The transmongolian railway

We started by the train on Tuesday 8 sept, and got a bit confused in many ways bording the train. At first there was a chinese conductor tocking our train tickets both for the train to Ulan-Bator but even more strange the ticket for the distance Ulan-Bator to Beijing. Later we discovered that the chinese guys had fullcontrol of who we are and what we do.

The other confusing thing was that everyone seemed to be swedish on the train. If i would make a guess 50% of the train tickets were sold to swedish. Mostly young guys and old womens.

One thing we were bringing on the train was cheap russian vodka (20SEK for 0.5liter). Very useful when eating strange food from the stations by local russian people.

In Perm we would by Noodles, and the russians dont speak english, bot even a little, so it was going back to younger days, pointing with fingers. That made us a problem, we wanted to packages with noodles and asked if it cost 100 rubles with raising 10 fingers, and the women in the shop was thinking we wanted 10 boxes, so we want back on the train with a lots of food :) Happily they were not expensive. We still have some left here in Mongolia now, and we use them to give to poor children on the streets.

On the train the time difference was a bit confusing because of always changing and the russian man in the restaurant was serving after moscow time. Bit we learned that it was much more easy and cheaper to buy food on the stations and the trains stops like every 4 hour.

On the train we spent in total 103 hours. On that time we were learning from the chines conductors how to count to 10 in chinese, we did 'campei' with them (Mao and Tje).

In Omsk we had 20 minutes on the station and wanted to go in the stationhouse and look around, when we come back a new train had coming and blocking ours so then we got a little panic and was running around the train to reach ours. And because of the chinese conductors having control of the passangers in their wagon (2 chinese guyson each wagon) we was forced to jump on the train in correct wagon.

The perople i met on the train:

Tomak- a polish guy that we also continued the trip in the first day in mongolia with.

Morten - a danish middleage man that had a good sense of humor.

Anders - a norwegian guy we meet at first time in Arlanda waiting for the airplain to Moscow.

Joel - a swedish from Uppsala we met on a very early morning in Tumen, and his cabin was empty so we eat our breakfast there.

We shared cabin with Tomak and Morten. The neighbour cabins was full with older swedish womens, but that was nice. It was like having 10 grandmothers in the wagon, and they also had a guide wich we were able to ask questions about future trip.

Yesterday, at Saturday 12/9, we stayed for border controls in 6 hour. And we were warned before that to save bottles because train toilets are always closed when train is standing still. During the bordering we met 2 mongolian girls, Ocka and Ninde, at first it was very hard to communicate because they only speak mongolian. But after a while with a worldmap and a paper and a chess game, we had a lot of fun together. We learned some easy phrases in mongolian language and played games with them. They also helped us with all the papers to fill in on the border control about health adn visa and migration cards (all in mongolian).