(Blogged November 4th)
On Saturday September 22nd I got on the train at 7 in the morning in Krasnoyarsk. The train traveled for three days straight, across the top of Lake Baikal. Thirty two hours into the journey, Fred joined me on the train.
I love train trips, they give plenty of time for thinking, praying and resting. On this trip I was able to make a good start on a project to understand Luke and Acts in depth. I went through it examining Jesus' patterns of discipleship and the Kingdom of God. On the return trip home, I finished off Luke, taking about 10,000 words in notes.
The trip on the BAM line is through a fairly remote part of Siberia. Some of the towns there exist purely because people were there to build the train line in the 70s and 80s. Some towns have now shrunk a lot. But the region is starting to open up now with the some mining of rare and precious metals. Notably the region is home to the world's greatest concentration of Vanadium. Vanadium is a major component in steel. Currently, Australia and South Africa mine 80% of the world's steel. This is bound to change in the future. In the coming years people there may be able to find good jobs.
The region is also notable for the fact that there are some indigenous Evenki communities. I fascinatingly searched wikipedia on the iPhone as we passed through towns, learning what ever I could.
After 3 days of travel, Fred and I pulled into Tynda, where we changed trains to head further north into Yakutia for another 19 hours.
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