Off the Rails My Trans Mongolian Railway adventures from the Great Wall in Beijing to St Petersberg

Some people might think long train journeys are monotonous: sitting there, watching the scenery go past. They have no idea. What's really montonous is sitting in a train for 12 hours, not going anywhere at all - and not being able to go to the toilet, either. Which is what happened to us at the Mongolian border.

The journey from Ulan Baatar to Irkutsk shouldn't be a long one. When you look at a map, the distance is just a fraction of the distance between Beijing and UB, a trip that took us 36 hours. Yet this much shorter trip ends up taking the same amount of time, not least thanks to our border stop.

We arrive at the border around 3am, having left UB at 7.30pm the previous night, and clank to a stop. We've been warned that we won't be able to use the train's toilets until we've crossed the border. What we haven't been warned about is that we will now sit here until the Mongolian border officials' morning shift clocks on at 9am.

This is when the fun starts. The train is packed with Mongolians who are either professional merchants, or making a bit on the side. They've come so laden with stuff, there's sometimes no room for us in our carriages. Several of our group have had to physically remove Mongolians' baggage to actually fit ourselves in our cabins; others in the top bunks have had the pleasure of trying to fall asleep with half a dozen salami dangling centimetres away from their noses. As the border officials come on board, some Mongolians start hunting for hiding places for their excess items. Several times we have to prevent people from other carriages hiding their goods in our compartment. Some, more resourcesfully, hide bags of who-knows-what in the bottom of the rubbish bin. Others even hide things in secret compartments under the floor. Unfortunately for them, the border guards are wise to this one, and find every skerrick hidden down there (although the parcels in the rubbish bin make it through intact.)

Mongolians aren't the only ones who run afoul of the border guards - one of our group gets her camera confiscated for taking a photo of the officials at work. Only after a lot of pleading does she get her camera back, after she's deleted the offending shot.

We finally leave the border behind early afternoon, but it still takes us until the next morning to reach Irkutsk. Our first sight of Siberia is pretty much what we expected - it's a cool morning wreathed in mist - but the day soon clears to a blazing late-summer day, perfect for our stay at Lake Baikal, the world's largest (and oldest) freshwater lake in the world. Here we're divided into two groups, each group housed with a different Russian babushka, who seems to take it as her personal assignment to fatten us up in the 24 hours we will be here.

For once, our program is profoundly relaxing. After a hearty breakfast (rye bread, cheese, small pancake-type things, homemade raspberry jam and sour cream, biscuits and cakes), we head out for a cruise on the lake. The water is incredibly clear and, despite the singlet weather, incredibly cold - four degrees. We take our shoes and socks off and wade, but after just a few minutes we have to pull our frozen feet back out. After the cruise, it's time for lunch - Ludmilla has prepared a delicious borscht (all veggies fresh from her garden) and omul, Lake Baikal's most famous fish. (80% of the lake's marine life is found nowhere else in the world.)

after lunch we go for a long walk along the lakeshore to try to walk off some of the food and make room for dinner. the lake is blue, the birch forest is a dozen shades of green, and the sun is gloriously warm. this place seems like paradise - after the snow in Mongolia, who would've guessed Siberia would be such a summer paradise? We head back to Ludmilla's for a sauna - sheer bliss after a couple of days without a shower! Then it's time for more food - this time another typical Siberian treat, pelmeni, or dumplings. We stagger around the village in an attempt to work off this latest round of food, then turn in for an early night.

The next day we explore the district a bit more, before heading off on the next leg of our journey. (But not before Ludmilla has one last chance to feed us up with some more soup.) We head back to Irkutsk, stopping along the way at a museum of typically Siberian wooden architecture. Once settled into out hotel, we set out to explore this town, the capital of eastern Siberia. It has a checkered history - founded by Cossacks, it went through a stage as a boom town, and was also shaped by the political revolutionaries who were exiled here. As you walk along its pleasant shady streets, you can see remnants of its various histories, from ornately carved wooden houses, similar to the ones we saw in the museum, to more impressive municipal buildings. This is also the only town I've seen in Russia where there's a statue of both a Tsar (Alexander III) and Lenin still standing. It's a lovely little place, one that is very different from our next stop - Moscow. But first we have three days and nights on the train to get through. I'll let you know how we survive that one!