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  #1  
Old Posted Oct 16, 2010, 10:22 PM
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Nantais Nantais is offline
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From Moscow to Beijing by train. Part Four : Going to Mongolia !

Here is the fourth thread about my train journey, in last july, from Moscow to Beijing.

The links towards the three first threads :
- the first thread (about Moscow) :http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=185517
- the second thread (about Siberia) :http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=185578
- the third thread (about the Baikal):http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=185653

In this fourth thread, I will post pics that I took from the train during the journey from Irkoutsk to Ulan Bator. The journey lasted two nights and one day (including the long eight-hour waiting at the border).

It should be noted that the atmosphere in the train between Irkoutsk and Ulan Bator was very different than in the first part of the Transsiberian.
Here, the train was literally packed with young European globe-trotters (from France, Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, Great Britain, etc.) while from Moscow to Irkoutsk, there was a lot less tourists and we were more with the everyday-Russian people taking the Transsiberian as an ordinary mean of transport to travel inside their huge country.
So, in a word, lot of tourists, few local people. On a side note, I didn't meet one single tourist from North America, what I find strange, considering the dozens (hundreds ?) of European tourists who were in this train.
Myself, I shared my room with Angela, a German-Swiss girl who was going on a world tour, and Mark, a crazy guy from the Netherlands, who also wanted to tour the world, but without taking plane. He had left the Netherlands on a moped, and then was going on by train after his moped had been stolen in Estonia or Russia (I don't remember).

Enough of words, here are the pics :
1- Waking up on board. The train left Irkoutsk the day before at about 10:00 PM. Ruins along the tracks. We've passed Ulan Ude during the night. We're still in Russia :


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4- The landscape is more hilly :


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10- Crossing a river :


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21- Approaching another lake, just before Mongolia.


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26- Our train, the great Transmongolian !


27- Lot of old water tanks all along the Transsiberian and the Transmongolian :


28- Last ruins of Siberia :


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35- Here is the last russian train station before the border. This is the beginning of a very long wait to cross the border. Fortunately we could go out of the train and take a very refreshing (but not free) shower in the train station.


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38- The customs building :


39- After waiting four or five hours, the train left at last the last russian station to enter Mongolia. When entering Mongolia, there were mongolian soldiers saluting the train all along the tracks. I could not take pics of them as taking pics was not very welcomed at this moment. Here is the first Mongolian train station :


40- We are in Mongolia !


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45- First mongolian town. Not so different from Russia :


46- We've just made some miles into Mongolia and we stop again for two or three hours to let the Mongolian customs do their job :


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48- Here is Boris. A crazy French who was trying to rejoin his girlfriend working as a nurse in the middle of Mongolia :


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53- The train is advancing again into Mongolia. Lot of huge more or less abandonned industrial buildings there too :


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55- The next day. It's about 6:30AM. We're entering the outskirts of Ulan Bator :


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62- A yurt, while we enter the Ulan Bator train station :



We stayed in Mongolia for two days before taking again the train. Don't miss the next threads !


Edit : if a mod could rewrite Moscow with a capital letter in the thread's title... Thanks !

Last edited by Nantais; Oct 17, 2010 at 9:49 AM.
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  #2  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 1:02 AM
Cementglow Cementglow is offline
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I really like this thread.

Last edited by Cementglow; Nov 7, 2010 at 6:38 AM.
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 1:48 AM
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I'd say you went the extra mile with this one.

Siberia is usually thought of as this frozen, desolate wasteland but there are some beautiful sights to be seen, obviously. You shot these from a moving train and through windows? Good stuff.
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 4:50 AM
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I can't wait for the next one!
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 9:51 AM
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Thanks! I love it!
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  #6  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 10:14 AM
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Very interesting trip report. Great job
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  #7  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 4:50 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Nantais View Post
Edit : if a mod could rewrite Moscow with a capital letter in the thread's title... Thanks !
Fixed!

Great thread...
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  #8  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 4:57 PM
KVNBKLYN KVNBKLYN is offline
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I'm loving this series. It's making me very jealous. I've wanted to check out the unglamorous cities of Siberia for a while now and I'm always a sucker for a transcontinental train journey. Great photos!
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 6:58 PM
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You've done it again!
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 7:55 PM
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Awesome. Thanks for posting.
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  #11  
Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 8:11 PM
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Great series! Thanks for taking us on this awesome trip with you, I can't wait for the next one. I'm surprised Mongolia looks so much like Russia, I know it was in the Soviet sphere of influence during the Cold War, but wow their signs are even in Cyrillic. They're lucky they didn't get annexed.
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Old Posted Oct 17, 2010, 9:16 PM
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what an awesome trip!
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  #13  
Old Posted Oct 18, 2010, 12:18 AM
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You never hear or see much about Mongolia, or Siberia. I like these pictures.
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  #14  
Old Posted Oct 19, 2010, 2:54 AM
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Nice pictures. We don't see Mongolia on here that much. Does Mongolia use Russian characters and letters, Chinese characters and letters, or both in every place or one near one country and another near the other?
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  #15  
Old Posted Oct 19, 2010, 4:40 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by xzmattzx View Post
Nice pictures. We don't see Mongolia on here that much. Does Mongolia use Russian characters and letters, Chinese characters and letters, or both in every place or one near one country and another near the other?
They use the cyrillic (russian) alphabet in Mongolia.

Thanks to all for the comments.
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  #16  
Old Posted Oct 24, 2010, 5:10 PM
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This is such a killer trip. I'm loving these threads!
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Old Posted Nov 1, 2010, 3:17 PM
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This is quite awesome!
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  #18  
Old Posted Nov 1, 2010, 4:45 PM
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Awesome thread. Thanks for sharing.
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  #19  
Old Posted Nov 8, 2010, 7:35 PM
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wild although Mongolia to me I always identified as an arm of China but their alphabet and lettering looks Russian
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