The End of BAM: Vanino/Sovetskaya Gavan

Novy Urgal: Boredom in a BAM Town

Novy Urgal, the lead town from the eastern stretches of the BAM railway, is clearly not a place most, or any, travellers will come to. The train station has no guesthouse, and a tragic toilet for those needing it. The hotel is under renovation -- if you can find it -- and a scattered group of tile-peeling buildings are lined along dusty streets in a town of 6000 (and diminishing) people. It only began in 1974, when 320 Ukrainians came to work the railroad. Now the lone cafe in town, Aisberg (Iceberg) -- a blue and white place with three bored women watching Russian comedy on a big-screen TV -- doesn't serve borscht, but 'Ukrainian borscht' and 'Ukraine' is written along with 'Urgal' above the train station. I came because Lonely Planet thought it would be added to the Russian book. I knew it wouldn't be much, and it was clear about five minutes off the train, but I now have a day to kill before my night train to Birobidzhan. Here's how it's going:

* Got in line for train info at the station, but saw a break was coming in 15 minutes; with three people before me, chances were zero, so I left for town. TEN HOURS TO KILL

* Up the long steps into town, I saw a great 'BAM' marker, with a hero worker and kilometer distances to Moscow and Fevralsk. Nearby was a hospital shaped Dom Kulturi, I stepped into. I asked if I could look to the admin woman in a mini office up front. 'We have a store, a club, a library. Sure, you can look.' Above was towering ceilings, with elevated walkways I didn't know how to reach and a painting of a mountain scene. NINE-AND-A-HALF HOURS.

* Across a scruffy plaza stand a big gray buildng that seemed official, so I headed toward it -- and walked right in, finding the former admin bldg of some sort converted into a mall, a common occurence out here. walked past shops for haircuts, fresh bread, bad clothes and found -- sacre bleu! -- this Internet spot, where I checked college football details and answered a few emails. EIGHT-AND-A-HALF HOURS.

* There's a lone attraction in town, a BAM MUSEUM, and I tried to find it, walking lazily down cracked sidewalks of streets namd 60 Years of USSR and Kiev (Ukraine). I asked at a store, where a auburn-haired woman, locked up and walked me 15 feet away to point to the next door. 'Second or third floor.' Up the stairs, I surprised a 60- or 70-something attendant who gave a painstakingly detailed run-down of each and every item (1970s samovars, paintings that say 'Long Live Stalin,' a mini BAM map, stuffed animals I've never seen before), using her pointer to show the first, second and third buildings made in town from a glassed-in town model, and I finally had to excuse myself from a very Soviet experience. SEVEN HOURS.

* I dropped by the closed hotel under reconstruction and got some prices to be, and ate at a meal at Iceberg, watching Russian MTV (don't Russians ever listen to US pop?). I pushed the onions off my slice of pork and mixed them with a few potatoes I didn't eat to disguise my dislike for them. I didn't touch the peas. The borscht was excellent. FIVE-AND-A-HALF HOURS.

* I stopped or more Internet, and slowly returned to the train station where I found two people in line in an empty station. After 40 minutes of waiting, with no progress, I sat down and watched seven people take my place, and the two before me finish up. I left to a cafe near the Dom Kulturi, where shirtless guys in shorts and buzz haircuts worked on setting up a stage backed with navy-blue flames that look like Arabic writing. I had a beer and read. TWO-AND-A-HALF HOURS.

Now, with just 95 MINUTES TO GO, I'll try a ticket again. If not, I'll set in the shade and worry about my next ticket in Birobidzhan. Someone needs to clock waiting-in-vain on a trip here.

Komsomolsk: Communist Tour

The Trans-Siberian Railway is a Tsar's creation, but the scrappy BAM -- connecting west Siberia with the Soviet Harbor port in the far east -- is pure Soviet. Built over most of the USSR's run, with stops in production here and there, the Soviets put cosmonaut-like money into this train to nowhere. Purpose-built towns were made along the way, with laborers chiefly from Gulags that moved up and down the line built over permafrost and through mountains and over rivers no one had developed before.

Most towns here are cynical gray ugly creatures -- a lone Chinese restaurant, a sad cafe with latticework of iron gates on the windows, blocks of uniform housing with apartments in the beautiful area as cramped as Hong Kong's Chungking mansions. That's not true of Komsomolsk. Here, buildings are pink, salmon and sky-blue, made to look like St Petersburg by design -- the city, founded in 1932, became a ship-building and aircraft-building center of the Far East, and a successful one. Even today it feels more Soviet than many towns, in the best possible ways. Parks named for Ship-Building Factory, Railroad Workers and Construction Workers dot the city, as do tree-lined backways and sidewalks. The old 'factory kitchen' (fabrika-kuzhnya), where streams of workers poured in for meals next to the still-active shipyards, is now El Dorado, a renovated nightclub.

A local tour agent took me on a trip of various sights of the 'Stalin era.' His grandfather perished in a nearby gulag, then his father moved here from Siberia to see if he could find the cemetery. He's happy to be here. 'Things maybe were better 10 or 15 years, when the government gave us high pay, good food and free tickets as incentive to live here. Now they want to out. But I like it,' Misha, 48, says.

We visited an area by the railroad that was now as a mini gulag district -- nice tree-lined streets and Petersburg-styled housing blocks. A district for the administration, not the prisoners.

We drove by the active Amur Steel plant -- 'used to be 30,000 workers, now 7,000' -- and passed a working prison. 'When I was young I took the tram to work in the factory an we'd stop here, as 1000 gulag prisoners would cross the tracks to work in a nearby plant. That stopped in 1980.' And the prisoners now? 'Mostly criminals. But maybe a little bit political too.'

Russia Time-Out

I'm a bad blogger, but it's not all my fault. Been dashing about Russia's Far East -- sometimes a couple nights on trains, sometimes too worn out to cross town for an Internet connection you have to wait for. While I catch up on a few experiences to jot down here, here are a few photos: