26 September

Today I awoke to glorious sunshine through the window – at 0600 Moscow time or 0900 local time. By 0630 I decided to get up and had my “wash” and dressed in track suit pants and shirt. Back in the cabin Sharon had woken, so we had a cup of tea and another Teddy Bear biscuit. Neither of us seemed too bad from the vodka the night before.
The scenery around was again light woods, but with a lot more open areas and many more villages, most quite picturesque. With the moving train and the windows (now soiled again despite our Swedish neighbour cleaning it for us yesterday) and proved difficult to get good photos of anything except blurred trees and the ubiquitous railside poles.
We stopped at Krasnoyarsk for about fifteen minutes (but only TEN MINUTES off the train – I think our provodnitsa is worried we will get left behind) and I got a good photo of a locomotive there. I didn’t see any good cakes on the platform (but I did spy Choco-Pie – evidently a traditional Russian recipe and good Russian name) so I will have to wait until our next stop. We crossed over the Yenisey River, which apart from bridge supports built to withstand small icebergs, had very scenic cliffs visible. After that we went through many more scenic villages, thus destroying completely my preconceived view of Siberia. At many of these villages, the villagers were standing and sitting at local train stations, waiting for the local train into the “big smoke” – aptly named here because the cities have a lot of smoke!
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, with the odd photo opportunity being taken.
It does seem funny now with the train running on Moscow time and the local time four hours ahead (and changing to five hours overnight.