Sunday 28th February We reached Ulaanbaatar at around 7:00 a.m this morning. The temperature was -15C!! We awoke south of Ulaanbaatar as the railway made its way through mountains and eventually onto the Asian Steppe. This is a rough grassland just before a true desert. The yurt (tent) is the traditional home of the Mongolian
Saturday 27th February Now we have found the cold! Minus 7C is now common place during the day, and of course colder at night. Condensation inside the double glazed windows now freezes into amazing patterns. During the night the train continued through mountains and forest passing Kuytun which means ‘cold’ in the language of the
Friday 26th February Last night we stopped at Novosibirsk for wheel checks, removal of ice and a change of engine. One member of the team saw the grand station which is described as a ‘real temple’ of the Trans- Siberian Railway. Here the sky was clear and the stars were visible. However, just before daybreak
Day 8 Thursday 25th February Overnight our train headed southeast from Perm and finally crossed the Ural Mountains. 1777km from Moscow we crossed the border between Europe and Asia. This may be Asian Russia but we are still 260km from the start of Siberia. In the early hours we stopped at Yekaterinburg which was the
Wednesday 24th February Last night we boarded the train to Beijing at Moscow’s Yaroslavsky Station. The rolling stock is Chinese apart from the restaurant car which is Russian and will be with us until the Mongolian border in a few days time. The provodnitsas (carriage attendant) are Mongolian or Chinese and it is their job
Tuesday 23rd February Once again the roads and pavements were being cleared of snow when we awoke. It is a National holiday today and there was fencing around Red Square and the Kremlin to stop access. TV crews arrived and there was strict security with police on every street corner and along the road in
Monday 22nd February Hello readers. We have updated previous posts on this trip. Hope you find it interesting. What a surprise it was this morning as we were met with a snow covered Moscow! Teams of snow clearing machines and people were at work keeping roads and footpaths clear. Overnight the temperature rose from -5C
Sunday 21st February After last night’s interruptions it was an opportunity to sleep in. For one of us it was 10:45 a.m. local time when he was greeted with a cup of Russian coffee in its official Russian railway cupholder. The journey continued through the taiga to Moscow. En route we saw small hamlets and
Saturday 20th February At 5:15 this morning we had arrived in Berlin where the Prague section of the train was uncoupled and moved to the rest of its train which had come from another part of Germany. By daylight we were speeding through Poznam and across the Northern European Plain with its vast expanse of
Friday 19th February During the morning we visited the British Museum to track down the Rosetta Stone. It was the first time we had seen the original which was so important to 19th century archaeologists in interpreting and cracking the hieroglyphs and their codes. The stone had been found in Egypt in the Napoleonic era