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Irkutsk- a short 20 hour train journey for our final destination in Russia. Its known as the Paris of Siberia.
We got our first Russian compliment on the bus by someone claiming to be a football player!.. 'you look mighty beautiful' then was finished by 'for this hour of the morning' .. so quickly became backhanded...as much as we weren't expected to be complimented we've realised Russians neither compliment nor smile!
On arrival to Irkutsk we found a hostel- again someones apartment, but this time it wasn't a dorm but was a bunk in someones lounge/office.. and seperated by a wardrobe and a piece of cloth hanging up. Didn't mind too much except at 1am when the women still was sat the other side with the light on.. being on the top bunk shining right in my face!
We caught a bus to Lake Baikal- one and a quarter hours to a beautiful lake that had frozen ice glaciers in it and views stretching across to the Khamar-Duban mountains.
Lake Baikal is the worlds deepest lake and 400 mile long/ 20 or 40 miles wide.. a little bit too big for us to manage to walk the
whole way round that day... instead we got our bikinis on and had a dip... very cold and if there were neighbors they would have heard me squeal!! Its also known as the holy sea... so perhaps we will be blessed for the rest of our trip!!
The section we stopped at was Listvyanka- we were warned that this was touristy but we still went as it was the closest place to catch a bus to. It was 5x more touristy than anywhere we've been... we saw a whole 5 European/American tourists... of course they had guides though!
next... to MONGOLIA!!
For this section we had 2nd class carriage as all the 3rd class planksart had sold out. the 2nd class is a small cabin for 4 people and the only difference is its a cabin, has a sliding door, a light and more storage/headroom. Justine and i found our cabin... but there were bananas everywhere!! Boxes of bananas in the overhead storage, under the bed... kind of lucky for me as i could of happily eaten a couple of bananas but it wasn't leaving much room for our stuff. We got on with it and got
out our stuff for the 33 hour journey. The Mongolian guard then came and signed us to move.. we thought she meant move the bananas.. then realized she meant us to move out.. so we gathered all our stuff and moved to a different cabin!
We spent our journey learning a bit of Mongolian (i would have written this in my new learned language but my phone keyboard doesn't allow!), reading (Micheal Mcintyre definitely isn't that funny in a book!), eating noodles and sleeping.
After waking up i realized the train had been back and forth to the same station 3 times (that i had been up for) going back about 1km a time. I thought maybe carriages or something were being changed.. then we were still for 2 hours... not knowing what was going on we pulled down the window as far as we could enough for me to stick my head out sideways... then realising we were the only carriage at the platform with no driver carriage!!! I wandered down the carriage and looked in the other cabins.. a total of seven people! Not knowing what was happening we thought we might as well get out
onto the platform and enjoy the sun as obviously the train could go nowhere!
9 hours later... we had been joined by some other carriages, got a driver and been checked for customs (i guess 9 hours is better than 2 days that we heard someone did it in) the checks were passport, visa and document from checks, people checking in our carriage and thorough photo matching checks- never before have we had such thorough checks that our photos match, not just a glance but a long stare of our faces and holding it for a while!!!
We arrived to Mongolia knowing it would be a bit more hustle and bustle than Russia. We got off the train and i was very surprised to see a sign saying -Ellen Freeborn Sunpath Mongolia- not knowing how this man could have known we were coming on that carriage at that time we realised it was the man from the hostel that we had looked at online- so for a $3.50 hostel we had someone meet us at the station and give us a lift at 6am!!!
Luckily it was the man from the hostel and we arrived we had
a Mongolian massage that wasn't too pleasant, but was pleased of use of a steam room to clean us up a bit! we went to the Gobi dessert/mountain range and horse rode as well as a 2-humped camel ride. ..only ever ridden a one hump camel so was a little bit different. We also had lunch in a Mongolian house in the mountains- some kind of mutton, noodle, potato dish and mutton dumplings
Next... moving onto China in the morning.. so probably another nine hours in customs and arrival on the 13th evening. Plans for China are Beijing, great wall, forbidden city, summer palace, move onto shanghai, next we plan to head toward Chengdu and the panda range, towards Xi-an and then we'll see...
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D MJ Binkley
Dave and Merry Jo Binkley
Mongolia is one of my dreams
I can't wait to go to Mongolia. I wish you were spending more time there. Please add some photos. Wow, 9 hours at the boarder. Now that is an inspection!