• This was one of my first big trips abroad and my diary was at that time still fairly limited - most of what you read was added some time after the trip while editing my diaries (and translating this part into English)
• I traveled through the USSR in early 1989 - Gorbachev was still the Communist leader and those were the final days of the cold war. All of this is now history...

It's ten minutes to three on a dark, overcast afternoon as the train stops in Moscow. As I step out of the train I realize that I'm cutting my life-line to the west - there's no fast and easy way out of here.

The train station smells from disinfectant and is clean. Grey and clean. I look for the Intourist bureau, as I had been briefed by my travel agent. It's a big, grey room inside the hall of the station and it's empty apart from a cluttered desk in one corner and a nervous young man who hastily stops biting his nails as I come in.

I tell him in English that I got sent to him by my travel agent and I show him the pack of receipts and papers that I got with my train ticket to Moscow.

He takes his time while checking my name in a long list. Without looking up he pushes the pack of papers in my direction and grabs the telephone. Harsh Russian words bring back where I am. He talks for a while and I can't help but imagine that he's talking to the KGB: 'Yes, we've caught the spy now. Where shall we bring him, comrade?'...

Another man enters the office and gestures me to follow. We walk through the train station and leave through a side door. The man opens the trunk of a small, black car and helps to heave my backpack inside. He starts to laugh and says something in Russian. He seems to ask what on earth is so heavy in the pack. It's the first time I see somebody laughing in the Soviet Union.

He ushers me into the back seat and starts the engine. It's a bit surprising that my first impression of Moscow is the bourgeois view from a chauffeured limousine.

When I booked the ticket for the Transsib, Intourist required that I had to book a night in a hotel in Moscow, the minimum being US$80 for a single room in the Hotel Belgrade. That's where we are going now, along huge streets with four or six lanes, filled with trucks, buses and taxis. There seemingly are no private cars.

The Hotel Belgrade is a semi-clean, dusty place. My room is small, just big enough for the bed and a chair. Since the room is on the 12th floor, there is at least a good view of Moscow.

I'm hungry from the train ride so I skip a first trip into town. I take the elevator down to the dining room 'for individual travelers' just to find out that the man at the door doesn't have me on his list. He sends me up to the dining room 'for group travelers'. There I get told that from now on I'm part of a tour group - the 'group of individual travelers'...

The food is fairly good, just those strange grey sausages without any taste give us headaches. We - that are 14 travelers from six countries. We all came to Moscow as individual travelers and it seems that Intourist decided that we are a lot easier to handle as a group with one tour guide.


Friday, 21st of April

The breakfast at nine o'clock is basic, to say the least. Valentin, our guide announces a bus tour through the city and a guided tour of the Kremlin at no extra cost. It somehow helps us to accustom to the thought that we're now a tour group.

The bus tour is brief, basically only a trip around the perimeter of the inner city of Moscow. We get a rundown of some of the ministries of the Soviet government and then we stop in front of one of the entrances to the Kremlin.

We walk through a big gate and enter the heart of the Soviet Empire. Strangely enough, we are facing some office blocks that one just doesn't expect in here. But there are also well-preserved old buildings, a beautiful old church with mindboggling riches lining the walls...

The place is big enough for days of exploration, but here the tour groups are kept under surveilance by their Intourist guides and after half an hour, we are again in our bus heading back to the hotel.

There's another Intourist tour in the afternoon, but somehow Valentin just can't explain what's so special about our destination outside of Moscow.

Together with another Thomas and Andreas from Germany and Marie from Canada, we decide to do Moscow our way. We organize a map and start hiking along the big Prospekts, wide streets with six or eight lanes cutting through the city.

We visit a supermarket on Kalinin Prospekt, not too far away of the Red Square. It's empty. Not that there are no people, no - there's a good crowd walking along the shelves... the empty shelves. We can't figure out what hundreds of people buy in an empty food store, but maybe they are waiting for the next truckload of meat from somewhere. It explains our meager breakfast - and the grey sausages from last evening...

The Red Square is breathtaking. It's not as big as I thought - don't know how someone can land a Cessna in here. But the buildings that surround the square are gorgeous. The intimidating Kremlin Wall on the one side, the classic Gum Department Store on the other. The wonderful Basilius cathedral at one end of the square with its colorful - and freshly renovated - towers.

On the way back we take Moscow's Metro. This is fun. The subway stations are beautiful, some of them look like huge ball rooms or underground cathedrals. We miss our stop, but since we have some time left and it is a circle route, we just stay on for another round.

Our second - and last - dinner in the Hotel Belgrade. This time the food is better and there's folk dancing and loud music after dinner. But most of us start dreaming while we listen to the music, another couple of hours and we are on our way...

Valentin calls for his group. We all jump up and almost run for the door. It's now 10.30pm and our bus is waiting. We all get our backpacks from our rooms, jam into the elevators until the warning light starts sending out nervous messages.

The bus takes us to the Jaroslawskij train station where we have to wait for another half an hour, the train is not ready. It's almost midnight, but there are thousands of people at the station. Some seem to travel with all their possesions, while others, without doubt, have nothing left than their patched clothes.

Valentin calls again for his group, inducing heart problems with some of his over-excited group members. This is it - we are walking up to the platform where we see, feel - and smell - our train. The Trans-Siberian!


Saturday, 22nd of April

It's 1.20am as we leave Moscow's Jaroslawskij Station. All in our group have been assigned their quarters, sorted out by nationalities. I'm sharing a four-bed cabin with Thomas, Andreas and Maja, a girl from Hamburg. I have one of the lower beds.

We try to open the window, but it's locked - it's still winter time in Siberia and Valentin tells us that our window is 'officially locked'. It's also unofficially dirty, but we're not pointing it out to our guide...

3.30am. We sit on the lower beds, talking. We're too excited to sleep and as we can hear through the thin wooden walls, our Dutch neighbours are also awake.

Somebody is knocking at the door. It's 8.30am and our faithful guide reminds us that our breakfast time is 9 o'clock sharp. Andreas slept in one of the upper beds, as he finds out the hard way. We, the two Thomases in the lower beds have it a bit easier there, but only a little bit.

On the way to the restaurant car we get our first glimpse of the countryside. There are small villages connected by dirt tracks and there's still a good amount of snow everywhere. The thawing snow and the heavy trucks convert the dirt roads into muddy creeks, almost unnavigable for even the heaviest trucks.

The food is not too good and the two waiters seem to be trained prison personnel. They basically throw the plates with the food at us and only through coincidence hit the table instead.

Grey seems to be the favourite color in Soviet cuisine. We have two kinds of stale bread, light grey and dark grey, grey sausages again, and even the yolk of the egg is greyish yellow. And the overall taste can only be described as grey, too.

As we leave the restaurant car, we realize that the train personal had all the Soviet passengers cleaned out of the restaurant for us. As we walk out, they push in to get their share of the grey breakfast.


Sunday, 23rd of April

What was only a suspicion yesterday becomes a fact today. There are no showers on the train for second class passengers. Valentin apologizes in four different languages, but there's not really a lot he can do about it once the train is rolling. Our showers are in a different carriage that is still in Moscow...

Instead we build a small apparatus out of mineral water bottles and strings in one of the toilets of our carriage. Not great, but better than nothing. The conductor in our carriage is a bit concerned at the beginning, but then helps us out with the string for our self-made shower.

There is a conductor in every single one of the carriages on the train. They assign cabins and beds to new passengers, clean the corridor from time to time, and are responsible for the Samovar, the water boiler in each carriage that supplies us with endless amounts of hot water for tea and instant coffee.

But their most important task is to check that all the passengers are back on the train after the frequent stops. We all use those stops to take walks on the platform or run over to the station to buy snacks. We also started an ongoing international snowball match. It's still freezing cold here in Siberia.


Monday, 24th of April

1 am. We're going through Novosibirsk. We are all still awake since we are experiencing 23 hour-days at the moment. Through our continuing movement eastward we're loosing one hour per day.

Novosibirsk seems to be one big industrial site. There is coal dust penetrating our cabin through the cracks around the window. There is a sulphuric smell in the air.

After lunch we cross the Jenissei. It's a huge, muddy river, maybe a hundred meters wide that is running north to the Polar Sea. Shortly afterwards we are in the Taiga, an endless forest of birche and pine trees.

Valentin pinned a map of the world at the corridor wall on the first day of our trip. He's charting our course every couple of hours and there's now a neat red line across half of the Soviet Union. After three days of continuous travel we've done almost half of the complete distance between Moscow and Beijing.


Tuesday, 25th of April

The food in the restaurant is getting worse. It seems that they stocked up in Moscow and they don't get anything fresh on the road. One could drive nails into wood with the bread from our breakfast.

We arrive in Irkutsk in the afternoon. Valentin is leaving us here. He goes back to Moscow to guide the next group around. Before he leaves, he gives our papers to one of the Swedish travellers as the new head of our group.

Late in the afternoon we arrive at Lake Baikal. The train takes a long, slow curve around the southern end of the lake. The lake is more than 600 kilometers long and covered with ice. My guide book says that early in this century the Russians even built rail tracks across the ice in winter time.

The ice gleams bright red in the evening sun as we reach the eastern shoreline. Our train turns east again and the lake disappears.


Wednesday, 26th of April

The landscape has changed during the night. The hills are arid, brown and dusty. There are gun nests and bomb shelters dug into the bare hills, the remnants of the fighting between China and the Soviet Union.

In the afternoon we arrive in Zabaikalsk, the town on the Soviet side of the border. We have to leave the train, because the wheels of the carriages have to be changed from the Soviet wide-gauge to the standard gauge used by the Chinese.

One carriage after another is lifted up, the old wheel assemblies are rolled out and the new assemblies rolled in. It takes more than two hours for the whole train.

After changing our Rubles back to US Dollars we have some time for a stroll around town. There's a playground next to the train station with a huge, rusty tank on a concrete foundation.

Back on the train the customs officers are very relaxed. There is no real inspection, just a casual walk-through. The Swedish head of our group gives them our papers, we are again individual travelers.

It's getting dark as we pass the border. On the Chinese side the border looks more active, more militaristic and there are border guards along the rail track up to the station of Manzhouli, the town on the Chinese side of the border.

Suddenly everything changes. The station is brightly lit, there's loud music out of the station's PA system. The platform is filled with people, most of them try to sell their goods to the travellers.

And what goods they have! There are all kinds of fruits, soft drinks and snacks that were unknown in the Soviet Union. The merchants use a melodic sing-song to entice customers. Within the last few kilometers we went from one world to another.


Thursday, 27th of April

It's still very early in the morning as I take my first peek of China in daylight. There are farmers out in the fields, bikers on a dirt road that follows the rail track. Small villages with dark ponds and thatched roofs. Rickety, old trucks wait at the rail crossings.

There are a lot more people about as in Siberia, even out here in the countryside one can sense the huge numbers that dominate China.

Before lunch I see my first real steam train. I've seen museum pieces before, even under steam, but this is the real thing. It's a very long coal train that is pulled by two steam engines in tandem.

Marie asks on the way to the restaurant car if I've noticed that the Russian train personnel is suddenly smiling. I haven't, but it's true. Since we've entered China they are suddenly outgoing, friendly, even cheerful.

We've also got a new restaurant car, in the place of the Soviet one is now a Chinese restaurant. The food is not only fresh, but also very well made and quite tasty. The restaurant is also full of Russians and Chinese, nobody here would dream of closing it down so that the western tourists can eat alone...


Friday, 28th of April

6.45am. The train stops in Beijing Station with less than a quarter of an hour delay on more than 9000 kilometers, not bad.

The square in front of the station is a delirious experience for us. Since we are all backpackers, we're all heading for the same, cheap hotel. But it's not so easy to find the bus stop or even to read the signs with the destinations of the busses.

There are people everywhere. The busses we see are crowded beyond believe. Cyclists move through the mass of people waiting for the busses, using their bells constantly, shouting at the people to get out of the way.

Finally we find a bus that seems to go in the right direction and fourteen tired, sweating foreigners with huge backpacks push into the already crowded bus. We're on our way...