Posting from Outer Mongolia! We made it to Mongolia after a couple of days on a train. Have now run into our first contact with Sars prevention – all the border control\/customs\/immigration people were wearing masks and our train was sprayed with something nasty and disinfective smelling. People in Ulan Bator are wearing masks, espcially in public places. So we’ve taken to wearing ours now. Still planning to maintain our travel plans, but will probably just go straight through Beijing.<\/p>\n
We are in Ulan Bator which our guide book says ‘Mongolia has, on average, 283 sunny days each year.’ Just guess what’s it’s doing right now. Yep. Absolutely pouring it down. And snow out in the mountains. I think we’ve brought this stupid cloud with us from London!<\/p>\n
A note about our blog – we have now made this public, so if you lose the URL you should now be able to search on the Blogger site and find us. Of course, if you’re reading this now this little piece of information is of no use and if you aren’t reading it cause you lost our URL it’s no use at all! But there you are.<\/p>\n
The train journey was a bit more interesting between Irkutsk and Ulan Bator. The scenery changed completely and kept changing; though we missed our last look at Lake Baikal. Went by that late at night as we were on the very very very very slow train. Even when it was actually moving it wasn’t doing much of it. A bit more like Railtrack! We were also in a kupe compartment (four bunks rather than just two) but were only in with one Russian woman. She didn’t speak any English and we speak no Russian, but we managed to communicate fine! We also met a Dutch couple on the train who were travelling the same way. They’d flown to Moscow though and were flying out of Ulan Bator to Tokyo. As they hadn’t planned to go to Tokyo they borrowed our guide book to see what they would see! So the trip was much more interesting.<\/p>\n
The border was even more interesting – took hours. We went into the station and all got out for a stretch. Joe wandered off in search of a bank to get rid of the roubles we had left. Our carriage attendant told us all to get back on the train, but Joe was still missing. The Dutch couple went a bit hysterical thinking we were leaving Joe behind – I knew we’d be at the station a while yet but was worried the train would be moved to where Joe either wouldn’t find it or wouldn’t be able to get back on. So we were looking out the windows for him and getting the carriage attendant to re-open the door. And here came Joe, sauntering along, humming and looking around. Dum de dum – all the time in the world. (sigh) It turned out that we were merely shunted out of the station back towards Irkutsk, then shunted back in, then shunted back towards Irkutsk . . . about four or five times. Then we were shunted to a little siding just beyond the station and our little carriage was left all on it’s own. For five hours. So everyone got out and went shopping, walking whatever. In the rain. I read Tolstoy. Joe found the bank and changed the roubles. He also found a nifty little market and a little food shop where the attendant was adding purchases up on a abacus then putting the amount into a till.<\/p>\n
Finally we got shunted a bit more, then attached to another train and the border control started. That was the easy bit. We went over the border – barbed wire, tanks, and amazing scenery – beautiful! And on to the first station in Mongolia, about 20km from the border. Customs barely looked at us, but went through every single bag that every single Mongolian had. And caught a bunch of smugglers. That took another four or five hours! But at last we were on our way – slowly but on our way. And arrived here at 6 in the morning. Had to sit in the station waiting for everything to open, then had an adventurous ride on a Mongolian bus to the centre. Found a nice place to stay and are off to the wilds of Mongolia tomorrow morning early! Going to stay with nomadic families in gers and hopefully see some wild life! So won’t be able to update this until we are back on Saturday – hopefully will be able to update before we are off again early Sunday morning.<\/p>\n
Thanks for the e-mails. Postmaster seems to be running a bit slow so I haven’t been able to answer any, but we are reading them!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Posting from Outer Mongolia! We made it to Mongolia after a couple of days on a train. Have now run into our first contact with Sars prevention – all the border control\/customs\/immigration people were wearing masks and our train was sprayed with something nasty and disinfective smelling. People in Ulan Bator are wearing masks, espcially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4T97-1o","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":87,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/05\/17\/out-of-ulan-bator\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":0},"title":"Out of Ulan Bator","date":"Saturday, 17 May 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"This trip just keeps getting better and better! Up early on the Thursday (I think it was Thursday - it's been very easy to lose track of the days), threw our stuff into the back seat of a blue Russian van, climbed in behind the stuff, and we were off!\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":85,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/05\/11\/an-update-irkutsk\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":1},"title":"An update Irkutsk","date":"Sunday, 11 May 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"An update from an Internet cafe in Irkutsk - with loads to say! The train ride was good - we have pictures of trees, train stations, trees, train carriage, trees, trains, trees and maybe a few pictures of trees! It was surprising how little the landscape changed once we were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":81,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/12\/81\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":2},"title":"What we’re actually doing ?","date":"Saturday, 12 April 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"I just realised that although I've been posting test messages I haven't actually given any idea of what we're actually doing! So here it is: (by the way, the trip is still quite flexible) We leave on 1 May early in the morning as our train leaves Waterloo at 8.30am.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":93,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/06\/07\/our-last-week\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":3},"title":"Our last week","date":"Saturday, 7 June 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Well, we're fairly well sorted now - our last week. We are just now getting ready to head up north where there may not be any internet access. If we can find computers we'll keep you updated! Joe is waiting at the train station while I get this done. We\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":89,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/05\/26\/top-travel-tip-for-china\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":4},"title":"Top travel tip for China","date":"Monday, 26 May 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Yea, found an place to post that's about a quarter of the cost of the hotel internet access. Top travel tip for China: if you go through Beijing don't admit it or you won't get a hotel anywhere. Joe finally told the Ramada in Nanjing that we'd just flown in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":82,"url":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/2003\/04\/23\/yet-another-pre-trip-update\/","url_meta":{"origin":86,"position":5},"title":"Yet another pre-trip update","date":"Wednesday, 23 April 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Yet another pre-trip update. We went out at the weekend to do a bit of trip shopping. It was mainly to get the rucksack mended; the zip is busted and we've taken it in to see if it can be repaired. Good news is that it may still be under\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Travel"","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.purple-penguin.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}