30 hour Train

A mate of our hostel’s owner drove us to the station and happily spent the journey telling us how we’d picked the slow train which wasn’t as fast as the fast train which was therefore worse than the fast train. He refused to take a fare and then Mum and I were left on a long platform in the dying light of a Mongolian sunset. We had a slight problem in that I had several thousand tugrugs left so had to wander around trying to spend it. I bought some twixes.

           Then we hopped on and found our berth. We were sharing with two Australians, a man with Dutch ancestry, and a woman, originally from Brazil, who was trying to collect her third passport from Portugal. They made for acceptable travel companions, although like all Australians they were obsessed with talking about the economy. Cos theirs is doing rather well.

            We arrived at the border around 6 in the morning but weren’t prodded to hand over passports until around 9 am, which pleased me very much. International border crossings are always at some ungodly hour. For some reason the train was staying at that station for around two more hours so I got off and wandered up and down. At this point every muscle in my body was aching because of the riding so I hobbled slowly from one end to the other. There was a little puppy also hobbling around, calling for its mother who was distressingly not there. I went over and cooed at it for a bit and it decided to snuggle into my trousers. Heart melted. A guard gave it something to eat and I tore myself away.

            The train moved away to change tracks or something and Mum, who had got off, thought it was leaving and got back on pretty sharpish.

            Eventually we chugged away for real, and we left Mongolia.

            At the Russian border there were no puppies, only rather large guard dogs patrolling, drool hanging from their enormous teeth. Mum reckoned they used the puppy to feed the guard dogs. The Russian guards got on and looked around. One was a female, rather tall, with long blond hair in a plait. She wore enough make-up to work at Harrods and a uniform of black jacket and leather jackboots. She looked like a Bond girl.

            Occasionally a dog ran up and down the corridor. We stayed in our berths.

            After a few hours we moved on.

            The landscape itself did not change so much but there were no more gers. There were rather ramshackle houses of wood with corrugated iron roofs. Each tended to have a vegetable plot, with mostly potatoes planted, surrounded by a wooden fence. There was not much livestock, although we saw chickens for the first time. As we carried on it became obvious we were no longer on the steppes, rather the wooded hills and valleys stretching away from us were now Siberia.