Part 14 - Day 3 on the big train - Tayga to Nizhneudinsk

Another variable night's sleep. I slept on and off until 5am, missing stops in Tayga and Mariinsk (although laying in bed listening to endless tannoy announcements) and then after that slept until about 10.30 which is unheard of for me. Soon after that was our first stop of the day at Krasnoyarsk.





In front of the station there was a square and weird station of a lion holding a spade.







The route during the night and today was surprisingly more built up. If you went a few miles back from the line, there's probably thousands of square miles of nothing, but close to the railway there were towns, industrial areas, and lots of abandoned Soviet concrete monstrosities. I particularly liked this one with "GARY 1974" written on it - that's some old graffiti.



The scenery was changing a bit more too as we rode through the Baraba Steppe.



The lunch stop was at Ilanskaya. Strangely this was the first station - and only one - whose name we saw in English.





And ... at last ... vendors on the platform! With non-kiosk food, but lots of kiosk food too. And cold beer in cardboard boxes!







And while you're trying to work out which will poison you the least, someone will come along and drive a truck down the platform.



I went for a sort-of-sausage-roll (not very nice) and an unidentified fritter (not bad, with meat and potatoes in it). And some Ayan Abakanskoe beer which is a "local" brew from Abakan in the Republic of Khakasiya, so that's sort of local to where we are now.

Followed by a well-earned afternoon sleep. We're now 4400km out of Moscow.

After a couple more hours we were at Nizhneudinsk. This was a let down compared to what we found at Ilanskaya. No nice food, no beer!







A final night-time stop at Zima. No beer again! We ended up in the restaurant car.