I was intending to take the trans-Siberian to Beijing this Tuesday. As it currently stands, one of the travel agents I’ve been speaking with is saying it’s completely booked. I’ve yet to hear back from the other.
So I’ve been thinking about contingency plans and what might transpire in the next few days. Here’s two that I like::
- One of the two travel agents miraculously produces a ticket for me. The ticket is a reasonable, albeit inflated, price. This occurs sometime over the weekend or on Monday. I have Tuesday to prepare and purchase some things before boarding the train in the evening.
- I arrive at the station Tuesday evening with my bags and purchase a ticket on the spot. I will bring along somebody who speaks Russian (I’ve met a few through Couch Surfing) to assist.
If I have no luck with the #4 train on Tuesday then I won’t be taking a train eastwards. Although there are plenty of ways the trip can be made, I’m fairly limited because my Russian tourist visa expires on the 30th November and I only have a ‘transit’ visa for Mongolia which expires on the 3rd December. It might be possible but I’m sure I’ve exhausted all the combinations of well documented trains. So here’s three other possibilities:
- I hand over a large sum of money to Aeroflot (the Russian national airline) or Air China. They will fly me directly to Beijing.
- I hand over a smaller sum of money to Air Baltic and they fly me Helsinki, Finland. I cash in a large sum of frequent flyer points and Qantas give me a ticket on a Finnair flight direct to Beijing.
- I arrange a train to take me from Moscow to Helsinki. Then I do the frequent flyer – Finnair thing.
The up-shot of the alternatives is that I’ll have time to see more of Moscow and perhaps a little of Finland and Scandinavia. The downside is that I’ll inevitably spend more money and I won’t get to take the really long train ride that I’ve been looking forward to.
It should be an interesting couple of days.