Hi everyone,
Sorry I haven't added an article for a while but I couldn't get this site to come up on Mongolia. We are now in Beijing and hopefully over the next few days I will get time to get our journal up to date. Thank you for your emails, it is so nice to hear what everyone is up to. Though we are having a great time, travelling does make me miss people more. Postcards will be coming soon. I found it hard to find any in moscow but I will definately find some in China.
Trans - mongolian rail. Any one who has known me since highschool knows that I have always wanted to take this trip and it didn't disappoint. We took the train from Moscow to Ulan Batoor and then from Ulan Batoor to Beijing. The first stretch of the trip took 5 days and we went to 5 different times zones in that time (now for the first time in four years we are actually on the same time zone as australia) and believe it or not, the trip really flew by.
I think a major reason why we enjoyed the trip so much was that we went first class, which meant we had a cabin to ourselves. This gave us our own personal space- which for five days is necassary, but because all the people on our actual carriage spoke English and we very friendly, we also got the social aspect of being on the train.
Our days very quickly fell into a routine of looking at the passing landscape, drinking lots of tea/coffee, chatting to the others and just passing time. The only interuption to this schedual was when the train pulled into a station. The cue for this was the conductors locking the toliet doors. Then everyone in our carriage would put on their out door gear and watch through the passage way windows us enter the station. Then we would all rush out to walk around a little and buy food from the ladies who sold stuff on the platforms. Our excitment to get off the train and run around the platforms made our carriage attendants very nervous. They usually kept watch over us like other hens and would yell at us if they thought we were going to stray to far away from them. At one station, the poor attendant got worried there were too many people on the platform for him to watch us so we all had to get back on to the train.
Our carriage attendants were friendly and really lovely. This is not true of all carriage attendants. We got nice service because we were in the china part of the train. The russia end couldn't give on iota if they left someone behind. We got this information from Steve, our friend who would come us from 'little russia' each night to drink vodka with us ( I am now over vodka for a very long time).
Once again, besides the people we met, the best thing about the train was watching the passing landscape. I could go on for ages about its beauty and diversity. It was so nice to sit and read a book by the window. Everytime I glanced up, the landscape would have changed. Two of the most impressive things I saw were: a) massive frozen lakes that went on for miles and if you looked closely often there would be a car driving on it or some one ice fishing and b) the Gobi desert covered in snow. Though it strangely looked like a moon scape, it was teeming with wild life. We saw camels, horses, llamas, cattle and massive birds of prey.
Anyway, I'll stop there, or I'll just go on for ages, but if you every get a chance to take the transiberian or transmongolian rail- do it. IT was one of the best experiences of the trip so far and we were both sad when it came to an end.
