From Russia with love

If travel for the sake of travel is your thing than riding the Trans-Siberian Express is just the ticket. The longest continuous railway track in the world takes you from Moscow to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean.

As you nibble on caviar and sip ice-cold vodka you’ll travel through seven time zones and see the vast expanses of steppe and taiga of Siberia unfold from the comfort of your carriage. So hop aboard the Trans-Siberian Express to travel to the end of the world.

With 5,773 miles of track, this is the longest continuous railroad in the world. Built by the tsars to connect the European part of the Russian empire with the port city of Vladivostok, the tracks were carved out of the permafrost with dynamite and pick axes, guided through thick forests and across rivers and lakes. Work could only be done during the four summer months and was carried out mostly by foreign railroad workers.

Chinese coolies, Mongols, Turks, Italians and some Russian convicts were called in for this thankless and often dangerous task; some were carried of by thugs, others succumbed to the bubonic plague or were eaten by tigers that used to roam the Siberian forest.

But the task was completed in 25 years and the first Trans-Siberian Express chugged along these tracks in 1916. Since then this train has been the stuff of myths. It’s been a setting for films and a veritable fantasy for those who care more about being in transit than arriving.

Still, the Trans-Siberian Express makes more than 90 scheduled stops and getting off at some of them is almost a must.

Take Irkutsk, already four time zones away from Moscow and deep in Siberia. This is not the grim, grey industrial city that one might expect but rather a cosmopolitan city with wide avenues lined with silver lampposts, over-the-top mansions and a theatre hall painted scarlet.Dubbed the “Paris of Siberia” by playwright Anton Chekhov at the turn of the previous century, Irkutsk owes part of its splendour to an ill-fated uprising against the tsar in 1825 by a band of army officers and aristocrats.

Many were sent to Siberia, among them count Sergey Volkonsky and his wife Maria. Their wooden mansion stands to this day, its interior virtually untouched; the grand piano, the library with more than 3,000 books and the Empire furniture they salvaged in an effort to replicate the sophisticated and cultured lives they led in St Petersburg.

Lake Baikal offers splendour of a different kind. This lake, off-limits to tourists until a few years ago, is about 25 million years old and about 80 per cent of the species that live in the lake are unique. There is the nerpa, a freshwater seal, the omul salmon and the golomyanka fish.

In the winter Lake Baikal freezes over and the ice is so thick that for a while the Trans-Siberian Express even ran across its surface. During the summer months, the blue waters are transparent up to a depth of forty metres and its shores light up with the brilliant colours of wildflowers.

Before leaving this hotel on wheels there’s at least one more must-see: Ulan Ude, the capital of Buryat Republic and the centre of Russian Buddhism. The city was founded in 1649 as a Cossack winter encampment and owes much of its growth to its central position on the tea route between Irkutsk and China.

The Cossacks met some fierce resistance from the local Buryat people who, like the neighbouring Mongols, are a nomadic people and largely Buddhist.

They were not allowed to practice their religion under the atheist Soviets who killed many of the Buddhist lamas, or alternatively, sent them to the gulags. These days, however, the temples, stupas and prayer wheels are very much present again.

The main monastery and the only one that was allowed to function under communist rule is the one near Ulan Ude in the town of Ivolginsk and, with its numerous Buddha statues, colourful painting and bright silk pillows, it’s well worth a visit.