Profile
Blog
Photos
Videos
Tom, Day...... Er.... Mongolia 3!
Greetings from Mongolia! Sorry again for the delay in posting, internet cafe's didn't get any more widespread the furtehr east in Russia we went... The good news is, we're now in Ulaanbaatar where they're everywhere! Even better, we've finally managed to get some photos on a CD so will try to get them up here when we can (the photo above isn't actually UB, but hey). It's really exciting to be in Mongolia, we got a bus from Ulan-Ude in Russia (which is fairly uninteresting except for the fact it's home to THE WORLD'S BIGGEST LENIN HEAD! Which is alright.) and the scenery changed really quickly from Irkutsk's woods and forests (which were actually a breath of fresh air in themselves after 4500km of barren, flat siberia) to the wide, grassy plains fo Mongolia, which are really beautiful. So beautiful in fact, we;re going on a week(ish) tour out into the countryside, which I'm very excited about - I feel just like Ray Mears!
So, for the last week or so (we're not really sure how long it's been, all sense of time/day/date dissapears when you're on the train) we've been travelling the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was, well, interesting. On our first jopurney (Kazan - Tobolsk) the Russian guy in the bunk below me (suitably s***faced) decided, in the middle of the night, despite me telling him otherwise, that Chloe's bag was a terrorist bomb, after which he completely shot himself in the foot by helpfully ringing the police to let them know, who promptly escorted off the train! It's quite a surreal experience travelling on Russian trains, and completely dependent on the company. Sometimes we'd have really good neighbours, like the old man who spent a couple of hours thouroughly destroying me at chess (I'm sure he was a former Soviet Grandmaster), or we'd have people who were so interested in us that they'd spend hours asking us stupid questions, with both sides taking forever to get their meaning across as the communication barriers were pretty high! Generally, the experience was one of countinuously being stared at (and in Chloe's case getting photographed, kind of funny for me, infuriating for her!), being woken up by shouty kids running up and down the train carriage (and fighting, and throwing stuff, and being told off!), fairly bland scenery, lots of oil trains going past, and lots of pot nodles.
As for the places we travelled to, they were, to quote Chloe, "Kind of interesting, in a way, but I wouldn't go back..." Nizhny Novgorod and Kazan were actually really nice, but our next stop, Tobolsk, (every time we told a Russian we were going there they laughed at us) was grim: half of it horrible concrete Soviet appartment blocks, the other half wooden houses sinking into the swamp (described by Lonely Planet as 'a charmingly decrepit old town' - in reality, not so charming), with no centre of town. After about 2 hours sleep on the station floor (there weren't any beds in the station for men, so I sat up drinking beer and catting to an English guy we met, while both our girlfriends went and slept in beds!) we spent HOURS looking for somewhere to eat and just couldn't find anywhere! Fortunately we were saved by James and Marina (who spoke Russian, which was AMAZING), who got us some food. The next stop was Omsk, which was the most industrial place we'd yet seen, which basicly was a bit crappy...
Then finally we arrived in Irkutsk, which again is never going to win any prises for being picturesque, but is the closed city to Lake Baikal, which a massive, beautiful, worlds biggest, holding a fith of the worlds fresh water (although this seems dubious as it definately smelt pretty salty) lake! We went down on two seperate days; on the first we only had about an hour before the last bus went back to Irkutsk (the difference between Scandinavian and Russian public transport is mindblowing), and on the second day we stopped off at a museum halfway there, and had the most terrifying experience of my life as we hitched the rest of the way with the dodgiest, tatooed, scarred, half finished bottle of vodka in the back seat, loudest music, worst driving Russian I've ever met! When we got out of the car we literally hugged each other (me and Chloe, not the driver!), shaking, thankful that we survived!
But now we're in Mongolia, having left Russia behind, and evedrything is good! Got to go! Bye!
- comments