Part 13 - Day 2 on the big train - Yekaterinburg to Novosibirsk

Having had a not very successful sleep through two of the bigger towns, Yekaterinburg and Tyumen, our breakfast point of call was at Ishim, a very tidy place with a smart station building, and the obligatory old man with shopping basket having a fag.



Lunch was at Omsk. I had a bit more time to run around to the front of the station building and take a few more photographs of the outside and inside of the building, another one that's very ornately decorated.











And more strange Russian lunch. Not-vey-nice-at-all samosa with unidentified meat and meat-flavoured cheese spread, although you could barely taste any meat at all which was good as I just wanted cheese spread.



Pulling out of Omsk you can see this spruced up old train. You see this kind of thing in a lot of stations on the route.



Our early evening stop was at Barabinsk. This was where I fell out of love with our Chinese guards, not that I was particularly in love with them in the first place. The stop was for 27 minutes and we therefore had time to go to the supermarket and station cafe. After 13 minutes I'm walking out of the station, 5 tracks away from our train, when suddenly my fellow passengers are shouting at me. "The train's leaving! The train's leaving" The guards had apparently beckoned to them that we were ready to go. I ran over as quickly as I could, more in fear of wondering what I'd be doing if I was stranded here with no passport, no phone and 100 roubles. I scrambled on, the guards had a little chuckle to themselves ... and then we waited FOURTEEN minutes until the train left, as always, dead on schedule.

The Chinese guards have a habit of trying to make you come back to the trains earlier than you should but that was just taking the piss.





The trees started to thin out a little bit by sunset, which was a great view from the train. As usual the camera doesn't do it justice.





Around 10pm local time we pulled into Novosibirsk, Siberia's largest city and the third biggest in Russia behind Moscow and St Petersburg. It was great seeing the city as we pulled in as firework displays were going of everywhere - it was Victory Day after all.







Just time for me to stop and get some dinner.



Baltika 7 is quite a nice beer too, very more-ish. That's a litre can too, helpfully marked by the words "BIG SIZE" on the bottom of the can. It was 130 roubles (£2.70) from the station cafe.