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 !
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