Categories: travels
Date: 01 September 2007 10:17:51
On the same journey I eventually managed to befriend the people who threatened/joked about robbing me - It transpired that they were actually a minor league Siberian football team - aside from the fact that they drank solidly for 72 hours (I'm not joking I don't think they ever slept) they turned out to be pretty nice - if not very rowdy. All they wanted to talk about with me was premier league football and Peter Crouch's capabilities on astroturf. That is as far as I could translate with my meager Russian language skills.
The train eventually arrived in Irkutsk at around three in the morning local time. Very confusing because the train service operates on Moscow time but covers about 8 different time zones so you always need to have one time piece on Moscow time on one on Local time to work out what is actually happening.
I spent some time after that by Lake Baikal doing some hiking (as I probably alluded to below) then caught the train here - Mongolia. Yesterday I spent almost 10 hours on a searing hot train at the border whilst my passport and travel documents were checked and re checked - no one ever checked my bag though. I could have taken anything across and no one would have known
Oh yeah - I'm currently a millionaire by Mongolian standards. I should get myself some bling and a fur coat. I'm just a stones throw from the Gobi desert and Gengis Kahn's nomadic decendents. Only another 2000 or so miles to go before I hit Beijing and the great Pacific beyond. Apologies for the lack of detail in this post. So much has happened that I'm finding it difficult to filter my perceptions of time and place. My watch is on Mongolian time, my phone on another time zone and my soul... my soul is a few thousand kilometers away struggling to catch up.