WORD OF THE DAY: 'Panda'
We arrived back into UB after the Ger Camp stay around midday. Our second part of the Trans Mongolian starts tonight at 9.20pm. 48 hours on the train from UB to Irkutsk. The beauty of the 48 hours for this component is that it is 2 nights and one full day on the train. So a third of the trip we will be sleeping, so it won’t really seem like the full 48 hours. It sounds like a long time still right?
We were lucky enough the hotel gave us two rooms for us freshen up in as we had around 7 hours to kill till our departure for the train station. Bill, Jules and I got one room and the other guys got the second room. The hotel where we stayed is currently under-going a soft refurbishment, so they gave us the 2 rooms on the 4th floor that they were still working on. No big deal a room is a room and we were just grateful that we were able to shower, re-pack and freshen up. Well I do have to tell this story, as every time I think about it, I just cannot keep the smile off my face. Bill and I were in the room, and we were looking for the TV remote, Bill was lying on the bed and he just reached over to the night stand, not looking and going by touch, and said I’ve got something, so I walked over and he was holding a used condom in his hand! The look on his 72 young face was priceless and his first words were ‘great they have given us the hookers room’!!!!! I tell you as disgusting as it sounds, it was sooooo funny and we just couldn’t stop laughing! I am now just wondering that when we checked out of the room and they go to clean the room, if they think that the condom was Bill’s and what their reaction would have been once they realized we shared the room!!!!
The rest of the day for me was catching up on Facebook and trying to keep ahead of loading the pictures as I go. Otherwise I will just get snowed under and I will never be able to catch up. I have always tried to comment on my pictures as I load them, for informational purposes and so people know what they are looking at. Me and Wikipedia are close friends, but I am finding that I don’t have the time to caption and load, so my main aim is to get them on and then I can head back later and caption them. So I apologise in advance if you are looking at a photo and don’t know what the hell it is about ( that drives me nuts when I look at other peoples photos ) but I will get back to it, when I have more time.
We got picked up at 7.30pm for the train station. We stopped via a money exchange to get rid of our tugruts, as once the money is out of Mongolia, no-one will touch it and it is useless. So we exchanged what we had into Russian roubles, as we leave Mongolia tonight and head into Russia for the last 2 weeks of our trip. 1 AUD is worth 30 Russian Roubles. So far so good with the budget and I will need to let my POA ( Power of Attorney ) know that all is well in budgetland.
The train we are on is a Mongolian train, and very similar to the China train we had for the first portion of our trip. They are certainly roomey enough, with the luggage space under the bottom bunks to take all 4 backpacks, so there is not too much luggage in the way barr the day packs and the bags of food we bring to snack on.
I am in the party room for this leg, so I bought a bottle of vodka for the trip. We left UB promptly at 9.20pm and when I checked in with the other cabin, our guide Julia had been temporarily robbed. I say temporarily, as she pretty much noticed straight away as the guy left their cabin and she pulled him up and without even saying much, he just turned around and gave the wad of money back!!!! So needless to say that she was a little shaken, so we popped the bottle of vodka and had a shot. We have met a guy, Andy from Manchester, travelling on his own, so we asked him to join the party, so we had 7 of us in the cabin and we pretty much cleaned that bottle of vodka out in around 40 minutes! I rekon that would have to nearly be a world record, and we are pretty glad we only had the one bottle, cause if we had of had more, we would of hit it hard and not felt so great this morning!
Lights out, and slept like babies till 7am this morning, to find us at the Mongolian boarder to cross into Russia. As before boarder crossings take HOURS. We were able to get off the train and they had cleanish toilets that could be used for the grand price of 12 cents. Once we exited the carriage, you have not seen a funnier scene – we were the only carriage sitting there. No other carriages, no caboose, nada – just our carriage! It was hilarious. They do this as the Mongolian train does not go into Russia, so it just travels UB to the boarder, drops us off and then heads back to UB. So the train that picks up is the Russian train that runs from one side of Russia to the other and also does not cross the boarder and turns around and goes back again over Russia. I guess that system works for them!!! So after 3 hours and 45 minutes, passports stamped, customs declared, rehooked up to the Russian train, we then headed into no mans land for 30 minutes before reaching the Russian boarder to go through the same process again. We had a time difference moving from Mongolia to Russia of an hour, the first of 11 as we head across the massive country of Russia.
WELCOME TO RUSSIA. The Russian boarder control is nothing shy of excessive. I guess you would expect that of Russians right? They really are trying to catch locals bringing in stuff that they aren’t supposed to. The officials look the part, with long leather coats, those fur hats you see them wearing in the movies and they look, well Russian. The dogs were bought onto the train and they also lifted the carpet in the main corridor to make sure nothing was stuffed under foot. As we have an odd number of people in the group, the second cabin has to share with a random. Well the random arrived with quite a bit of luggage and during the first portion of the trip, she was smuggling in underwear! She was hiding it in her clothing, stuffing it into her jacket, rubbing the underwear together to make it look worn etc – the guys couldn’t believe it! For the record she got it through. Who would have thought that underwear was such a high commodity! We got an hour after the formalities were done to get off the train and get a quick bite to eat, grab some food supplies ( eg vodka ). I got a litre of coke, a bottle of vodka, an icecream, a bottle of water and 2 biscuits for 210 Roubles, which is $7 AUD!!!!!! Now that people, is value for money!
We headed back to the train in preparation for the next 7 hours before our next stop of approx. 20 minutes to stretch the legs, and then the final haul into Irkusk for a further 7 hours. In the mean time we have fit in an hour of Russian language class, a bit of down time reading, a nana nap and then heading to the dinning carriage for dinner at 7pm. A busy day all round really.
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