthest corners of the world. As much as I’d developed a taste for falling asleep in one country and waking up in the next, the richest flavour of train travel lay in the joints and hinges that held countries together: it was deep inside, buried into the bone marrow of these no-man’s-lands, where cultures swirled together, currencies doubled up and languages overlapped. Invisible to others, these oases were the preserve of train travellers who were permitted a glimpse as they rolled from one side to the other.

  When I left London, I set out to discover what train travel meant to people around the world, and to determine once and for all if the naysayers were right to sound the death knell for long-distance train travel. The romance, they said, was dead – shot down by bullet trains and high-speed rail. But it wasn’t dead, just reincarnated, living on in the passengers who would always tell their story to strangers, offer advice, share their food, and give up their seats. It could never die, any more than our interest in people could die. After my journey around India, I came away in thrall to Indian Railways, convinced that no other country could emulate its spirit and vigour, and that I would be disappointed as I travelled this time, searching for something that didn’t exist. Instead, I’d unearthed something greater: to some, trains would never be more than a convenience, but for others, trains were symbols of strength, weapons of war, and political tools. Trains provided salvation for the poor, and a lifeline for commuters. They offered the chance to escape, and homes for the lonely. Trains were a link to the past, and a portal to the future. And to me? Trains would always be an open window into the soul of a country and its people.

  Beyond the Kazakh border, the train ran almost parallel with the Trans-Siberian route, dipping in and out of the more southerly regions of Russia. For two days, we pushed through the hinterlands, and I sat by the window watching passengers skip around in towelling slippers, smoking on frozen platforms. As though on the brink of death, miles of mournful trees sped by, spaced out by emptiness and snow. Gradually, dirt tracks appeared, furrowed by tyres, and
houses emerged through the woods. Spirals of smoke greyed the skies, and gold-domed churches shone like beacons through the gloom. Farms turned into villages, the villages into towns, until the dismal sprawl of suburban Moscow caught up and began to run past the window. Tiered like an elegant wedding cake, Moscow Kazanskaya station drew into view. Rolling with one last gasp of effort, the train drew under the roof of the covered platforms, hissing to a standstill. Marc looked out of the window.

  ‘Fifty-eight hours. We made it. But now I really do need a drink.’

  Moscow is one of those cities that looks better under snow. In fact, most of Russia looks better under snow, its brutalism buried beneath drifts, leaving its domes and spires to dominate the skyline. Gathered on a rooftop bar overlooking the Kremlin, we each clasped tankards of Moscow Mules, wishing we’d worn gloves. Like celestial orbs, the uplit domes of St Basil’s Cathedral shone through fat flakes of snow, fresh powder shifting and crunching under our feet. The leathery sweetness of cigar smoke drifted across the terrace and I took deep breaths of the sharp air, staring at the domes in the hope of making the moment last. Six months before, I’d stood on the same rooftop anticipating the journey ahead. From where we were, Mongolia, China and Tibet had seemed so otherworldly, the space between us so vast. Now, though, I could journey back in an instant. Like a time-lapse video in my head, I could see the route unfold from where I stood, running past trees, farms, lakes, mountains, rivers, steppes, horses, villages, towns, stations, and cities. I could hear the hawkers, smell the dried omul and feel the Siberian heat. The earth was much smaller than I’d realised, and nothing was that far away. Taking comfort in the thought, I felt for the first time since we’d set off, that I was ready to return home. And there was only one train that could take us there …