100hrs on the train & the Mongolian Captial!

We cycled to the train station in Moscow on 8-lane traffic. Drivers in Moscow seemed quite calm and accustomed to anything, including touring bikes and...















...young girls on horses - no one even gave her a second look.

















Here is Tim in front of our train - ready to board,at this point we were still not sure where our bikes would go??? But the situtation was quickly resolved by Mr Wi our friendly & funny Chinese conductor, who stuck them at the end of our wagon. (each wagon gets 2 dedicated conductors and our train was Chinese)
















For the first 3days and four nights we had a whole four berth cabin to ourselves - nice!And so we rolled on day in day out across Siberia. The train stopped about 4 times a day each between 15-30mionutes. So we saw many train station just like this one:















The view from our window on the whole presented us with open grassland, mixed or birch forest, sometimes a river but mainly open grassland, endless hours of open grassland.















Often we saw little settlements like this one - each wooden house usually had a massive well looked after vegetable garden attached to it. Self-sufficiency all the way in Siberia.















And we got to sample the delicious fresh garden produce, as on every train station we were received by enterpreneurial vendors and their carts full of food and drinks.

















So we had a cosy few days in our cabin, reading, playing yatze and well in Tim's case going to the toilet a lot, as his runs started on the train (properly caused by bad tap water - we think).
Our neighbours were all foreigners as well - in our carriage mostly Dutch and German.














Each wagon has a hot water urn - so we had plenty of teas, coffees and pot noodles in addition to what we bought from the vendors - yamm!















After Irkutsk we drove along the ha-uge Lake Baikal. Wow!















We also got a cabin - mate in Irkutsk, Jinfei from Inner Mongolia on his way home duirng term break. He was very nice and interested and downloaded our Moscow photos on his laptop to show to his family. He also tried to teach us some Chinese with limited success. Oh yes and we had some preparatory lessons in "Noodle slurping", which all in all we managed pretty well.















Here we are in Ulaanbaatar...we rolled in a couple of days back. Since then its been a whistle stop tour courtesy of our Mongolian hosts here. We visited a Monastry, a Shaman and been shown around the city. We have been preparing for our trip around the countryside. Unfortunately Tim has developed the runs during our train trip and we have now successfully negotiated Mongolian hospitals to get some medicine with the help of Binderja our host. We will be heading out West tomorrow.

Three Days - Three Capital Cities

Am posting this blog in a bit of a hurry.....

Here we are in mad Moscow. A huge city buzzing 24/7. Needless to say we had a bit of an initial culture shock but after a self-learning crash course in the cyrillic Alphabet we found our way around and had a great couple of days mostly travelling via Metro, which runs something like over 9000 trains a day - an awesome system.

Moscow was/is hot - our hotel room had a consistent 34Degrees and today we had 38! in some places.

There was a motor racing event in the city centre when we arrived.

We planed and stocked up on all things necessary for te next phase of our trip. Here is Sara, writing one of her lists.

We visited the obligatory Red Square and Kremlin. Amazing, everything is so big, full of Architecture - we were tired just from taking it all in...wow!

However Moscow is not that cycle friendly as Scandinavia, so we had adventurous times navigating around the city.

We left Helsinki a three days ago - the city is trendy and glam with a nice hostel, huge department stores and all you can eat Pizza. We spend a few relaxing hours and a morning stocking up on esential items such as water containers for Mongolia

Then we hopped on the 10-storey Viking Line ferry to Talinn. A nice ride in beautiful sunshine, although a booze-cruise for most locals, who nip over to Estonia to buy cheap Alcohol.

We only had a few hours in beautiful, tranquil, romantic Talinn. We enjoyed wondering around the old towncentre . We explored the maze of cobbled backsreets and ended up on staircases a few times.

We boarded the train to Moscow in the early evening and found there was no luggage compartment. So we made do with the space next to our bunks.

Very Cosy. The 15hours ride was a good prep for our 4day train trip. We had some nice Russian Cabin - mates and the border crossing went smooth although something to get used too, with plenty of inspections and sniffer dogs etc.

So now we are about to board Trans-Mongolian!!!