Life On Board #2

We are really getting into the long train journeys and have a good set of routines to while away the hours of having nothing to do and all day to do it in. The first port of call are the windows, looking out of which is like watching the Discovery Channel. You snap out of gazing at the sights not really knowing how long you have been staring into the middle distance. Then there is the food. Maybe a sweet every half an hour, which is a pleasure to look forward to (“Oooh, a chinese milk sweet please!” or “Can I have one of those bright pink Russian ones!”). Then there is a hot drink to pass twenty minutes or so. And then the joy of meal times! Everyone crowds anxiously round to choose their particular brand of instant noodle and then they might jazz it up with canned fish, or have it with vegetables and a hunk of whatever the local equivalent to bread is. Maybe it will be finished with a course of Ritz crackers with peanut butter if we are feeling particularly decadent!

The samovar provides all the hot water and is nestled at one end of the carriage, bubbling away and looking for all the world like a household boiler, but probably not breaking down and needing fixing for vast sums of money on such a regular basis. On this train we are given ornate metal holders for our glasses and use them to make tea, coffee, hot chocolate and, of course, wine. There are also people getting on the train with cold drinks and beers, but we haven’t yet changed up any roubles to try out their refreshments.


The entertainment (after the views, food and drink) are many and varied, but include making a rocket out of an old cardboard box, chatting to people at stops, read our books, dozing, playing on the PSP, bunk gymnastics, playing with pet shops or superheroes and diary writing. Then there is the dreaded ‘Daddy School’ which consists of making the children do an hour or so of something to prevent their brains turning into mush after nine weeks of no school. Maisie usually submits to this torture in a mild way, but then spends ages sighing and noodling and avoiding doing anything of any real substance. Harry reacts in a much more extreme manner and usually tries to escape the carriage. I haven’t yet chased him over the train rooftops, Indiana Jones stylee, but we still have four days of train journey ahead. He is then dragged to the small compartment table, complaining all the way, but eventually settles down to do fifteen minutes of some low level activity before we give up.


One of the highlights however, has been to watch Doctor Who. We have said goodbye to the wonderful David Tenant and have quite liked Matt Jones. Watching top notch BBC entertainment on a train barreling across the steppes is wonderful and we are having to ration out the episodes in order to make season five last as long as possible. After this we have our fallback position which is Bear Grylls; watching him chew on a live grub makes even Maisie more thankful for her mutton pot noodle...

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...

UB or Not To Be

Ulaan Bataar is a very odd capital. There are all the things you would expect: Ghenghis Khan’s image carved on to a hill? Check. Gers right near the city centre? Check. Mongolian Barbeque Restaurants? Check. However, UB is also a city that is trying to be startlingly modern with it’s stretched Hummers, shopping malls that are so new that they don’t yet contain shops (or shoppers) and the noise of new buildings and apartments going up all the time. The whole place was not quite as post communist as I had feared and although it is a little shabby and dusty it is trying to assert it’s own character. It is also a place that is such a contrast to the stark and simple beauty of the open steppe and as you approach it in the train or by road it does look a little odd to have 1 million inhabitants crammed into a small valley when the rest of the country is empty of people. 

We have been staying in the Bayangol Hotel which, like UB, is a little dog-eared but essentially OK. It is only a stones throw from Sukbaatar Square (where you can see a giant statue of Ghenghis Khan in front of Parliament House and be accosted by drunken Mongolians) and not far from the National Museum (a very good recount of the insanely colourful history of a nation that has been responsible for changing world history) or the Natural History Museum (fossils and badly stuffed animals). The 36 hours we have been in the capital have been enough time to recharge our batteries, catch up on the internet and pick up supplies before the trip into Russia.

Three Weeks In

We have been through five capital cities (Bangkok, Vientiane, Hanoi [well, it used to be!], Beijing & Ulan Bataar) and have covered 5,650 kilometres. It’s time for a map and a recap:

Maisie: “I liked the Gobi. The gers are really interesting and I liked staying in them because  they’re amazing. Mongolian food was OK, but I didn’t like the horse milk or sheep milk. We made friends with Sorcha and Hannah too!”

Marcelle: “My favourite part of last week was Sainshand and being in the Ger. The contrast between hot and cold was amazing. We had a great guide,  great company with people we had met on the tour and the hilarious journeys in beaten up old vans!”

Matt: “I loved the Gobi desert and had a moment of complete bliss sitting in a bumpy old Ukranian van that was being driven at excessive speed across the desert, eating strange berries our driver had just found, whilst listening to Black Sabbath on the iPod speakers. Perfect! I also liked Mongolian mutton, which was good, as there was nothing else...”

Harry: “My best thing was winning van races with the other van. Because Jow Ha goes very fast and took over the other car we keeped winning. I did the bow and arrow and was winning. We played games with bones and I keeped winning.” (a certain theme has emerged here...)

We are now heading off for the Russian border tonight and then Irkutsk, on the shores of Lake Baikal (930 kms) and after that we do the BIG one: trans Siberia for 5,150 kms over three days and three nights!

Mutton Jeff

I had been scaring Maisie about the food in Mongolia, and I think she thought it would be something out of a Bear Grylls nightmare. However, it was more like a disaster for our waistline. Here are a few culinary delights you can expect at a Ger Camp:

Breakfast: doughnuts, rice filled omelettes, plaited rolls, rice pudding, chips & sausage, eggy bread, sandwiches, chocolate filled pastries.

Lunch: coleslaw, consomme, mutton curry, chips, arctic roll, mutton spaghetti bolognese, cherry compote, mutton pasties, egg drop soup, wagon wheels, mutton burgers, vermicelli noodle salad, mutton dumpling soup, banana & chocolate smoothie

Dinner: coleslaw, mutton dumplings, salad, mutton shepherds pie, fresh yoghurt, spatzli & mutton, custard & cranberries, leg of mutton, mutton stock soup, lemon cake

It’s plentiful and also contains more mutton than I have eaten in my life so far. Luckily there  have been no mutton dishes on the breakfast menu...

Elstei Ger Lodge

Just like the Ger Camp at Sainshand, Elstei Ger Lodge feels like it is in the middle of nowhere. Only this nowhere is green and verdant pastures with hills rolling off into the distance and semi-wild Mongolian horses galloping all over the shop. This is Ghenghis Khan’s backyard, and you wonder why he’d want to leave to rape and pillage the known world. There are twenty or so gers which are larger than the ones at Sainshand and more ornate in their furniture and paintings. The food is good and comes thick and fast, but I’ll write about that in another post.

We go riding on the horses, only these ones are more semi-retired than semi-wild, but it is a lovely way to pass a couple of hours and Harry and Maisie are thrilled. We also go and visit an old Grandma nomad, a twenty minute walk across the steppe. She has prepared omelettes in curd, sheeps cheese and yoghurt and ‘airag’ the traditional fermented mare’s milk. It is unpasteurised and has been covered and left to it’s own devices for four days. It tastes like a cross between vinegar and sick and for some bizarre reason, I ask for seconds. I won’t try it again. Harry spends ages on the way back capturing grasshoppers that click and buzz as they fly through the air.

On one of the afternoons there is a summer storm and everyone has to run round and batten down the hatches. The horses are driven from their corral and I rush back to the ger to cover the roof ‘window’. Daytime lightning cuts the sky and I can see why I am being asked to take down the steel chimney in my ger. After the storm a couple of calfs wander round the gers and get inside one belonging to our neighbours, a couple of Mongolian holiday makers. I try to communicate to them what has happened using sign language but they laugh at my attempts. Later, me and Maisie see them cleaning out their ger, their belongings well and truly ‘fertilized’...

Sainshand to Ulaan Bataar Train #289

Leaving the Gobi ger camp, we headed back to Sainshand to catch the train to Ulan Bataar. Sainshand is not the prettiest of towns, and once we poked around the two museums that the town boasts, that was that! One of the museums told the story of how a brave buddhist devotee hid spiritual treasures from the cleansing might of Russian atheism  from the 1920’s to the advent of democracy in the 90’s. The other museum told the history of Sainshand from the time of the dinosaurs to the present day. During our visit there was a power cut, so we took the rest of the tour by torchlight, eerie stuffed camels and caveman mannequins looming out of the dark!

We got on the train at 7:30pm for an 8pm departure. This train was very old, but clean- a samovar boiler at one end of the carriage and another of Ghenghis Khan’s female descendants as our carriage mistress. The air conditioning whilst heading through the Gobi was a window that opened stiffly. A Mongolian family was singing a farewell song and  dancing in a group huddle on the platform; it sounded very forlorn. The train set off and the sun set in a blaze of golden fire. We put the children on the bottom bunks as there was no rail to stop Harry tumbling down in the night. The open window blew a dry desert wind on to my face. As soon as it was dark, an electrical storm of epic proportions began. Lightning stabbing down from one end of the horizon to the other, sometimes arcing back up into the clouds without striking the ground. Weirdly, there was no sound of thunder. At about 1am we passed through rain and I felt large drops of rain hit my face. I wrestled with the window and just about wedged it shut.

We woke at 6am as we had heard the toilets were locked an hour before arrival in UB for some reason. We made some porridge and watched the new greener landscape unfold out of the window. Every now and then we passed a group of gers and then the suburbs of Ulaan Bataar. We had been promised no Starbucks or Maccy D’s in UB, so you can imagine our surprise and horror when Maisie spied a sign for IKEA! IKEA in Mongolia! Is nothing sacred? Do they still have bookcases called Billy and tables called Sven, or are they instead named Ghenghis and Kublai? We shall probably never find out...