Almaty to Novosibirsk

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Another long train journey.

This time we were joined by two Russian girls. As mentioned before these trains seem to be the preferred trading route for Russians and the like. The girls came into the carriage with a couple of bags, not much to mention. Then as soon as the train started moving they left the carriage and came back with two enormous bags full, we thought Jeez how much stuff do they have they then proceeded to to repeat this three or four more times and completely filled our compartment. Then they started emptying them out of clothes and hanging them up pretending they were just their clothes then they took some to hang in other peoples compartments and returned with boots from someone elses. Turns out they make this trip evry 2 weeks sticking up on cheap stuff from Kazakhstan which they can sell with a 3-4 times mark up. To avoid the customs guard they pretend its for personal use and swap produce with other people on the train to get through the border. They were clearly very nervous as the guards came round and reversed the swapping process as soon as they were through and then cracked open the sweets and smelly fish products to celebrate with us. Not sure its worth the stress and the 4 day journey every 2 weeks.

We lost the warm weather and the snow or "snyek" started to fall as we hit Novosibirsk early in the morning. Biting cold - the long johns and wooly hats came out for a fairly non descript 12 hours here before getting the evening train to Irkutsk.

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