Maximillian & Us

Day 1:
17.10.2009 (Saturday)

Our journey started by boarding the Eurostar to Paris, France. We took the afternoon train, so we don’t have to wake up early and rush to St Pancras. The 2.5 hours journey was quite uneventful. When we reached Paris, it was dinner time. We have about 1.5 hours to find Gare De l’Est Train Station before the next train to Berlin departs. Luckily the train station is quite near to the Eurostar station (Gare du Nord). We found the station and had dinner at the train station so that we won’t miss the train.

The day ended onboard the overnight train to Berlin, Germany.

We arrived in Berlin at around 9am feeling very tired. Although we bought seating tickets, we were in a berth with 3 other passengers. The berth is not installed with proper seats, so it was not exactly very comfortable. On top of that, the other passengers were chatting non-stop among themselves until next morning. So annoying.

Although we were tired, we were quite determine to see Berlin as it’s our first time in this city. After locking our bags and bought a map from the tourist centre (yes, no free maps in Berlin!), off we went to see the Berlin Wall. Then we saw the hop-on/hop-off buses and decided prolly that was a good option as we have limited time to go to all the major sights. That was a bad option. 10 minutes after boarding the bus, we were already dozing off cos we were very tired due to lack of sleep on the train.

Anyhow we managed to see all the major sights and still managed to visit a holocaust memorial (Memorial to the Murdered Jew in Europe). The visit to the memorial makes me sad. Can’t believe up to 6 millions Jews were murdered in the span of 2 years. For whatever reasons, they did the things that they did, it is still evil from my point of view.

Moving on. Our next destination is Warsaw, Poland but our train only departs at 0400 the next day and we didn’t make any booking to stay in a hostel. Dav had the brilliant idea of staying in the train station till the departure time. Luckily the train station did not close. And so we slept on the benches in the train station until our train arrives.

Finally we made it through a very very cold night in the Berlin Train Station. It was freezing… at one point we noticed some people hiding in the self-service ticketing office for heat. Naturally we didn’t have a good rest. Once we boarded the train, we wasted no time and went straight to bed. I slept all the way to Warsaw. The seats were very comfortable and big enough to fit 2 person!

I’m not sure whether we slept too much or was not paying attention, but we arrived in the wrong train station. It didn’t look right when we couldn’t find the main hall. After asking around, we had to find out way back to the main station, luckily with not much problems and we have a 2 hour transit in Warsaw. If not, we might have missed our connecting train to Moscow.

We made it to the correct train station after 1 hour and had another hour to have a quick bite and stock up on our food supplies before our departure. The journey to Moscow took about 19 hours from Warsaw via Belarus. For this journey, we were upgraded to a 2 person sleeping berth. So we have the whole berth to ourselves. Our berth has a sink and we were given a small towel, bed sheet, duvet a pillow for the journey.

We have to do border crossing on the train for the first time on this journey. There’s no border between all the Western European countries as they are all part of EU. We have to go through the Polish border and custom control and then the Belarus. Initially the Polish border officer was looking for a visa and I had to kindly remind them that Malaysian do not need a visa for Poland. Then for the custom clearance, we were asked to empty our backpack!! Literally everything out of the bag. Not sure what they were looking for, I did not think that was necessary. The process in Belarus was relatively painless. All we had to do was give our passport to the officer and then she disappear for about 20 minutes. After that she came back with our passport already stamped.

The border crossing experience did not end there. We had to stop for another 2 hours because after the border crossing, the train has to change its wheel. Apparently Western Europe and the former Soviet Union (i.e Belarus and Russia) has different train tracks width. So changing the wheels took a considerable amount of time.

Before I forgot, it is worth mentioning as well that every time the train approaches its destination (ie a station/ city), the toilet will be locked because it is still using the old sanitation system whereby everything goes on to the train tracks. Therefore to prevent any unpleasant things left on the platform train tracks, the carriage attendant always lock the toilets approximately 20 minutes before the stop. This applies to border control stop and changing of the wheels. So we have to constantly be aware when will the next long stop takes place and try to clear our bowel before that. For this border crossing, we were without toilet access for about 3 hours!

Another important thing to note is that this particular train does not have a restaurant carriage and we didn’t know that. Luckily we bought some snacks in Warsaw and had instant noodles and soup brought from home.