Ulan Bator 14.10.2014
We left from Moscow with the Chinese train (nr 4°) that goes to Beijing on Tuesday the 7th of October at 23:45. Lovely friends from Moscow came to say goodbye from Yaroslavsky train station :)
The first impression of the train was that train staff was Chinese and didn't speak any English. They took our train tickets and showed our compartment. We were the only ones in ours. There wasn't any information about the facilities on train but we found the water boiler from which travellers can take hot water during all the trip. Every vagon had its own toilet (a true train toilet) and a water tap. No shower. No toilet paper provided. We checked the restaurant vagon but it seemed quite expensive (i.e. borsch soup 250 R/ 5 euros) and not worth it. The train stopped the first few days more often than in the end of the road. It was possible to buy groceries from small kiosks next to the platform. No wifi.
Chinese trains don't have 3rd class so we travelled in 2nd class. We heard that Russian trains have the open vagon 3rd class which is cheaper and more common to Russians. The 1st class in our train was not anything luxorious but it looked like ours. The only plus was a shower and more space. Also from 2nd class it is possible to have a shower if you pay the staff a little. But once in the train it didn't matter!
Sense of time vanished pretty quickly. The first day went by just resting and looking at the autumn colors passing by. We ate when hungry, mostly noodles and bread. We should have bought more food with us. Now we consumed maybe 1e per day per person! At least we stay in the budget. We bought more food from the kiosks at some stops.
Soon we got to know other passengers and evening activities were clear. Vagon 6 became the party vagon. Mostly we got to know some Chinese, Swedish, Australian and British people. We also met another Finnish couple travelling around the world. Also one of the train staff joined our party by creating a drinking game. It was so cool because after the first cold impression of him he became a really friendly and smiling guy. After this icebreaker we got some help from him also afterwards. Time went a lot faster with hilarious company, beer and vodka.
The landscape changed a little bit every day but the best ones were from Irkutsk ahead, from day 4. We passed next to the Baikal lake and near the Mongolian border the landscape changed again a lot. One night we saw it was snowing and at some point it got really cold. In the train it was still warm all the time.
The border control took altogether about four hours but went smoothly. Mongolians spoke English much better than Russian or Chinese staff.
We arrived in UB Sunday 12th at 6:35am with a temperature of -14 degrees. Thankfully we can think of the future hot months that are ahead of us :)
No comments:
Post a Comment