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Much has been written elsewhere about riding the transsiberian across Russia and for us, into Mongolia. There's precious little exploring to be done on the train, save for walking up and down everyday testing the two doors at the end of each carriage and seeing which the guards forgot to lock. This allows one to generally be a bellend by hanging from the train at high speed to enjoy the scenery much better.

Otherwise we typically passed the time by:

• Listening to a french guy and his nine-toed companion play the accordian.
• Talking trash and drinking vodka with a room of british guys.
• Investigating the oddities for sale at the small stations on route. These included dried prehistoric fish bunched on loops of string through their eye sockets, AK47 vodka and chippers.
• Using the readily available hot water to make pot noodles userscott would be proud of.
• Discussing how we would die in Mongolia and who would receive which cameras from our wills.
• Giving vodka to the Chinese carriage wardens who weren't supposed to drink, but all did anyway when nobody was looking. Champs.

source: flickr, user forgotten



Prior to departing russia we each bought a 10 liter MSR water sack, for reasons I'll explain another day. We made a number of excellent purchasing decisions and the water sacks were definitely amongst them. The sack has loops of cord around the edges for hanging it up, and a plastic bit on the bottom with 3 flow options. A baby folding spout for a trickle, a 1cm wide opening for a stream and a 5cm widemouth opening for filling. Second class berths you see, do not have showers. This isn't a huge issue since one exerts approximately 1 joule of energy a day doing fuck all but when boredom strikes and all other options are exhausted a hot shower isn't so bad. Half fill with hot water from the carriage urn, top up with cold from the toilet then sling ya sack up and let it rip. I've long since returned to civilisation but I continue showering by this method.



qx contracted face aids somewhere along the way and spent our rest day in Irkutsk mostly laid up in bed. In Russia we purchased a medical kit, knowing it would be handy for Mongolia or face aids. Of course everything was labeled in Russian, something which hadn't occured to us at the time. Our russian friends have an interesting sense of humour though and offered to translate the contents for us. Oddly, they found the idea of us stranded in Mongolia with a medkit in which everything was labelled in sharpie as condom more amusing than we did. Reluctantly they scrawled the proper names on everything. Nothing seemed to offer a cure for face aids however and qx trundled off to see a russian doctor. We'd planned to head out to Lake Baikal for the day but that plan went out the window pretty quickly. The hostel was helpful but much to our amusement had a small sign with the following recommendation "Don't leave hostel after 2330, not safe!".







Visa 3 passed without incident and after 6th and final night on the train we arrived bright and early in Ulaan Bataar, capital of Mongolia.


pic: qx