Railroads are roads too.

Trans-Siberian Railway 1990. Barabinsk Station.

I've never been a big fan of travelling. Or rather, there are a lot of places I want to see, but I wish I could just teleport to my destination, without the hassle of packing and tackling mundane means of locomotion. (How long until transporters are finally functional, eh?)

However, there is one particular destination, or group of such, that I wouldn't mind accessing normally at all. Rather, the destinations are just dots along the way, pit stops through the ride, which is the purpose of the journey itself. That is the very essence of road tripping - does it matter that the particular trip doesn't use roads?

The Trans-Siberian railway has fascinated me for a long time; since I was in primary school, in fact, and bought myself a book on the Soviet Union culture from a school book fair. Today, the journey from Moscow to Vladivostok takes six days; six days to cross the largest country of the world almost from end to end, and that's just the time moving. No reason why I couldn't step off somewhere, stay overnight, and continue on the next train, making the whole adventure last two or three weeks.

There are so many places along that mighty railroad I want to linger in. Vladimir, the city of cathedrals and that famous icon style, Our Lady of Vladimir. Nizhny-Novgorod, still called Gorky on the railway, one of the world's 100 top cities of historical and cultural value. Kirov, the city of twins, with its ghost river port. Yekaterinburg (still Sverdlovsk for the trains), the gateway to Asia and the place where the last Russian royals ended their lives. Omsk, where so many rhythmic gymnastics champions seem to come from. Krasnoyarsk, where the lowest ever temperature in inhabited areas was recorded (-70 Celsius, if I recall), but also reputed to be the most beautiful city in Siberia. Irkutsk, the flagship city of Siberia, if there ever was one, and the setting of Mikhail Strogoff, a fascinating read about a fascinating time. Ulan-Ude, a piece of the Far East that was closed to foreigners until 1991. Birobidzhan, the heart of the Jewish community in Russia. Not to mention the nature along the way, which is not so much larger than life - nature is always like that - but more impossible for me to imagine. Endless steppes, mountains like the Urals, lakes like the Baikal, rivers like the Volga and the Amur dwarf everything I have known as plains, mountains, lakes, and rivers so far.

It's not going to happen any time soon, I know that; it's not the kind of trip you take young children on. I will have to wait until the younger generation of the family is grown enough to be safe somewhere else. I just hope it doesn't become impossible to travel those regions as a foreigner by then.