Land of the silver birch

Woke still in the birch zone, but with decidedly thinning snow. Rivers are still frozen - solid enough for ice fishers to set their chairs out mid stream.

My time keeping system had reset itself overnight. You might think a clock is optional for someone on a train for 5 days, but that's not the case.

Local time is needed to keep up with the time zone changes, and prevent jet lag landing all at once when we reach the next destination. And the restaurant car runs on local time. However, the rest of the train runs (and stops) on Moscow time. So we need that to keep track of where we are (stations are few, and often not well signposted) and when we are coming up to stops long enough to get off, stretch our legs and buy provisions.

The guidebooks list where we cross time zones, but they disagree with each other - sometimes by 2 hours. It is therefore unhelpful of a clock to have a mad 5 minutes and lose both times. Fortunately Russian trains run to a strict timetable, so you can quite literally set your watch by them. Which I did.Read more