The planning for this stage of the trip has taken months and finally we find ourselves wandering around Beijing Central Station looking for Train 3 to take us to Moscow. A few blank looks and hand signals later and we're being shown along carriage 10 to our room for the next 5 nights. We decided to go posh and have a deluxe soft class cabin, i.e. it sleeps 2 and has a shared sink/shower room. As it turns out it's pretty much the only option if you want to a) have some room (some of the 4-berth cabins had 5 or 6 people in them!) and b) not be in a cabin shrouded in cigarette smoke the whole trip.
Our journey takes us 7865km through Northern China, into and out of Mongolia, through the Siberian plains and into Moscow. As the train passes through each of these countries the restaurant car changes so you get Mongolian in Mongolia, Chinese in China, etc. Sounds good but for the majority of the journey we're in Russia and they're not renowned for their culinary work. We did try it but after paying an extortionate amount for a boiled egg and slice of bread avoided it thereafter. To get around this the advice is to come stocked up with food that needs only hot water as every carriage has a samovar, a small coal-fired urn giving you boiling water when you want it. This meant that we came loaded up with pot noodles of varying flavours. As it turned out they all tasted the same and were nuclear hot. We managed to supplement this with bread from some of the stations and of course chocolate and beer!
As well as a new restaurant car as you cross borders you also have the delights of customs and passport control boarding the train. Travelling west meant these took place at 11 at night or later and you had the joy of a friendly Russian (an oxymoron if ever there was) rummaging through our things or looking in the roof of our cabin. Quite what he expected to find is anyone's guess but my jar of Marmite survived.
So, enough on the logistics, what about the journey itself? It takes 6 days to travel between Beijing and Moscow and during that time you get the chance to see some stunning scenery. Once you leave the smog of urban and industrial Beijing behind you get into agricultural land that in season would be filled with fruit trees and corn. You also run close to the Great Wall at a couple of points and again can appreciate the scale of it as it snakes up and down hills. You soon start to climb from the lowlands of China up to the high plains of Mongolia which sits at around 1500m elevation.
As you pass through Mongolia you go across part of the Gobi Desert and we saw a few Bactrian camels (the two-humped variety). You also see a lot of yurts (or gers), the traditional Mongolian style homes. As you reach the northern parts of Mongolia you start to get into snowy landscapes that stay with us until Moscow.
Siberia is renowned as being a cold, god-forsaken place and as we rush by in the train you can see why. There's not a lot there and what there is looks pretty industrial with the odd exception of some interesting churches. The natural beauty though is stunning and in winter is very picturesque. Lake Baikal, the deepest freshwater lake in the world, is particularly impressive stretching away to the horizon and occupying our view for several hours. Every so often there are groups of people fishing through the ice, although as the lake is pretty heavily polluted I'm not sure what the catch would be like.
The snow remains very thick and even as we cross back into Europe from Asia and the temperatures remain on the fresh side. The lowest we got was -12°C at one station and we didn't hang around to watch the thermometer drop any lower.
Before we know it we're pulling into the Yaroslavsky Station in Moscow, bang on time as well, saying cheerio to people we've met and heading off to our hostel for the final 2 nights of our trip. We've travelled nearly 8000km by train without a hitch, an amazing feat really when you consider the terrain it covers and the weather at this time of year. No frozen points or wrong kind of snow problems here. We've been treated to some stunning scenery and are glad that we decided to do this journey as part of our Big Trip.
Trans-Mongolian 24/7s
Wednesday: Sitting comfortably? Let the train journey begin.
Thursday: Through desert, past camels. Mongolia looks stunning.
Friday: Even under ice Lake Baikal's still impressive.
Saturday: We don't get snow. This is snow!
Sunday: Can't speak Russian? Pointing and smiling works.
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