Trans-Siberian railway: I quit my job after an unforgettable trip across Russia

“If you want to stay on the train without getting off, you could get from Moscow to Vladivostok in six days. I was happy it was this short because it gave me a deadline, though I did get off at several points,” says Mangione, who took a detour at Irkutsk, the third stop on her journey, following Ekaterinburg and Krasnoyarsk, to spend five days on Lake Baikal and Olkhon Island. “I wasn’t really interested in the cities. I wanted to see the multicultural parts of Russia I was unfamiliar with. The part of the trip I liked the best was from Siberia onwards — passing through Ulan Ude, Chita, Birobidzhan, Khabarovsk before finally ending in Vladivostok.”

The photographer brought with her an analogue camera and 40 rolls of medium format film, which she says is still considerably less than she would usually shoot. “I decided I didn’t want to bring the digital camera because I wanted to slow down the process. I’d been shooting my most recent project on Denmark on a digital camera. But for this project I wanted to shoot less. I didn’t want to go home with memory cards full of pictures and so I set out to shoot only things I found interesting,” she explains. To get the full Trans-Siberian experience, she bought a ticket for the third-class wagon (platskart in Russian). It gave her chance to interact with fellow passengers, who shared everything from their own family photos to pungent Siberian breakfasts. Read on for her five travel tips for this bucket-list staple.

The route isn’t as popular with Westerners as you’d expect

“I thought it would be a much more touristy but actually the large majority of passengers were Russians or Siberians. Many of the people who take the railway do so because they can’t afford a plane ticket. So there are usually a lot of students, especially during summer when they are going home for their summer break. Then there were a lot of a lot of soldiers on leave. I also encountered big groups, with families coming back from holidays. Russian people are really friendly. Now I live in Scandinavia, where everyone minds their own business. On the Trans-Siberian railway, people aways wanted to interact, even if they didn’t speak any English.”

It’s better to come prepared

“The very first train we took, we knew we’d be on it for three days but we didn’t think about a lot of things like what food to bring. People are very organised for this trip. You can tell there are some people who have been taking this route for a long time and know exactly what to bring. We learned from observation. There’s a restaurant that’s usually in the middle of the train but I didn’t see many people eating there. People mainly go there to drink beer. Generally people bring their own food. There is a samovar in each wagon with hot water, so everyone drinks tea all the time. It’s common to see people with dehydrated soups and instant noodles. Or people bring all sorts of cooked meals from home: I remember there was a girl travelling for Moscow to Vladivostok who brought along meals that were labelled for each day.”