Part 16 - crossing the Russia/Mongolia border

If you ever travel from Russia to Mongolia by train you'll end up at the border town of Naushki. Some of the travel guides tell you you can be stuck here for hours - but our train, with its ruthless Chinese efficiency, stayed the exact 3 hours and 35 minutes allowed by the timetable and not one minute less or more. They also said that we were stopping for "one hour" - I'll be glad to see the back of that ...





Exploring the immediate area was interesting - there was just no signs of line. On one hand it looked all very serious but then even the cows were coming and going as they pleased.





They had a well-stocked shop at least so we spent the next couple of hours standing on the pavement drinking. Couldn't do that in the UK ...







The three and a bit hours did seem to fly past, and then we got going and over the border. Our first stop was Sukbaatar, about 20km down the line.



We weren't allowed off the train during our scheduled 90 minute stop ... but we were delighted to be told early into this that the Russian restaurant car had been decoupled, the Mongolian one was added and would we like to come down and have a drink there? Then it flew by! The car was pretty impressive too ...









I was due to get off the train at 6.30am for Ulaanbaatar, set my alarm for 6am but was woken regardless by the new Mongolian provodnitza at 5.30am. I said my goodbyes to Nic and Xavier and wandered out into Ulaanbaatar on a quiet Sunday morning ...