Journal
Monday,Sep 11 2006, 10:28:03 PMTrans-Siberian Railway
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Trans-Siberian T...
(73 photos)
To be fair Trans-Siberian is not 100% accurate as that goes Moscow-Vladivostock we got on the Trans-Mongolian Moscow-Beijing! Anyway what a trip full of fun and excitment and finding yourself staring for hours at a time at the same bit of carpet or gazing out the window watching the world pass you by. The pict is of me eating noodles for the 4th day in a row breakie dinner tea etc. being as organised as we obviously are! neither 1 of our university educated minds thought that we might perhaps need a drink or even alittle snack during the course of the next 132 hrs! This beyond obvious (crossing into the 'u stupid stupid bastards' category of stupid) notion only became clear to us as people all around began opening cans of coke and rummaging thru their gigantic supermarket bags of delights! We could only laugh in dispare as the train pulled from Moscow! 'In for the longhall now!' i thought.
I quickly became fluent in the art bartering with the old women and young lads who sold food and drink at the stations we stopped at along the way! Tho i didnt admit to Mart i was kinda daunted by the fact that i might not be alive by Beijing if we didnt get food/water soon so the first stop we made i dived off the train into the welcoming arms of a old women selling oranges and bread. I took everything she was selling, tho i didnt quite know how hygenic this policy of buy whatever was, i dint give a rats and as the train set off again i sat munching the bread with a smile on my face and a wave to the old lady while hoping that it was infact rice in the middle of my butty!!
There are certain things you need to watch out for when travelling on the Trans-Mongolian. Including eating but not so much that you feel the call of nature! Martyn was a master at this while i sat upon that steel throne on more than 1 occasion (less a toilet more a sort of bin! do ur business then press a handle with ur foot like a bin lid and it all cascades onto the tracks below!!! NICE) being that i seemed to do all the eating while Mart did the sleeping! Of course being as organised as we were, we had no loo roll luckily id taken the napkins from the several occasions we'd graced Mocow pizza hut with our presence, so sparingly i set aside napkins for whenever fate should deal its ugly hand.
A second is making sure ur tickets go all the way to where u want to be! in our case that was Beijing tho sadly we could only buy tickets as far as Ulaan Baatar the capital city of Mongolia! Luckily my Chinese/Mongolian was up to the challenge of begging the conductor to let us stay on the train and with a last minute dash at 6am to the other end of the train (15 carriages long) i secured our tickets an hour b4 Ulan stop! jammy as!!! somebody loves us!
However our luck wasnt as strong when we thought it a good idea to change our only US $ to the local Mongolian currency Togrog! This was a bad idea mainly because it worked out at 1921 Togrogs = 1 quid and it turned out that everyone both in Mongolia and the rest of the world laugh in the face of this monopoly money to the point where even the Beijing map seller walked off laughing as we tried to use togrog to buy 1 of his maps when all he wanted was $1 or 50p!
The only other thing i must write is how god awful the border crossings were! over the space of about 26 hours we were stopped 4 times for passport and visa checks! i didnt so much mind being checked and filling in a 1000000000 different forms about how i didnt have bird flu and i hadnt brought any radio-active material on me that i was aware of, but it was the 4-5hrs it took knowing that 2000metres down the track was the same scenario as u entered the next country!
We made it to Beijing in the end tho im happy to report! Tho the taxi driver charged us 10 times what the local rate should be! the girls behind the desk looked shoked as we told them we payed 150 yuan! sayin 15 was fair but not much more! They looked nervous and asked if we had enough money left to pay for the hostel! i chuckled to myself as i pulled 2000 yuan from my wallet without breaking a sweat! '450 yuan did u say love?' Bloody taxi driver though! its not the fact that it cost us 10 quid yes thats right naf all but the fact that in his mind he screwed us over! id happily have paid anyway! Right id say it was time for bed but its now 7am in Beijing (midnight England time (GMT)) The fact its boiling and i was gettin biten to death ow and im sodding dying of thirst brought me to the conclusion that my time would be better spent writing this crap down tho i doubt anybody reads it! on the upside it has just killed an hour and the lady might be awake behind the counter to flog me sum water, God willing.