Ulaan Bataar to Irkutsk Train # 263

Saying goodbye to UB, we board the train just before 9PM. This train had no dining car, so we have to make doubly sure that we have enough food for the next two nights and a day. Things are a little complicated as the timetable for the train is all in Moscow time which is actually eight hours time difference to Irkutsk! Luckily there is a Mongolian Secondary School teacher who speaks good English and explains that the train will get to the Mongolian/Russian border at 6:30am, and that if we were processed fast we will leave on the Russian side at 3pm at the earliest! Sometimes it takes up to eleven hours to get through.

This train is Russian, and is the high standard we have come to expect from these train journeys. The seats and beds are comfortable and the carriage is modern. When the train starts, the air con comes on, and is kept at a very comfortable temperature throughout the journey. We also come across our first ‘Provodnik’ and ‘Provodnitsa’ who are the male and female conductors for our carriage. The first one is a guy who looks like Peter Weir from ‘Robocop’, so we take him quite seriously. The next shift is taken over by a ‘Provodnista’ who is like Les Dawson in drag, only without the jokes. We take her quite seriously too...

The train chugs out of UB, and we pass typically Mongolian countryside of rolling steppe that doesn’t really change until the next morning. It has then begun to look more hilly and there are lakes and streams dotting the landscape. At the last town on the Mongolian side (which is mainly built around a sawmill) we spy the last ger of our trip. Mongolian border guards get on and take a few hours to search cabins and process the passports, and then the train moves off again. Then it stays in no man’s land for hours...We sit, we make lunch, we  read, we sit some more and then the Russian border police come on and take the passports in a leather briefcase. The customs official is a bored, blonde woman with startling taste in eye make up, and Maisie says ‘She’s beautiful!’. She doesn’t smile.

As we had been promised, we leave at 3pm. It only took us a mere eight and a half hours...