ARE we there yet? It was meant to be the train journey of a lifetime – travelling more than 7500km on the Trans Siberian Express from Moscow to Beijing.
But the last thing Sydney man Archie Fraser expected when he set off on his “bucket list” adventure with his wife Jennifer was to be stranded in the middle of Siberia for three days.
Annandale train travel enthusiast Archie, 78, had always wanted to travel on the Trans Siberian so his son surprised him with two tickets.
The weekly train leaves Moscow for the Chinese capital every Tuesday night for its 7621km, six-night journey.
All was going according to plan, until the train made a scheduled stop on day one in the Siberian city of Omsk.
“I jumped off the train to take some photos of engines including a really old Russian steam engine on my tablet,” Archie said.
Asking the guard how long the stop was for, Archie misunderstood the “15 minutes” reply and thought it was 50 minutes.
“When I came back the train was gone. My first thought was they must have moved the train to another platform,” he said. Then reality struck home: the train had left without him.
So began Archie’s adventure across Siberia to catch up with Jennifer who was still on the train.
“I didn’t have any food, a phone or my medicines but I did have my wallet, a tablet for taking photos but luckily had my passport,” said Archie, who recently won the Uniting Senior Memoirs Writing competition writing about his experience.
Archie stood stunned for a while then sheepishly returned to the main station building.
“Nobody would speak to me and I couldn’t find anyone who spoke English,” he said. “Eventually a young lady said ‘Can I help you?’ I nearly fell over.”
With only two trains a week, Archie learned his only way out was to wait 18 hours for a train the next afternoon to the city of Krasnoyarsk, then hop on a 31⁄2-hour flight to Beijing.
“While waiting I did manage to send an email to my daughter-in-law in London, asking her to get a message to my wife to tell her I’d meet her in Beijing.”
The next day (after spending the night in the train station armed only with some pretzels and a bottle of water) Archie boarded the train to Krasnoyarsk.
“Two men joined my carriage with luggage and baskets of food,” he said. Then it dawned on him that the 1440km trip was going to take at least 20 hours.
“My biggest worry was that I couldn’t read any of the station names as we passed through and I found it difficult to pronounce Krasnoyarsk, let alone read it in Cyrillic!”
But three days later, and after many mishaps and adventures (including the plane to Beijing being turned around at the last minute) Archie was reunited with Jennifer – after having a much-needed cold beer and club sandwich.
He had heard from his daughter-in-law via email that his wife was “as mad as a cut snake” and admits it took a couple of days to mend fences.
“I don’t think she was worried. She was pretty angry that I could go and do something so stupid.”
The couple still managed to have a fun week together in Beijing after all the drama. “It was certainly memorable and looking back it was very exciting.”
Archie, a regular member of Uniting’s Senior Gym in Lilyfield, won the Uniting Senior Memoirs Writing competition by writing about his experience.
His prize was a new bucket list experience – travelling by train from Melbourne to Adelaide with Jennifer. Thankfully this time he made the train.
- 1800-486-484, uniting.org