Ulan Ude (2), Incompetence Among the Buryats: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 7

How Not to Make Buuz, Shoot Arrows and Play the Bones Game

Shopping in Ulan Ude

Russia

Ulan Ude

In the morning we had a spare hour so we decided to buy some provisions for the next stage of our journey. According to the guide book there was a supermarket called ‘Sputnik’ in the same street as Svieta’s apartment block. It was not where the map said it was, and after some searching we concluded there was no shop anywhere in the neighbourhood. We had just about given up when we saw a small sign high on a wall saying Спумник, - Spumnik rather than Sputnik, but suspiciously close.

Ulan Ude is in the Russian far east, almost due north of Ulaanbaatar, the Mongolian capital

Beneath the sign was a row of silvered windows. Wondering what might be behind them we walked to the end of the block. Round the corner we discovered a small door. It opened automatically and we stepped into a large, clean, well-stocked supermarket. With no indication on the outside as to what would be inside, we again found ourselves marvelling at the mysterious workings of Russian capitalism.

Atsagat Datsan

Shopping done, we met Svetlana, Andre’s wife, who was to take us to Atsagat, another datsan, this one some 50 km east of the city. She turned up not with the battered family Lada, but with a company four-by-four and a Buryat woman driver.

The outskirts of Ulan Ude

Ulan Ude stretched out in a ribbon development of army bases and factories, many of them derelict. Eventually we were in open country and made our way across the steppes to the datsan, which stands on a low rise above the village of Atsagat.

On a rise above the village of Atsagat

Although older than Ivolginsk, Atsagat was much smaller and even quieter – if that was possible. It was once a centre of learning and of Tibetan medicine, but now struggles on with only a handful of monks and students.

Atsagat Datsan

Once we had walked round Atsagat in the approved clockwise direction, looked into the various temples and wondered at the lifelike waxwork of the Dalai Lama, it was back into the car and a drive of some 10 km westwards to another of Russia’s endless supply of identical wooden villages.

Atsagat main temple - and our Buryat driver

A Buryat Lunch

We stopped outside a house distinguished by having a ger in the back yard. A ger is a large circular tent on a wooden frame, a Mongolian yurt. Inside the ger – in Part 9 and Part 10 we live in a real Mongolian ger, not a tourist ger, so I will leave further description until then - Lynne and Svetlana sat on the women’s (right hand) side and I sat on the left.

Lynne and Svetlana on the 'woman's side'

After a short wait a woman in full local dress brought us a yoghurt drink, salty rather than sweet, the sort we had drunk in Iran and would have been quite happy not to meet again. We ate bread and salad and were then offered a glass of something described as herbal and healthy. It was related to Benedictine or Chartreuse, but a little lighter in alcohol. Slowly it dawned on us that the woman was in fact our driver; she had slipped in the front door and changed while we were coming through the back and looking round the ger. It was, we learned, her house and her ger.

Making Buuz Badly

Next up was noodle soup, very pleasant if a bit salty, and that was followed by some buuz, Mongolian dumplings – or at least the kit to make them; pasta/pastry circles, chopped meat and herbs. We tried our best to wrap the first around the second, but the results were singularly unimpressive. When we had finished they were taken away to be cooked.

Dressing Up

At this point we were invited to dress up in local costume. This is a situation we usually try to avoid; it so often morphs into an ‘aren’t foreigners funny little people’ sort of activity. However as there was no one to offend except the woman offering us the clothes, we had no option but to dress up. And very fetching we looked, too.

Not really Buryats

Resuming Our Buryat Lunch

By the time we were back to normal, the dumplings had returned. Buuz are big butch dumplings stuffed with mutton. These had a pork based filling similar to Chinese jaoizi, but they had all the other buuz characteristics. Most had been properly made, our creations sat among them looking a little sad.

Buryat Games

Inept Archery

After lunch it was time for games. Riding, wrestling and archery are the traditional Mongolian sports but we had not seen a horse in the Buryat republic and in present company wrestling seemed inappropriate. We went outside for some archery. With blunt arrows and a target scarcely 5 metres away it was childishly safe – which was a good thing given our woeful shooting. I seemed to find my line quite easily, but length was another matter, some arrows soared over the target, heading for the next county, while others slammed into the turf barely beyond my toes.

This man is not Robin Hood

A Cup of Tea and the Bones Game

Having demonstrated we were as expert at archery as buuz making we went inside for jam and fritters and a cup of tea. I have been privileged to drink tea in many places and am constantly amazed at the variety of ways it can be presented. The British, of course, drink black tea with milk, sugar is optional. Americans (those that drink tea), Poles and Russians omit the milk. Iranians, stalwart tea drinkers, do the same but like to suck their tea through a sugar cube held between the teeth. Moroccans and Libyans like theirs sweet and with as much mint as tea. The Indians either dunk in a spoonful of masala or make their tea with condensed milk, pouring it repeatedly from one glass to another from a great height so that is served sweet and foaming. The Chinese are purists, permitting only leaves and water (though some of the leaves may be jasmine, chrysanthemum or rose). The Tibetans add yak butter, though Lynne and I, and most non-Tibetans, find the rancid cheesy flavour somewhat unpalatable. The Buryats (and, we wold learn later, Mongolians and Kazakhs) make a brew consisting largely of sweetened watery milk which may, at some time, have been shown a tea leaf. It is not unpleasant, but it is hardly tea.

We were joined by our host’s eight-year-old daughter for the ‘bones game’. Sheep’s ankle bones are roughly cuboid. Two ends are slightly rounded, so that when thrown they fall with one of four sides uppermost. These are sufficiently different to be recognisable and are called ‘camel’, ‘horse’, ‘sheep’ and ‘goat’. Thirty or so bones are thrown onto the table and the first player chooses a bone and attempts to flick it against another similarly orientated bone. If they succeed they take one of the bones and continue. If they fail it is the next player's turn. When all the bones have gone each player puts in as many bones as the player with the least, and play continues until somebody has no bones at all. That person is eliminated…and so on.

Camel, horse, sheep and goat from left to right (I think)

An impromptu international was arranged between the Buryat Republic and the Principality of Wales. Buryatia won easily, probably because they had played before.

Buryat bones team

Evening in Ulan Ude

If you have a shaman handy you can also use the bones to tell your fortune. Having no shaman we took our leave of the ger, though not our host as she was also our driver, and returned to Ulan Ude. We had a nap and woke not quite ready for dinner. The problem with allowing hospitable people to take control of your eating arrangements is that no one wants you to leave their table hungry. You end up with a choice of being rude or being stuffed. I would never be rude.

In fact, dinner was worth having, because along with the mashed potato and the obligatory dill salad, Svieta presented us with an omul. We had observed these fish in the aquarium in Listvyanka but were seeing them on a plate for the first time. Omul is a distant relative of the salmon, but Lynne thought it more like a firm fleshed haddock, albeit a fresh water haddock. It was excellent, not perhaps worth the five thousand mile journey on its own, but I would certainly eat it again if I spent any more time in the area.

In the evening we passed another hour in the pizza café, beer drinking and people watching rather than pizza eating. Young people were out in force parading up and down Lenin Street. Clothing tended to look cheap and again we noticed the fashion for ‘street walker chic’ which seems to be current all over Russia and indeed much of Eastern Europe.

This looks suspiciously like the same beer as yesterday

Russians outnumber Buryats two to one in their own capital, and that seemed to be reflected in the people we saw promenading. Although they live side by side, by and large Russians walked with Russians and Buryats with Buryats. There were a few mixed couples, but they were very much the exception not the rule. We tried to decide if Ulan Ude is a Buryat city with a lot of Russians or a Russian city with added Buryats. We were now further east than Singapore; Irkutsk had been unequivocally European, Ulan Ude was beginning to hint at being in Asia, but we were unconvinced we had got there yet.

Svieta’s apartment was close enough to the railway station to hear the announcements. During the night we were woken by what sounded like an argument between two station announcers conducted over the loudspeakers. We were up at 5, breakfasted on tea and pancakes, and at 6 o’clock Andre arrived to take us to the station for our journey to the border town of Naushki, gateway to Mongolia.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Part 1: Moscow

Part 2: Yekaterinburg

Part 3: Across Siberia to Irkutsk

Part 4: Listvyanka and Lake Baikal
Part 5: Irkutsk

Part 6: Ulan Ude (1)

Part 7: Ulan Ude (2)

Part 8 : To Naushki and into Mongolia

Part 9: Across the Mongolian Steppe from Ulan Bator to Burd Sum 

Part 10:With the Mongolian Nomads

Part 11 Ulan Bator 

Ulan Ude (1), Buddhists, Old Believers and an Enormous Head of Lenin: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 6

Ulan Ude

Russia

It’s an underwhelming city, Ulan Ude: three hundred thousand people huddled on a grassy slope where the River Uda joins the much larger Selanga on its way to Lake Baikal. If Irkutsk retains the feel of a frontier town, then Ulan Ude (pronounced Oohlan-oohday) is the town beyond the frontier, the step beyond the certainties of civilization.

The central Soviet Square sports the city’s only item of note – a giant head of Lenin (see later). From there a wide pedestrian street called, inevitably, Lenin Street descends some 800 metres to the half-restored Cathedral. Lenin Street has fountains and modern sculptures and is lined with some of the town’s less dowdy shops; elsewhere there is little but rattling trams, soviet-style apartment blocks and soviet-style industrial dereliction. So soviet is the town, in fact, that in cold war days Ulan Ude was closed to foreigners - more, one feels, in a spirit of Stalinist bloody-mindedness than because it had anything to excite a western spy.


Lenin Street, Ulan Ude

Svieta's Apartment

Andre met us at the station and drove us the short distance to a dingy courtyard behind a forbidding apartment block. In the semi-darkness of the stair-well we lugged our cases up to the third floor and Andre knocked gently on a heavily armoured metal door. Had we been met by a nervous, shifty-eyed dissident and passwords been hissed through clenched jaws I would not have been surprised. In reality, we were welcomed by a smiling, diminutive old lady who introduced herself as Svieta and ushered us into her equally diminutive apartment.

Andre left as we chose one of the two basic but clean guest rooms. The third room, which contained a television as well as a bed, was Svieta’s. It seemed she either lay down or stood up, sitting in chairs was not part of her repertoire. There was a tiny kitchen and an even smaller bathroom with an ancient shower. We made good use of this pleasingly efficient antique while Svieta bustled about in the kitchen preparing breakfast.

Rattling soviet tram - the view from Svieta's apartment, Ulan Ude

Ivolgonsk Datsan

Clean and relaxed we sipped black tea, nibbled equally black bread and enjoyed a mound of scrambled egg lurking beneath the inevitable carpet of dill. As we finished, a tap on the door signalled the return of Andre, who was to drive us to the Ivolginsk Datsan some thirty kilometres from town.

“Have you heard of the Old Believers?” Andre asked as he piloted his Lada out of the courtyard, which seemed a little less dingy and forbidding now the sun was fully up. I had been reading about them and found them a strange, even lunatic bunch, which, fortunately, was not what I said as Andre’s next remark was: “My mother was an Old Believer.”

I could think of no appropriate reply, but Andre did not seem to want one, and anyway we were on our way to a Buddhist temple.

Once beyond the urban sprawl, we were in rolling open grassland with a big sky and low hills on a distant horizon; steppes which stretch all the way from Lake Baikal to the fringe of the Gobi desert.

The highway was narrow, but well surfaced and more than adequate for the small volume of traffic. At one junction a sign pointed 450 km back to Irkutsk, a journey which had taken us twelve hours. The Trans-Siberian Railway is real enough, but the Trans-Siberian Express exists only in fiction.

A distinctive low hill became a prominent landmark. From a distance it resembled a breaking wave, but closer to we could see it was more of a cone with a shattered apex. The hill stood above the small wooden town of Ivolginsk. In a circle below its peak stones spelled out Om Mane Padme Om in Cyrillic.



Om Mane Padme Om, Ivolginsk

It was strange visiting a Buddhist temple in Russia, particularly in the company of Andre, a local man of obvious European descent. Ulan Ude is the capital of the Buryat Republic, a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, and the Buryats, like their Mongolian cousins, are traditionally Buddhist. Very possibly, the Mongols are not so much cousins as exactly the same people. Buryatia has been Russian since the seventeenth century and whilst Inner and Outer Mongolia suffered under imperial Chinese rule, the Buryats traded with the incoming Russians and enjoyed comparative freedom and prosperity.

The Buryat Republic

In the early twentieth century, Sukhbaator’s communist-inspired rebellion freed Outer Mongolia from the Chinese, although Inner Mongolia remained, and still is, a province of China. The Russians liked having a buffer state between them and the imperial giant to the east, particularly after they had murdered Sukhbaator and installed their own man to lead the new Mongolian Republic. Realising that Russia’s Mongol population might be glancing enviously at an independent Mongolia run, ostensibly, by Mongolians, Stalin set out to create a distinctive Buryat identity as dissimilar as possible from Mongolian culture. The policy has been partly successful. Buryats still have a love of archery and an insatiable appetite for mutton, just like Mongolians, but while many Mongolians remain nomadic herdsmen, Buryats are settled, living in Ulan Ude or one of the many typically Russian villages of wooden houses and grassy streets. The policy has been aided by the influx of Russians, which has continued unabated since the seventeenth century so that today Buryats are out-numbered two to one in their own country.

Before the revolution, there were hundreds of Datsans in Buryatia and thousands of monks, but by the 1930’s the Datsans had all been closed and the monks dispatched to the Gulags. In the 1940s Stalin decided it was time for more religious tolerance and Ivolginsk was among the results.

The Datsan, which opened in 1947 on a site carefully chosen by astrologers, is a large, flat rectangular compound surrounded by a low wall. We paid our photography fee and entered. A couple of lack-lustre stalls selling trinkets, fridge magnets and religious gewgaws guarded the entrance, but little effort was made to sell us anything. The officially post-communist Russians have taken to petty capitalism with far less flair than the still officially communist Chinese.



Ivolginsk Datsan

Inside the compound, the structures were largely wooden; the style of the temples and stupas reminiscent of Tibet, whilst other buildings are clearly Russian.



Monk and stupas, Ivolginsk Datsan

We ambled in the approved clockwise direction, wandering in and out of temples inspecting statues of the Buddha, thangkas and libraries of tantric texts. Compared with other Buddhist temples there is little special about Ivolginsk and the most sacred and perhaps the strangest sight is not for general viewing. In 1927, Dasha-Dorjo Itigelov, the 12th Khambo Lama (the head of Russian Buddhism) died whilst at prayer. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the lotus position and dug up at regular intervals, in the belief that the physical bodies of those who have attained Nirvana do not decay. In 1955, 1973 and again 2002 he was found to be remarkably well – for a man of his age and condition. After the most recent exhumation, the current Khambo Lama decreed that Dasha-Dorjo should henceforth sit in a glass case in an upstairs room. Devotees may pay their respects on one of the seven sacred days in the year. He was not open for business the day we visited.



At Ivolginsk Datsan

Temples are a reflection of those who use them. In materialistic Hong Kong, where spirituality lies well hidden, temple visits are a way of assuring good luck. An act of devotion is followed by a visit to the fortune-tellers who pronounce on the likely success of their latest venture. In Beijing, years of state atheism have made temple-goers unsure of what they are supposed to do, and there is much giggling and confusion. By contrast, pilgrims in Lhasa form a sweeping clockwise tide encircling palaces and temples, twirling their prayer wheels. Inside, among the jostling throngs, the atmosphere is of intense spirituality, the pilgrim’s belief as powerful as the odour of wood smoke and yak-butter they carry with them.

At Ivolginsk, however, atmosphere seemed absent. The monastery is of the same Yelugpa (Yellow Hat) sect as the Tibetans; the Dalai Lama himself has made several visits, but still I felt we were seeing not so much a living temple as a museum. Buryatia is, allegedly, undergoing a Buddhist revival but at Ivolginsk there were few visitors, no tourists except us, and the monks kept a low profile. In Lhasa the prayer wheels turn incessantly, the bearings are always oiled and the handles polished by the devoted grasp of generations of pilgrims. Here we could have been the first to turn the creaky wheels that day, or maybe even that week.



Turning a prayer wheel, Ivolginsk Datsan

Seeds from a sacred Bo Tree – the tree under which the Buddha sat and meditated – were brought from Delhi in 1956 and the result is carefully enclosed in a glasshouse. On a summer’s day it might well have felt comfortable, but the Siberian winter is not the winter of northern India so it needs the protection. It looked well enough, for a plant so far from its natural habitat. Buddhism, on the other hand, has been in Buryatia for millennia and was once well acclimatised; now it too seems in need of the glasshouse treatment.

As we left Ivolginsk Lynne remarked how peaceful and spiritual it had been, so my take on it is clearly not the only one. We drove westwards for a while, then, as the road swung left to by-pass a village of wooden houses Andre swung right and took us down the main street.

Old Believers

“This is an Old Believer’s village,” he informed us, although it looked like every other village we had seen on the five and a half thousand kilometre journey from Moscow. Confidently navigating the maze of streets he parked beside the churchyard.



Old Believer's Church, near Ivolginsk

The Old Believers split from the Russian Orthodox in 1667 over reforms instituted by the Patriarch Nikon. The Patriarch had set up a commission to examine the drift of Russian Orthodoxy away from its Greek template, and so claimed the weight of scholarship behind his reforms as well as the support of Tsar Alexis I. The real driving force was Alexis’ ambition to become the liberator of all Orthodox lands then under Ottoman control. Sweetening the near-eastern patriarchs did no harm to this ambition, nor to Nikon’s chances of becoming the new Patriarch of Constantinople.

Among the reforms were an alteration in the spelling of Jesus from Ісусъ to Іисусъ (effectively Isus to Iisus), a change in the direction of processions from sunwise to counter-sunwise and the use of three straightened fingers instead of two when making the sign of the cross. These were not the most trivial of the modifications.

It may seem incredible that the Slavonic spelling of a name already far removed from its Hebrew original, or the precise way of holding a hand when making the sign of the cross should be deemed to affect one’s chance of eternal life. If God was that petty there would be little hope for Catholics, who cross themselves backwards (at least to Orthodox thinking), or Protestants who do not cross themselves at all – not to mention the Buddhists of Ivolginsk. However, such issues mattered to many thousands of simple believers who had no interest in or knowledge of Alexis’ Byzantine machinations. They mattered enough for thousands to die for them, and, predictably, many Old Believers eventually found their way to Siberia where their faith was strong enough to endure centuries of persecution and survive through the communist era.

The church itself was a small, elegant, whitewashed building. To a foreigner the Russian crosses on the tiny domes spoke more of the continuity of Russian symbolism than of schism. Andre found the pastor’s wife, the pastor himself was away on business, and she unlocked the church for us.

To my inexpert eye, the interior was like any small Russian Orthodox church. The iconostasis separating the nave from the sanctuary was relatively new but incorporated a number of much older icons. In Stalin’s time, the pastor’s wife explained, many icons and churches were smashed or burnt. She remembered the Young Communists arriving, intent on destruction but the most important icons had already removed and hidden. In these, more stable times, they have been returned to grace the new iconostasis. She also showed us two bibles, lovely illuminated works in Church Slavonic that had similarly survived. 

Andre and the pastor’s wife chatted as we looked round, they were obviously well acquainted. After we had seen enough of the church, she took as across the road to a building resembling a large church hall.

For years her husband had been collecting obsolete rural artefacts, and had assembled them into a private museum. What was surprising was how similar many of the old farm and household implements were to those in museums at home – though no British museum would have had such an extensive collection of samovars.


The pastor's private museum

Sheep for Lunch

Back on the main road, we stopped at a roadside café, a drab but not quite dilapidated building with a concrete floor, metal chairs and functional Formica topped tables. It might have been a transport café, but for the absence of frying. Indeed, there was something of an absence of menu – at least in the sense of choice - as the entire clientele, largely Russian but a good mix of age and gender, were all tucking into the same Buryat sheep fest. We joined them, and after our potato and lamb soup we found ourselves sitting behind large steaming bowls of lamb and potato. We had come a long way, I thought, to eat something that was, in everything but name, Irish stew.

As we ate, Andre told us of his scheme to build the Baikal trail, a venture bringing the youth of Russia and the USA together to work on projects to serve the community, and of the visit of the Dalai Lama in 1991. “I am not a Buddhist,” he said, “and I only came within fifty metres of him, but I could feel the energy radiating from him.” 

An Enormous Head of Lenin

Back in the city we explored a little and took some photographs of the enormous head of Lenin. On the Mongolian border we met three Spanish students who had been beaten up for not showing the head sufficient respect. That, though, happened late at night; in the afternoon sunshine there was nothing more threatening than Lenin's half smile.



Lenin's enormous head, Soviet Square, Ulan Ude

Svieta provided an evening meal of stuffed cabbage leaves with cheese, aubergine slices and a dill laced salad, followed by ice cream and jam. Not wishing to cause offence, we consumed it all, despite being still full of lunchtime sheep.

Beer in Lenin Street



The beer's okay, but I wouldn't trust the pizza
Lenin Street, Ulan Ude

We joined the rest of Ulan Ude in a stroll up and down Lenin Street in the evening sunshine, stopping for a beer at a pavement café. It was fortunate that we were not interested in eating, as the only food available consisted of unidentifiable triangles of greasy mush served on paper plates. As we left I saw that I had been sitting in front of a large picture of a gondolier and the Rialto Bridge. Only then did I realise the greasy mush was pizza. In the course of our travels we have seen some sad things served up in the name of pizza, but never anything quite as dire as that.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Part 1: Moscow

Part 2: Yekaterinburg

Part 3: Across Siberia to Irkutsk

Part 4: Listvyanka and Lake Baikal
Part 5: Irkutsk

Part 6: Ulan Ude (1)

Part 7: Ulan Ude (2)

Part 8 : To Naushki and into Mongolia

Part 9: Across the Mongolian Steppe from Ulan Bator to Burd Sum 

Part 10:With the Mongolian Nomads

Part 11 Ulan Bator 

Irkutsk: Trans-Siberian Railway Part 5

Russia

Irkutsk

Irkutsk: First Impressions

At first glance Irkutsk seems a down-at-heel sort of city.

The minibus dropped us outside the Hotel Angara, where we would deposit our luggage for the day. Inside the upmarket hotel, which was considerably less down-at-heel, we spotted a post office and decided to send the cards we had bought at Yekaterinburg. The cards were enormous, but in no way big enough for the huge stamps, four of which were required for each. For some reason this irritated the woman behind the desk, and she was further incensed to find that we intended to purchase her whole stock – leaving two postcards still unstamped. We were treated to a Russian speciality: public service with a tantrum.

Irkutsk

A young man of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance was waiting behind us. ‘Where do you come from?’ he asked pleasantly. ‘From England’ we replied. He pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Isn’t it a bit rough there, now?’ Slightly perplexed by this response, we assured him there was no better place on earth, except possibly Irkutsk and wherever he came from, and set out to explore the city.

At second glance Irkutsk seems a down-at-heel sort of city.

Irkutsk is in southern Siberia at the southern tip of Lake Baikal

Kirov Square and the Cathedral of the Epiphany

The Hotel is beside Kirov Square, which once sported two cathedrals and two other major churches. This was considered a superabundance for a city of only half a million people, so when the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan was destroyed in the civil war that followed the revolution, the Central Government Headquarters was built on the site. It is a truly ugly building. Opposite, the World War II memorial is in a sad state of neglect. The substantial Church of Our Saviour is now a museum, whilst the Polish Catholic Church, built in 1882 and Siberia’s only neo-Gothic church has become neglected as the Polish population has drifted away.

Only the Cathedral of the Epiphany remains in good condition having been re-consecrated after serving as a museum in the Soviet era. An unusually low building for a cathedral with a detached bell tower, its exterior had been freshly painted in the Russian ‘cake-decoration style’. The interior is covered with painting of saints, heaven and hell, angels, archangels and Virgins with and without Child. We watched two artists on scaffolding adding colour and calligraphy to new frescos.

The Cathedral of the Epiphany, Irkutsk

A small group of beggars had gathered by the door to receive our largesse. None of them were young, and it is easy to see why some people still think fondly of the Soviet era, when the young had jobs they were paid for, and the old could live on their pensions. They may not have had riches or political freedom, but they did not have poverty either.

We walked towards the commercial centre, stopping at a Post Office to dispatch the last of our cards. Here we encountered the other version of Russian public service, the one where you become invisible as you approach the counter. Fond thoughts of Soviet egalitarianism evaporated quickly.

Lenin Street and Karl Marx Street

After eventual success, we made our way down Lenin Street to the main drag, predictably called Karl Marx Street.

On our way we passed a number of the wooden building that are - or should be – Irkutsk’s pride and joy. With their carved ‘Siberian Lace’ decoration, their existence within an urban setting is almost unique. Sadly, those that are not falling down have been demolished to make way for cheaply constructed, badly designed modern buildings. Irkustsk will not be the first city to realise what treasures it had only after the last of them has gone.

Wooden Houses, Irkutsk

The main street was built in more confident times, when the city was still a boom town. Irkutsk was founded in1652 as a military outpost and by the 19th century was the administrative capital of Siberia. It still feels like a frontier town, a little like some small towns in the American west that once hoped to grow into Los Angeles or Seattle but never did. Just as the Americans pushed west in the nineteenth century to open up their continent, the Russians pushed east to open theirs – though without the cowboy hats and the movies. The city was a place of exile – most notably for aristocrats involved in the failed ‘Decembrist’ coup of 1825 – but most newcomers arrived of their own free will, particularly when gold was found in the area.

Karl Marx Street, Central Irkutsk

Though different in type, the difficulties of reaching Irkutsk in the 19th century were of the same scale as travelling the Oregon Trail. This changed when the railway arrived in 1898. Bradshaw’s ‘Through Routes to the Capitals of the World’ said of Irkutsk in 1903 ‘The streets are not paved or lighted; the sidewalks are merely boards on cross pieces over the open sewers…the police are few, escaped criminals are many….the stranger should not walk after dark; if a carriage cannot be got…the only way is to walk noisily along the planked walks….to walk in the middle of the road is to court attack from the garrotters with which Siberian towns abound’.

At third glance, Irkutsk seems a down-at-heel sort of city, but it has improved dramatically in the last 100 years.

An Italian Restaurant in Karl Marx Street

Café Snezhinka, inside one of the buildings on Karl Marx Street, has a high stucco-ed ceiling and a pleasant old world feel. We both read Cyrillic, but like primary school children, spelling each word out letter by letter and often arriving at nothing we can understand. On this occasion, we quickly deciphered Карбонара (carbonara) followed by Спагети (spaghetti) - it did not require a genius to deduce we were in an Italian restaurant, of sorts. The Siberian versions of carbonara and spaghetti bolognese had a weightiness that would have astounded their Italian originators, but were nonetheless pleasant enough.

The Trubetskoy and Volkonskaya Houses

The Decembrist rising of 1825 was an attempt to replace the autocratic rule of the Tsar with a constitutional monarchy. Five of the leaders were hanged in St Petersburg, the soldiers involved were transported to Siberia in chains, but the aristocratics involved merely found themselves sentenced to exile.

The Trubetskoy House, Irkutsk

We walked the best part of a kilometre down Karl Marx Street to see the house where Prince Trubetskoy and his wife endured their exile. It was covered in scaffolding and closed, so we walked on to the home of Maria Volkonskaya, wife of another Decembrist. It is a large and comfortable house still containing Maria’s furniture, clothes and letters. It is not altogether surprising that some of the Decembrists chose to stay in Irkutsk when their exile finished rather than return to the intrigues of St Petersburg.

The house of Maria Volkonskaya, Irkutsk

Others live less comfortable lives today. Walking back into town we saw people filling buckets with water from hand pumps in the street.

Loose Change

We dropped into a supermarket to buy supplies for our night on the train. Prices, as always, were quoted to the kopeck. This was sensible in the days when there was approximate parity between the rouble and the pound. The rouble crashed along with the Soviet Union and the new rouble - a thousand of the old soviet roubles – is worth 2 pence. In the days of the Italian Lira prices were often given to the precise Lira, but the cashier always rounded off to the nearest hundred when giving change, not so in Russia; you get your exact change down to the last kopeck. The tiny 1 kopeck coin is of such infinitesimally small value it costs more to hand over than it is worth. Unsurprisingly the recipients do not value them greatly and abundant if worthless loose change can be gathered in any Russian street just by bothering to bend down.

Off to Ulan Ude

We returned to the Hotel Angara to meet a man called Alexander who would give us our onwards tickets and drive us to the station. He was waiting not with two tickets but with four. ‘You can have the whole compartment to yourselves’ he said, ‘it will be more comfortable.’

This arrangement seemed simple enough, but was beyond the comprehension of the provadnitsa who looked at our four tickets, then the two of us and shook her head. ‘Where are the other two?’ she probably asked, though we did not understand. ‘Just us two,’ we answered, equally incomprehensibly. As we settled in she searched up and down the carriage for the other two people. As the train pulled out she shrugged her shoulders, gave us four sets of bedding and washed her hands of the affair.

Our next stop, Ulan Ude, was only 400 km away, but the journey took all night. The trip round the southern tip of Lake Baikal is allegedly the most scenic section of the whole journey, but it was dark, so I cannot comment.

Rudolf Nureyev was born on the 17th of March 1938 in a Trans-Siberian sleeping compartment travelling between Irkutsk and Ulan Ude. We had a much less eventful journey than Mrs Nureyeva.

The Trans-Siberian Railway

Part 1: Moscow

Part 2: Yekaterinburg

Part 3: Across Siberia to Irkutsk

Part 4: Listvyanka and Lake Baikal
Part 5: Irkutsk

Part 6: Ulan Ude (1)

Part 7: Ulan Ude (2)

Part 8 : To Naushki and into Mongolia

Part 9: Across the Mongolian Steppe from Ulan Bator to Burd Sum 

Part 10:With the Mongolian Nomads

Part 11 Ulan Bator