Moscow to Irkutsk - Russia

On the Train. 3 days and 4 nights. Luckily the beds appeared more comfy this time. Me, Ian, Kym and a Russian girl named Leanna. Although there is a restuarant car we took some food on with us for the journey, ie. soup, noodles, bread, biscuits, meat and cheese. We did have one dinner in the restuarant, which was O.K., and probably better used to meet people though. Otherwise we had meals in our compartment. We also bought food off the train stations when we stopped. Who knows what we were sometimes eating, but personally I've been fine and not got the runs like the other two. We had been actually looking forward to the days on the train after all the sightseeing and walking. It gave us a good opportunity to read (I knowingly took 4 books and want to get them down to 1, as of course they are taking up too much room), and be lazy. We meet some other travellers, a NZ couple Jacque and Jason, having lived in London for 6 years and spending 8 months travelling back home; and Beccy, Lisa and John - all School mates from Birmingham, England. We drank beer, some played cards and vodka and had lots of laughs. They are doing a similar trip and we are likely to meet up with them again along the way. For those interesting in some history about Siberia: Genghis Khan's Mogol Empire grew to become history's largest land empire in the 13th century, but in the 16th century Ivan the Terrible defeated the Mongol and opened up the way to Siberia, allowing a powerful family called the Stroganov's to rule (maybe this is where the beef dish came from???), this was until the Cossack forces established military outposts across Siberia and gathered up furs for the Tsar (King), reaching the east coast in 1639. Ivan the Great became Tsar in 1696. Russian Alaska was sold to the USA in 1868 for the bargain price of 2 cents an acre. In the 19th century criminals were sentenced to exile or hard labour in Siberia, i.e. salt, gold, silver or coal mines. Can we relate this to England sending convicts to Australia? Get this - in 1753 the death penalty in Russia was abolished and replaced with excile. The most famous political exciles were the "Decembrists", men who took part in an unsuccessful coup in 1825. Many were accompanied into excile by their wifes. The building of the Trans Siberian Railway commenced in the 1890's. Towards the end of the 18th century the population of Siberia was estimated at one and a half million people, most of whom belonged to normadic native tribes. Apparently many peasants left Europe for Siberia after the Great Famine of 1890-91. Surely they can't have thought that the conditions in Siberia would be better? By 1900 over a million people had been exciled, and the prison were very overcrowded. This was also when it was abolished. But 30 years later in the 1930's and 40's Stalin (President) introduced concentration camps.