Days 302 to 303 – Tue Sept 1 – Train to St. Petersburg

Pierre’s a funny guy. He’s not so much a tell-a-funny-joke person – I don’t think I’ve ever heard him tell a pre-told joke - he’s often more the kind of person who has funny trains of thought. His gems can too easily get drowned out when he’s around much louder me and his humour flickers in and out of conversations, sometime accidentally.

“Hey, do you know a tree whose name uses all the vowels?”

He’s been doing a multiple choice questionnaire about health that includes a section on testing your mental acuity. “Sequoia,” I say immediately.

“Oh. That’s what the book said.” He looks thoughtful for a second. “I came up with Adirondack Spruce.”

This makes me laugh. “I only know ‘sequoia’ because I heard it ages and ages ago as part of a quiz. I didn’t even know what a sequoia was at the time or how to pronounce it, so I certainly didn’t know the name of a tree that contained all the vowels.”

“Well,” he says seriously, “now you know two.”

These kinds of conversations are useful on long trips from A to B, and keep us occupied when we’re not occupying ourselves with books or music or just staring out the window. The train trip to St. Petersburg is an overnight, starting a short while before midnight, so we only chat for a short while before everyone organizes their bed sheets and starts to settle in for the night.

Pierre and I have what were probably the last inexpensive tickets available for this train when we bought them. We’re in the last of the low-fare sleeping wagons, which means that rather than small cabins with four bunks to a room, the wagon is open with around 56 bunks laid out neatly. With the wrong group of people, this situation can be pretty tedious – children, drinkers, shouters, loud snorers and so on would ensure that no one got as much sleep as they wanted. It’s possible to travel for 7 days across Russia this way on the Trans-Siberian and, after that many days of travel, I imagine that even the nicest group of people can probably wear on the nerves.

The group travelling tonight seems pretty good. No small children, no loud talkers. Even the young soldiers a few bunks over are noticeably vodka-less and eager for sleep. Everyone tonight seems to be simply travelling from A to B and hoping to get some rest before the train pulls into the St. Petersburg station at 6 am.

The only problem we see, in fact, is that we have some of the worst bunks in the wagon. We have some indication of this when the man checking our ticket at the doors looks at our seat numbers and says that it’s possible to upgrade to a private cabin. This is double the price, and for an overnight we’re not willing to pay out so much money. We decline, but they ask again later once we’ve started to set up our beds and prepare to sleep. We decline again, but this time it’s an educated decision because now we have officially met The Door.

The Door is directly next to our bunks and leads to washroom area and the passage way to other wagons. It’s not like there’s a bad smell or anything, and people are pretty considerate about not talking as they pass, but the door itself is badly designed. It swings shut with a loud bang and a click - and opens with a bang and a click - every single time a person passes through the door. This happens a lot. This happens all night.

We aren’t the only ones whose rest is seriously disturbed by the noise. Even before the lights officially go out, the man in the bunk perpendicular to us, across the aisle, lifts his head every so often to give the door the stink eye. I estimate that the ideal distance to be away from this door is somewhere around the middle of the cabin. The people sleeping there have probably learned from experience to stay the hell away from the edges.

Pierre and I are really light sleepers. Even with the ear plugs, the sound is sharp and impossible to imagine away. Traffic passing by? I can easily imagine that away as being waves on a beach. Sound of construction outside? I can pretend a factory worker on a really long shift and have been able to sneak a few hours of sleep away in a nearby storeroom. I can usually imagine myself into a frame of mind where I’m so glad for any kind of horizontal sleep that noises don’t bother me too much.

But even my last resort, tried-and-true trick of imagining that I’m on a long long flight to Australia, and have already been sitting for over 15 hours and have somehow been lucky enough to be given a first class cot to sleep in for a few hours… even imagining that doesn’t work.

Pierre manages to get a few hours of sleep. I get 45 minutes. We’re both tired and humourless when the train pulls into St. Petersburg.