4 days is a long time...

... when you're stuck in a tiny little compartment on a train with no shower.  

We were discussing what I should say in this blog post, and the short version is, don't take the train, or break the journey up - 4 days is enough to give anyone serious cabin fever. 

The "scenic" Trans-Siberian wasn't really as scenic as advertised - pretty much the whole trip looked like this:

 

With the occasional bit that looked like this:

So not really that much to look at.  For 4 days.

It's a bit hard to convey how small the cabin was - we're sitting on the bottom bunks and you can just see the top ones above our heads.  That's tasty tasty 2 minute noodles that we're eating - the promised food that you could buy on the stations never materialised, with the station vendors only selling the same stuff you could buy in a supermarket - pretty much 2 minute noodles.  The lack of fresh food was pretty grating - I guess we're a bit spoiled, but living off 2 minute noodles and cup-a-soup was driving me crazy pretty fast.

 

We were fairly lucky, having the other bunk in our 4 bed cabin unused for the first day and a bit.  At lunchtime on the second day, a very nice Russian businessman who spoke really good English joined the cabin, and it was pretty cool speaking to him - he told us a lot about the area and its history, and we taught him how to play Uno.  At breakfast time on the third day, he got off and was replaced by another Russian guy who spoke no English and wasn't so clean and well-dressed.  Through some picture-drawing, we deduced that he was a policeman, on a fishing trip from his town south of Moscow to a town near Vladivostok in the far east of the country.  He taught Stephen how to drink vodka (apparently you must drink 3 shots in a row)... for breakfast, which was pretty funny.  The unfortunate part was that he snored - louder than the train - it was like sleeping next to a freeway full of semi-trailers.  And to add insult to injury, he slept snored from around 3pm-10pm, then he went in and out of the cabin for the next 5 hours (noise, banging, plastic bags rustling, doors opening and lights), and then he went back to sleep from 3am until lunchtime (more snoring).  So the last couple of days were pretty awful.

 

Shower facilities.  The toilet paper on the train ran out after the second day - good thing we bought our own.

The most amusing - and possibly most telling - part of talking to the Russian travellers was that they couldn't understand why we were taking the train.  "Why aren't you flying?"  I think they concluded that we couldn't afford it. 
 

The long and short of it all is that the train was bearable to start with but got quickly worse the longer you were on it.  If you're set on taking the Trans-Siberian, our recommendation is that you break the journey after 2 days (which will drive you only mildly crazy), and have a night in a bed, some real food, some privacy, and a shower, before returning to the train and continuing on.