Transmongolian train ride

My first train ride of the trip, and I find myself with half a trainload of Aussies! Yeah there were two tour groups, and both mainly full of Australians. I shared a compartment with two lovely Mongolian sisters (who spoke english quite well, and had been in china for the elder sister to have a heart operation), and Rachel (a new intrepid guide), all of who you'll see in the photos. You'll also see the train being loaded in Beijing... there were a couple of compartments just stacked full with boxes, and a chinese trader guading the stuff and mysteriously deboxing it during the trip.

We travelled through some lovely mountainous countryside in China, before we hit the wide open dry flat land of inner mongolia. We got both lunch and dinner in the dinning car included which was a pleasant surprise, and other than that passed the time chatting, reading and staring out the window.

The Border crossing was quite a drawn out process.. forms and passports to hand over on both sides at different stations. And interestingly the bogie changing... think jack the entire train up carraige by carriage and swap the base wheel section to cope for the change in rail gauge.

The countryside started getting hilly, it started snowing lightly outside (yeah from shorts and t-shit in Beijing to snow!), and Ulaan Bataar came into veiw...