Click-clack ... long-distance train travel, like on the Trans-Siberian, is surprisingly enjoyable.Credit: Peter Solness/Lonely Planet
Click-clack, click-clack. Five-and-a-half days on a train and you still notice the noise. Click-clack, click-clack. It becomes the soundtrack of your life, a beat more insistent than any circadian rhythm. Click-clack, click-clack.
It's at once background noise and a major part of your world. There's an eerie silence when you pull into a station and the wheels come to a rest, like one of your organs has briefly stopped working. (One of them briefly had but we'll get to that in a second.)
Click-clack, click-clack. Five-and-a-half days, the full trip from Moscow to Beijing on the Trans-Mongolian, all stuffed into a tiny train carriage. It sounds mad when you sign up for it - how could anyone endure such a long time without room to move, things to do, news of the outside world or a shower?
But the strangest thing happens when you finally chug into Beijing station, dense stubble on your chin, reeking clothes on your body, nursing your ... um, sixth hangover in a row.
You realise you don't want to get off.
That's the thing about long-distance train travel - it's surprisingly enjoyable. Long-distance bus journeys are as tedious as Test cricket. Long-distance air travel is a blast if you like being locked in a tiny room with 300 other people, given a TV dinner and told to go sleep in a chair.
Train travel, though ... you can see why people romanticise it.
The perceived problem with long-distance train travel is, ironically, its greatest benefit: there's nothing to do. Not in a mind-numbing, will-to-live-draining way. There's just this grand feeling when you wake up each morning: that there is absolutely nothing that needs to be done that day.
There'll be no art galleries you've missed out on if you just laze around in bed for most of the morning. No famous monuments you won't have seen if you read a book for the afternoon. No museum missed if you just put on your thongs and shuffle down to the dining car for a cheeky vodka.
There's nothing to miss out on, yet you're still having a cultural experience because, here you are, on a train in deepest, darkest Russia, making stilted conversation with the two army lads who inhabit the bottom bunks.
The Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian are the grand old ladies of long-distance train travel. The distance covered is phenomenal - you can't get your head around it, so you just sit back, gaze out the window, argue with your partner over a game of Scrabble and enjoy.
Click-clack, click-clack.
There's more to it, though, than a mere lack of things to do. There are the folk on board - Russians, Finns, Danes, Chinese, English people, Americans and the obligatory Australians. You quickly realise there's an amazing camaraderie that forms between people who haven't had a shower in four days. There's the Australian physicist returning home from England (the long way). There's the chain-smoking Kiwi, who will go on to break his leg riding a scooter in Thailand. There's the Finn who will organise a toga party after realising his bed sheets are the closest thing he has to clean clothes. There's the Chinese train conductor selling cheap (and lukewarm) bottles of Yanjing beer at a good price.
Drinking becomes a big part of your life and not just because the Russians keep ordering bottles of vodka from the dining car, which has offered "beef stroganoff" four nights in a row and has produced a completely different dish each time.
There's just nothing better to do, except stand in the space between the carriages as the Kiwi chain-smokes. So you have a cold Baltika over lunch; maybe a few mind-jolting vodkas at dinner.
Click-clack, click-clack.
Your body clock's all out of whack. You're passing through unmarked time zones at random intervals. There's no one around who speaks English to tell you whether it's time to eat, sleep, get off at a station or just start drinking again.
Bits of blurred countryside flash past the window. Trees. A church. Trees. The bare, cold landscapes of Mongolia. The barren nothingness of northern China. A glimpse of the Great Wall.
You stop at odd intervals in nameless towns. You try to find out how long you'll be at the station. You hold up 10 fingers to the conductor and he nods: "Yes, yes." You flash 10 fingers twice: "Yes, yes." You try three times: "Yes, yes."
You give up and wander around the platform until the other passengers start piling back on. You leap back in to your carriage, there's a shriek of a whistle and, all of a sudden, the wheels are moving again and there's that familiar, reassuring sound once more.
Click-clack, click-clack.
bengroundwater@hotmail.com.
Read Ben Grounwater's column weekly in the Sun Herald.
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