[The Trail] The Reason We Chose the Strangest Path (1/3)

It all started with a single phrase from my best friend: “The Trans-Siberian Railway… it’s the dream.”

He had already traveled the classic Moscow-Vladivostok route. Now, with a rare gap between jobs, he wanted to share that dream with me, but I didn’t want to give him a repeat experience. I wanted something new, something that could belong to just the two of us. As we looked at the map, an idea struck me. It happened to be the 100th anniversary of the March 1st Movement, a pivotal moment in Korea’s fight for independence. A spark ignited in my mind. “Let’s trace the path of our ancestors, the independence activists who traveled this very route.” While the original Trans-Siberian was well-known, there was almost no information about its branch line, the Trans-Manchurian Railway. Our shared motto was, “Why not just dive in and see what happens?”

He was an international development expert who had navigated Ethiopia and India; I was nearing the end of my graduate studies, wrestling with my future and leaning heavily towards the chaos of a startup. A reckless duo, to be sure. Our meeting of minds always turned plans into reality. We would fly from Seoul to the heart of Siberia, Irkutsk. From there, we would travel by train, crossing into Manchuria, onwards to Harbin, and finally to Shanghai—the very path of patriots.

Of course, our journey couldn’t start smoothly. Our baseless confidence, the feeling that “we’ll figure it out when we get there”, immediately collided with the wall of Cyrillic script in Irkutsk. The train we needed ran only once a week. If we missed it, we’d be stranded for seven days. Unable to speak a word of Russian, we wandered the foreign city for days, communicating with gestures and frantic pointing. We luckily confirmed the departure date and waited in the freezing dawn at the platform for on-site ticketing to open. We survived on the only three Russian words we knew, Здравствуйте (Zdravstvuyte, “hello”), один (odin, “one”), and Спасибо (Spasibo, “thank you”), to buy bread and jam. When we finally stepped onto the train, the same words escaped both our lips in a sigh.

“Ha… we actually made it.”

In that single breath was the anxiety of the past few days, the immense relief of the present, and all our hopes for the unknown journey that lay ahead.

To be continued…