As we were on the move so much we decided to organize our Trans Mongolian/Siberian trip from Beijing to St Petersburg through a travel agency called Monkey Business
We caught the train from Beijing main station at 7ish in the morning on the once a week train. 99% of our carriage passengers were westerners including a couple of Kiwis.
We shared our carriage with Beth and Linda from Minnesota and had lots of laughs. They were heading for Finland by train.
We were next door to Deirdre and Derek (nicknamed D & D) that we had met in Qingdao in China and we had more laughs with them too. They were heading for Moscow and back to Ireland and who knows we may catch up with them in Ireland one day.
The weather was terrible as it was smoggy and extremely windy. There were several places where we should have been able to spot the Great Wall again but we could hardly see 500 metres out of the window. The dust clouds also blocked out the views and made taking photos useless. However we were able to chat with the other travellers in our carriage and share our experiences.
At 8.30 pm the dining car and toilets were locked and soon after we arrived at the Erlian (China) border. In the dark we could see the neon signs on some of the city buildings but not much else. The Chinese trains are slightly narrower than the Mongolian and Soviet 5 foot gauge railway systems so we headed into the changing sheds after the customs formalities were done.
It was very interesting watching the process to change the bogies: all the carriages were separated, half of the carriages were shunted onto a track parallel to ours so we could watch the whole operation, we were hoisted up and the bogies removed and the larger ones pulled into place and connected and lowered.
After we were reconnected we headed to the Mongolian border (Zamyn-Uud) and had to wait ages for the Mongolian customs to process the passports. It was about 2am by the time this finished and we were unable to get any sleep over this time!
We settled into sleep but it was pretty uncomfortable as the wind blew dust into the carriage and over everything. We woke at about 4.30am to get off at our first Mongolian stop of Sainshand at 5.21am and were the only ones to get off the train.
