We spent a comfortable and lazy day in our compartment on train 60, watching the Russian countryside go by at 100km/hr. The schedule was for 1800 kms in 25 hours, which works out at 72 km/hr, but of course we had up to two hours of stops at stations. Here are some of the hawkers selling at a station.
We saw apples, smoked fish and home-made cakes. Our schedule sent to us by Real Russia said our train would arrive at Yekaterinburg at 20.11 but our train ticket said 18.11. The ticket lady said the trains run to Moscow time. We needed to put our clocks forward two hours to be on Yekaterinburg local time. Mainly the train was passing through endless forests but occasionally we saw some crop fields which had been cleared ready for winter and numerous villages.
At one station they paid tribute to an old steam train. We have not heard of any steam trains actually running in Russia but surely there must be some still. We certainly saw many freight trains full of coal heading west.
We arrived on time and were met by two men who greeted us like long lost friends and grabbed some of our bags. Completely different from our arrivals in St Petersburg and Moscow. They took us into the square outside the station.
This was Denis.
And this was his father, Vadim, who was the local Real Russia Agency, loading us into the VW bus. Our driver took us to the Park Inn (Radisson) and on the way Vadim told us that Yekaterinburg (also called Ekaterinburg) had a population of 1.5 million and was the fourth largest city in Russia. It reminded us of Perth in some ways. Not at all the image we had of a place in the Ural Mountains that was on the edge of Siberia. Vadim helped us check in and assured us that Natalie would meet us at 10 next morning, take us on a walking tour and buy us lunch. He would then take over with the VW driver and take us out of town for a few surprises. We bought some food at the hotel restaurant and retired to our rooms which were excellent.
This was Denis.
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