Day 7: The Moonlit Mission

Monday May 12 - near Jekaterinburg

I am sitting on one of the fold-down seats in the corridor of carriage nine with the laptop on my knee, a cup of black tea on the orange striped carpet, chatting to Joe Cheng about the time to the next stop. I am confused. His watch is set to Moscow time and, apparently, we are two hours ahead here.

Joe is a 25 year old New Yorker of Hong Kong parents. He loves his technology and is an intrepid, solo traveller who has taken a one month break from his IT job to see Europe and Russia. Joe wears glasses, has a permanently optimistic face and the slightest hint of a moustache.

Joe’s a bright guy but he has his moments of confusion. I taught him backgammon earlier in the restaurant car and he beat me first time. But then, as I began typing in the corridor, he stood next to me in his checked pyjama pants, flicked through the guide book and said that he wants to get out of the train at the next stop to take some photos of the churches. ‘It stops for 23 minutes,’ said Joe. ‘So I could walk to the centre of the city, take some photos and get back before the train leaves.’

‘How far is the centre to the station?,’ I ask.

‘Around 300 metres,’ he says, pushing the guide book toward my laptop, finger pointing at the map. ‘That’s not far at all… only about 100 yards.’

I stop my typing and fix him with a puzzled face. ‘Erm, no. A yard is about the same as a metre. So that’s about a quarter of a mile. It’s not that far but we stop for 23 minutes only. Imagine if you take the wrong turn, get lost or delayed and the train leaves without you. Then you’re screwed just for a few more pix of a few more churches.’

Joe disagrees with my conversion of metric to imperial. But he’s an American; what do they know about metric? Undaunted, he hops onto the heating unit by the nearest open window and pushes his head into the cool, dark night air. A few minutes later, he comes back and tells me that the stars are amazing. ‘I guess you don’t see too many in New York, with all the light pollution….’ I look up for an answer, but he has gone again, head out of the window, craning his neck east, toward the churches of Yekaterinburg.

When I first saw Joe, he was stumbling along the corridor, just minutes before the train left Moscow. He had a backpack, a heavy case on wheels and, in his hand, a tilted plastic plate of food covered by cling film. I had just come out of our compartment and I offered to help. ‘No thanks,’ he said without looking at me. ‘I have been ripped off enough times already this week.’

I was taken aback. ‘No, I will help you free of charge…’

A few hours later, I was chatting to the four Irish guys who were playing cards and drinking vodka. Joe showed up on his way to brush his teeth. He was wearing his checked pyjamas a baggy T-shirt and, conspicuously, a pair of white towelling slippers with the Marriot Hotel logo on the toes.

‘Hey, I like your slippers,’ I said. ‘Yeah, they’re pretty cool,’ said Joe with a non-committal smile. ‘I got them from the hotel in Moscow.’

‘I hope you didn’t pay for them, did you?,’ I said. The Irish guys got the cruel jibe, but Joe didn’t. ‘No, they were complementary… but at six hundred bucks a night for a room, you’d hope for a few freebies.’

The Irish lads and I erupted in unison. ‘Six hundred dollars?!!’ ‘Yes, which is why I said I’d had enough of being ripped off before,’ he said looking at me. He had misunderstood my offer of help and thought I said something about ten roubles.

After a few minutes, Joe bid us goodnight and the five of us shook our heads at his naivety. ‘He is gonna get ripped off a hundred times more before he gets back to the States,’ said one of the lads.

But today, I saw a different side to Joe. He maybe a little gullible and too trusting for his own good, but he is fearless. He has travelled in Central America, South East Asia and across Europe, always alone and without the aid of guides or travel agents. He prefers trains and buses and only speaks English. He has lots of travel stories that he tells with not even a hint of ego. And tonight he created another.

As the subdued lights and unforgiving architecture of Yekaterinburg approached, Joe seemed to hang further out of the window. The toilets are locked a few minutes before a stop so I turned off the laptop and headed down the corridor. In the train attendant’s room, the light seemed duller than normal. The reason was the night-time attendant was getting changed into his uniform. The guy is enormous.

As I passed by, he was putting on his shoes. Bending over, the waist band of his trousers gripped the middle of his butt and a massive expanse of apologetically grey boxer shorts filled my view. When he walks down the corridor, his hips nearly brush the walls. His bulk pushed everything to the edge of the path. There is no need for words - his looming presence does the work. This is why I call him The Snowplough.

When I returned from the loo, the attendant was standing outside, fully uniformed, key in one hand, peaked cap in the other and a stern look gripped his downbeat moustache. I smiled but his robustness was impermeable. His steel-grey hair, menacing bulk and blunt manner would not yield, particularly as the train was due for a stop. He is even more impermeable than Natalia.

The Irish guys, Joe and I were some of the few passengers to hop off the train for the 23 minute stop. In the chilly night air, there was little to see. Fergal pulled out the cigarillos and the other three eagerly took one. With nothing to photograph or buy, we talked nonsense and then suddenly, Shane pointed and said; ‘Look, he’s off!’

We turned towards the station building and sure enough, Joe was running across the track, camera in hand to the nearest door. ‘He’s insane,’ said Fergal. ‘He is not even going the right way.’ He pointed at the door that everyone else was using. ‘That’s the exit!’

Earlier Joe said he was going to do the mission no matter what we said. ‘Well, if you do, make sure you take your passport and some money,’ I said, joking. ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea. I’ll take my electronic translator just in case I get left behind,’ he said with not even a hint of latent doom.

The people filed out of the exits, a few passengers boarded, the minutes ticked by and the station fell into silence. The Snowplough looked at his watch with increasing regularity. The Irish boys stubbed out their cigars and we all scanned the doors. There was no sign of Joe. The train attendant clapped his hands, said something authoritarian in Russian and we shuffled toward the train.

Just as we reached the steps, we heard a gentle panting behind us. It was Joe, wide-eyed and thrilled. ‘Hey, I got some cool photos. Look!’ He thrust his camera under my nose and with rapid fingers, flicked through his night’s work. There were 20, maybe 30, shots of 19th century murals depicting noble peasants, and out of focus photos of heavy chandeliers. ‘It was a real bummer,’ said Joe. ‘I couldn’t find the churches on foot. I was gonna get in a cab but there weren’t any. And then I saw these paintings in the station building.’

As far as Joe was concerned, it was a failed mission. Back on the train, he lamented the lost opportunity. He re-read the guide book and said; ‘Man, one of the churches was built on the site of a house where there was a massacre in the 19th century. Damn! It would’ve been cool to get a shot of that.’

‘You managed to get back on the train in time, Joe, that’s the main thing.’ He looked a little puzzled. ‘I had loads of time to spare. Maybe I coulda made it if I had sprinted.’

Joe’s attitude to travel and adventure is carefree to the extreme. Somehow he knows that he will be OK, no matter how hair-brained his ideas. He is not at all streetwise and he will get ripped off by countless street-level charlatans and board-level bullies in a way that I never would. And yet he has a youthful sense of discovery and wonderment that is way off my scale. Today, I learned a lot from the 25 year old New Yorker with the towelling slippers.

As I hunched over my laptop, reflected on the night’s events and sipped a final St John’s Wort tea, I noticed Joe reading his guidebook again. ‘Hey, Gary!’ he said with renewed enthusiasm, ‘A little further down the line is one of the last refuges of the Siberian Tiger.’ He peered into the jet black night as if half-expecting to see one reveal itself.

‘If we have a long enough stop, maybe I will get to see one,’ said Joe. I stared at him for a moment, shook my head in disbelief and smiled a tribute to a true traveller and a person who has prompted me to redefine the word ‘optimistic.’