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.