Murmansk for Five Days and No Nights – Murmansk, Russia

Murmansk for Five Days and No Nights
Murmansk, Russia

We originally meant to go to Tallinn, but we ended up on a train to Murmansk. We were in St. Petersburg and the Estonian visa was too much of a hassle – which is not to say that getting the train tickets to Murmansk was easy, either. Customer service is an under-appreciated concept in Russia. Clerks at train stations are very much aware that they are the ones with the tickets and liberally allow themselves coffee breaks at unscheduled intervals.

We decided to take an open cart. These are long cabins with rows and rows of bunks; about 50 people sleep in each one. My Russian host family was shocked. This is about the cheapest and least comfortable way to travel, and they could not understand why wealthy Americans – even students on budgets are wealthy by Russian standards – would choose it.

We wanted to meet people, which we did.

As it turned out, that particular train was packed with sailors in the Navy on their way to training in the Barents Sea. Murmansk is a naval town and was, until recently, closed to foreigners (parts of it still are, as you will read below). My roommate tells me that Murmansk features prominently in many Tom Clancy novels.

The sailors were not so interested in me, but they were interested in Nadine and Katie. I entirely understood. I had known Katie for a few hours and was half in love with her already, and Nadine in any other company would be remarkable herself, if in a quieter way. Since talking to the girls meant talking to me, I didn’t lack for conversation either.

This is helpful on a 28-hour train ride.

We boarded the train at one o’clock in the morning. Since it was the beginning of July, the sun had only just recently set. It was the last sunset we would see for four days. Rather, we would have seen one four days later if we had stayed up late enough; July evenings in Petersburg see dusk around 11 p.m., and by the time we returned from our trip, we were too tired to wait for eleven.

The sailors in the bunks closest to us were appropriately named Andrei and Vladimir. There were some “normal” Russians nearby, too. The middle-aged woman in the bunk across from Katie always muttered “You don’t need to know that,” whenever Andrei taught me swear words, while the one across from Nadine just laughed. But that’s later in the story.

A lot of our amusement came from teaching each other our languages. At first we tried telling each other jokes, although none of them translated well. The only one of theirs that we understood is actually very funny, but too crude for print and involves a lot of hand gestures. I don’t think they ever got any of our jokes.

Andrei claimed to know some English (we spoke only in Russian), while Vladimir only knew a few phrases he had heard in movies. Occasionally he would get all excited when he remembered something and then ask us what it meant. I still don’t know, since his accent was so thick I don’t think we ever figured out what he was saying. We made a list of more useful phrases for him, although this involved a lot of arguments between Katie (British), Nadine (Canadian), and myself (American) about pronunciation. This was all lost on the Russians, who couldn’t hear the difference.

Russians who do speak English, incidentally, tend to do so with a British accent, and this combination Russian-British accent can take some getting used to. In general, they tend to learn British-style English. This was a bit of a problem when I taught a conversation class at St. Petersburg’s Philological Institute, since fairly often the students would ask me what a word meant, and I could only throw up my hands and say, “British English.”

But back to the train…

Somehow it came up that I had a list of dirty phrases one my professors had given me a year back. The Russians had to see it. Upon reading it, they decided it was not nearly long enough. They borrowed paper and a pen and set to work. They were too embarrassed to explain what any of the words meant within earshot of the girls (Russians do not swear in mixed company), and even when we were off the train at a stop, they still spoke softly and conspiratorially.

I jotted notes on the paper.

These stops, which happened every few hours, were not at cities or towns for the most part – at least not that I could tell. Usually there wasn’t even a platform. The train just stopped somewhere and we all got off the train to stretch our legs. Locals would appear from somewhere with beer, soda, ice cream and dried fish for sale. When I say dried fish, I mean a whole fish, still on the hook, but dried. Andrei, Vladimir, and the other Russians all loved the fish, but I was never persuaded to try it.

I was talked into a few beers, however. The Russians seemed to think it is the way to pass time on a train, and many of them were already very drunk by the time I opened my first bottle, about 10 hours into the trip. The girls, who had better sense, largely abstained.

As the day wore on, the train started to heat up. Our repeated efforts to open the windows were of no avail; they appeared to have been glued shut. Near my bunk, a few rows down from the girls, we were able to pry one window slightly open. For the time being, however, it was not a major issue.

As mentioned, the sailors were on their way for some practical training. When we asked them what that would involve, it turned out to involve mostly drinking and relaxing on a ship, which didn’t sound all that different from what they were doing on the train.

I had about four or five beers, which was great fun until I woke in the middle of the “night” to a parched throat and a splitting headache. With a train full of warm bodies, the sun up all night, and most of the windows shut, the temperature had steadily risen. It could have easily been a train in Sudan. My water and soda was exhausted. The slight opening in the window near my bed let warm air blow over a few square inches of skin. The car swayed and the wheels clanked. Thuthump. Thuthump. Thuthump.

We had eight hours to go.

While I remember the rest of the train ride vividly, my story takes up again in Murmansk, where we arrived around five in the morning. There wasn’t anything to do yet, and we didn’t have a hotel reservation and didn’t really know where any hotels were – not that we had a map of the city, anyway. We waited a couple hours in the station for the information booth to open up. Having procured some water, I attempted to fix my head with a nap, which mostly worked. I swore to never again drink on a train.

Once we knew which direction downtown was, we set off. It turned out not to be far, and we shortly found ourselves a hotel with triple rooms for a song (hotel rooms in Russia are often cheaper than camping grounds in the U.S.) and set off to explore. The only thing we knew about Murmansk at the time was that it was home to the oldest puppet theater in Russia (the girls might have known that it was a military city, but I didn’t at the time). We quickly discovered that said puppet theater was closed for the summer.

We found a mall, where the girls shopped for clothes. I recall I was bored until I found a signed poster of Zemfira, a Russian pop star I had a mad crush on at the time, although now that I think more carefully it might have in fact been a poster of someone else. I remember very well trying to convince the girls that we should buy an inflatable swimming pool for our hotel room, which they were having none of, and them trying to dress me in Russian disco clothes, which I was having none of.

The first night, Nadine crashed early. Katie stayed up to read the Bible, which she did fairly consistently. I worked on Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov, which I was trying to memorize. Russians traditionally memorize a great deal of poetry, and during my first stay in Russia I had caught the bug. I was only on the third or fourth stanza at the time. Having finished her Bible study, Katie quietly quizzed me on the new stanzas, which I botched terrifically.

Murmansk has a gigantic, winding history/ethnology/geology/zoology/war museum, which was as fascinating in person as it is boring to write about. The guidebook we had did not mention that the city has a year round fair-grounds (of sorts) with a ferris wheel and a house of mirrors. The house of mirrors became especially useful during a 10-minute rainstorm.

The real jewel of Murmansk is the hiking. The city extends up the side of what seems to a native Kansan like myself to be a gigantic hill. Much of the first day we spent wandering the docks and the hill. From the top of the ferris wheel, we had seen in the distance what looked like a gigantic statue looming at the edge of the distant hill, which I had insisted on seeing.
There is no place quite like the former Soviet Union for public monuments. During the 20^th century, the greatest artists and sculptors were put to work producing propaganda posters and war monuments. The posters are as beautiful as they are terrifying. The monuments, which tend to have a very defined style combining human motion and a super-futurist artificialness, took me some getting used to. I cannot say they are beautiful, but they are fascinating. Do a web search for Mamaev Kurgan to understand.

The walk to the statue outside Murmansk turned out to be quite a trek, during which we came across a number of random buildings. There was a beautiful cathedral in the process of being renovated (we trespassed as close as we could, but I don’t think we managed to get inside). There was a gigantic castle/playground made for kids, which we watched from outside the walls. There was a reservoir of some sort, which people were doing their best to pretend had a nice beach.

We eventually made it to the monument. I am no estimator of size, so I can only say it was colossal – many, many, many times larger than a person. From our city map, we determined that is named something like “Defender of the Transpolar Region.” Unfortunately, I have lost the map and a web search doesn’t turn up much. It was a monument to a forgotten battle against the Finns during World War II.

After visiting this historical monument, we found the local movie theater and watched Lyudi v Chyornom Dva – Men in Black II. It was dubbed into Russian, and fairly well. Because budgets are low, foreign movies in Russia often have a single voice “actor” who reads all the lines right over the original sound. In this case, they had redone the sound track and had a different voice for each character, which naturally makes things a lot easier to follow. There were some parts that I didn’t understand, but when I watched the movie in English later, I still didn’t understand them.

We stayed only two days (we had classes to return to in St. Petersburg). We were to leave on the St. Petersburg-bound train mid-morning on our final day. Katie wanted to sleep in, but Nadine had found out the day before that a boat went to the far side of the river (Murmansk is situated above the delta of the Tuloma River), and we wanted to go. The schedule said there was a boat going first thing in the morning, which would return in time for us to catch the train. We barely made it there on time. There were a surprisingly large number of Russians (mostly men) taking the boat, many of them already breaking out the six-packs. They looked liked factory or dock workers, and we speculated that it was some sort of commuter boat for those who worked on the other side.

Unfortunately, when we got there, the conductor told us that foreigners had to buy tickets through a special office, which of course was closed. Still, we claimed to Katie that we had taken the boat all the way out to the Barents Sea (it had been a great disappointment to us when we realized that Murmansk was not within sight of the ocean) and had seen seals. I don’t think she believed us.

That was not our only such problem in Murmansk. Wandering around the docks, we found a large gate with something interesting written on the sign. I don’t remember exactly what it was we wanted to photograph, but a middle-aged woman came running up to tell us that photographs were not permitted. Apparently there were security concerns of some sort.

The train ride of the way back was less memorable, partly because there were no sailors. There was an entirely pants-less girl, which provided an amount of scandalous amusement and a number of debates as to whether she was entirely pants-less, or in fact wearing some sort of thong. The world may never know. It was at least a change from the trip to Murmansk, which had consisted of a lot of sailors in bikini bottoms.

For the return trip I packed only water and food – no beer.

When we returned to St. Petersburg, we went our separate ways. Katie was heading off for Poland. She had been studying a Polish phrasebook during the trip. We had amused ourselves during the trip by guessing what the phrases meant (they almost always sounded identical to the Russian equivalent). Nadine and I both had a few more days of classes and then were returning to our native lands.

After returning to America, I heard from Katie occasionally but lost Nadine’s email address for some time. After six months, I finally found it and emailed her. The subject heading was “Hi, remember me?”

Her reply:
“Of course I remember you. There is something about spending 54 hours on a
train with people that makes those people unforgettable.”

Travel in Russia is accomplished by trains. Russian train tickets are relatively cheap (you can ride from one end of Asia to the other for under $200). For the adventurous, 4th class is the way to ride, as you are guaranteed interesting company even if you only speak English. Moreover, the more expensive tickets do not buy you more comfortable berths – just a smaller cabin and a bit more luggage room.

Remember to pack food for your trip. For one, the restaurant car as little to offer. Second, Russians are great lovers of the potluck. You can expect to be offered food by your neighbors, and you will want to be able to return the favor. Favorites include canned fish, bread, sausage, cheese and chocolate.

The cities to northern Russia offer little in the way of urban attractions. The real attractions are the people and the hiking. Although Russia is difficult to travel if you do not know Russian, it can be done. I know someone who traveled half-way through Siberia on her own without knowing more than “da” and “nyet”.

To reach Russia by air, it’s cheapest to fly into Moscow or St. Petersburg. Roundtrip tickets from New York in the summer can run as low as $600 US.

Did you like this article?

    

 

Share it

 

Place a comment