Trans-Mongolian Day 1

Took the metro to the train station, which, confusingly, was one of 2 stations that are right next to each other. After a quick game of dumb-Englishman charades with a woman in the ticket booth, gathered that i'd got the right station and waited on the platform.

The side of the train

When the train did finally pull up, with the Chinese carriage attendants popping their heads out of the windows, I began thinking that this was going to be really sweet. I gave my ticket to the attendant, who fingered through it suspiciously before barking "NATIONAlITY?" at me.
"errr...British"
He greeted this with a furrowed brow and glanced me up and down. "BAHWAIN?"
"No, no. Not Bahrain. U-ni-ted King-dom."
This only confused him further, but as a long queue was forming behind me, he folded my ticket in half, then half again, and stuck it in his leather wallet. I tried to object that i wanted to keep hold of my ticket, but he just chased me up the stairs into the train.

My bunk on the train

My cabin had 4 beds - 2 up top, 2 that were the seats during the day. Clearly, I wanted one of the upper ones. Luckily I got one. Already in my cabin when I arrived was what turned out to be my only travelling companion for the first 4 days - Marie, a Swedish woman of late 30's, early 40's. Into motorbikes and that, she was meeting up with some friends in Mongolia who were biking back to Sweden. I soon formed the opinion that she was almost definately a lesbian.

We couldn't work out how to turn the fan off for the first night, so we both pretty much froze (Siberia was actually still pretty cold).

The toilets/bathrooms were also a major issue. It consisted of a normal lavatory - loo and sink, but with a hole in the floor. This was the 'shower'. Of sorts. The loo just had a lever underneath which would dip the bottom part, so that whatever had been in there was just dropped onto the track. Lovely stuff. Understandably they weren't very clean, so this was probably the worst thing about the trip for me - mainly due to the fact that a whole Dutch tour group that was in our carriage seemed to have diarrhea, so the thing always stank. Bloody Dutch.

written by

olliejohnson on August 9, 2006 from Perm', Russia

from the travel blog: A man from Cockshutt.

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