The ever-changing landscape on the Trans-Siberian train

The forest begins on the Trans-Siberian route

I recently re-read some of Paul Theroux's travel narratives in preparation for the travel writing course I ran, and picked out what I considered a "beautiful" passage about his journey on the Trans-Siberian:

The experience of the Trans-Siberian Express is both monotony and monkish beauty: all day outside the loud, hurrying train it is birch trees and undulant hills, and after the utter blackness of night on that line, you see more birch trees and undulant hills; and all that day too, until it seems more like wallpaper than a landscape - the kind of wallpaper that is so simple and repetitious that you look at the seams rather than the design.

The writing is fantastic, I think, and that's why we talked about it in class, but the other thing that struck me about this passage is that I totally disagree. I was amazed at just how much the landscape changed as I stared out the window crossing Russia.

Trackside village on the Trans-Siberian route

Every photo in this post was taken within just a few hours, on the stretch out of Vladivostok heading west. There is no sameness here, and I didn't experience sameness at any stage during my seven days on the train.

River alongside the Trans-Siberian route

One of the students at my course had a very interesting suggestion to make: perhaps for other travellers who've spent a lot of time riding trains through Europe or somewhere more populated and varying, the Trans-Siberian route may look all a bit the same. For others, like us Australians for example, who are used to travelling across places like the Nullarbor Plain which holds various records for the longest pieces of straight roads and straight train tracks, then the more varying countryside across Russia seems more interesting.

Rolling hills near the Trans-Siberian route

What do you think?