Border Crossings

A Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway

Emma Fick

All aboard for an exciting ride on the legendary Trans-Siberian Railway, an expedition from Beijing to Moscow over the steppes and through the forests of Mongolia.

The Trans-Siberian is the longest railway in the world, stretching 6000 miles (10,000km) across central Asia. It covers eight time zones, and a ride from end to end lasts a week.

In this handwritten and illustrated diary account, artist Emma Fick describes a month aboard the train with her husband — a journey that starts as a glimmer of an idea in a Helsinki used bookstore and ends on their final evening in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

Fick’s notes and hundreds of charming watercolor illustrations capture the small and large moments that define their trip. We see the inside of each sleeper car on the train and locals’ streetwear fashion. There are drawings of what she ate along the way: salty milk tea in Mongolia and pistachio ice cream at Gum’s in Moscow.

In the city of Omsk, she has a dish that the Russians call ‘Herring under a Fur Coat’: beets and mayonnaise on a layer of steamed potatoes and carrots, served over a bed of salt-cured herring with sliced, hard-boiled egg on top. She describes it as ‘not for the faint of taste buds.’

In the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, Fick and her husband embark on a ger (yurt) tour, and here’s where we get the strongest sense of Mongolia. Driven hundreds of miles into the countryside by their guide, they take in the sights of temples, stop at a very lonely restaurant, and spend a few nights with two nomadic families.

Fick illustrates how a ger is made and furnished: beds here, TV there, the family altar at the back. She introduces us to the family members, plays chess, and learns another game that involves tossing sheep anklebones. She vividly describes the food and how it’s served, including the formality around what is served, to whom, and when. Ger etiquette demands that the father gets the first pick, then guests, then the other men and women, and finally, children.

This is the best kind of travel book: it invites us into experiences that seem like wild adventures and makes them plausible and doable for regular folks like us — without removing too much of the sense of wild adventure.

To me, the ger looked small from the outside — probably because I was comparing it to the vast landscape around it — but when I crossed the threshold, I felt as if I were passing through a magic portal behind which space ballooned improbably. The interior revealed itself to be spacious and open — even with 10 people inside — yet cozy. The interior world of Mongolian nomads is opulent and spacious, an apt complement to the visual bounty of their natural surroundings: passing through the ger’s threshold, whether from inside out or from outside in, I marveled at the vastly different but equally remarkable worlds that awaited me on either side. — Emma Fick

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