Sleep and beauty on Aurora

Churches and attractive towns can be seen from the train. Picture / Jim Eagles

Train travel in Russia is, not surprisingly, geared up for cold weather. The carriages have heaters rather than air conditioning. So it was a little unfortunate our journey from Moscow to St Petersburg on the Aurora Express was during a heatwave.

The effect of cramming hundreds of passengers into carriages with no ventilation on a day when temperatures hovered in the mid-thirties was to turn the train into a mobile sauna.

Still, this fourth leg of our rail expedition across Asia and Europe was a dawdle, just 723km and 5 1/2 hours, and after all the food we'd eaten in Moscow a sauna was a good idea.

So we sweated off a week of good living, ate our boxed lunches, and admired the cultivated countryside and attractive towns which lie between Russia's two greatest cities.

Well, for a while I did, then I fell asleep. Even the fact that the seats on our side of the carriage faced backwards didn't stop me nodding off.

Which makes it as good a time as any to report that, fortunately, it was surprisingly easy to sleep on the trains that carried us the 9107km across Asia and Europe.

On most of them we travelled in pretty standard four-berth cabins, with seats that converted to two sets of bunks, which were surprisingly comfortable and, thanks to the gentle rocking motion of the trains, none of us had any problems getting off to sleep.

Some passengers were not quite so fortunate, having to share cabins with chronic snorers, but luckily our foursome were mere snufflers rather than full-fledged tuba players, or earplugs might have been necessary.

But we did make good use of the eyemasks provided by Singapore Airlines on the way over, due to the rather idiosyncratic lighting system - which for some reason tended to come on at 4am - and the inevitable bursts of light let in by anyone sneaking off for a midnight toilet trip.

In fact the trickiest thing about spending a few nights on the train was the necessity - if, like me, you had courteously taken the top bunk - of climbing carefully down a swaying ladder, tiptoeing out of the cabin, quietly opening and closing the sliding door, in order to visit the loo at the end of the carriage.

In fact the most entertaining moment of the entire trip came one night when I tip-toed out in my underpants, shut the door behind me ... and gazed with puzzled eyes at a much wider than usual corridor which was not swaying and had doors on both sides rather than just one.

Then I realised, I wasn't on the train. We'd arrived the night before and I was in the St Petersburg Hotel.

The only Aurora around wasn't the express which brought us here but the battle cruiser it was named after. It fired the shell which launched the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and was now anchored just across the Neva River.

And I had just locked myself out of my room.

While I stood wondering what to do a white-haired Russian in a pin-striped suit came round the corner, started at the sight of my scantily clad body, and ran away.

Luckily my wife heard my nervous tapping on the door and let me in before the hotel security staff arrived.

Checklist

St Petersburg By Air
Singapore Airlines flies 16 times a week from New Zealand to Singapore and 14 flights a week from Singapore to Frankfurt. Passengers then travel to St Petersburg with partner airline Lufthansa.

For fares to Frankfurt and further information visit the website link below.

St Petersburg By Train
Perth-based Travel Directors runs regular tours from Beijing to Helsinki by train, entitled Beyond the Trans-Siberian, including time in China, Mongolia and Russia. Tours cost around $13,000.

Further information
Email info@traveldirectors.com.au or visit the website link below.

Alternatively, contact Travel Directors' New Zealand representatives, Go Holidays on 0800 464646 or see the website link below.

* Jim Eagles' trip was assisted by Singapore Airlines and Travel Directors.