The train, while romantic, is not as technologically advanced,as modern jet travel. As such customs and immigration at train stations is totally stuck in a quaint, antiquated, paper based time warp. This usually means that after a fitful nights sleep due to a lot of shunting, stopping and starting, that you will be sat in a place you’ve never heard of and are unlikely to return to, for at least 5 hours, with limited toilet access and unlimited hot water access.
Apparently shunting at the Mongolian border started at 5am, but I was dead tired and slept through our carriage being repeatedly rammed while other carriages were attached. We left with two carriages from Ulaanbataar and when I woke up at around 7am in Cyxbataar we had around 3 more added.
This made for an interesting morning, toilets were locked and I was running around trying to find the word for toilet in cyrilic, I failed. When I went back to where our train was, it was gone, no train. Happily I had all of the money, but Tans was onboard with all of the passports, and photo ID. I walked up the platform looking for our carriage and only found it because Tans was having a Trans-Siberian (movie) flashback and had her head stuck out the window looking for me.
On the Mongolian side of the border we were visited by a yellow shirted Mongolian woman, who was using the carriage as her personal cargo container. She had a metric shitload of polar fleece tops, shirts and other clothing. At first she popped into our cabin, hung up her coat, mumbled something about no room and buggered off! Figuring I’d end up in Midnight Express 2 for smuggling drugs, weapons, wildlife or god knows what over the border I politely informed her where she could hang her jacket.
About 10 minutes after this we had a visit from the Mongolian Police Force, all one of them. This was a dude who was dressed all in black and had Mongolian Police written on his T-Shirt when we left Ulaanbataar, but strangely he emerged looking very sharp in full police regalia, at the border. I also told him that there was no room at the inn for polar fleece. If the fashion police were on the train instead, the polar fleece would have long been thrown off.
Lastly on attempt number 3, we had a visit from one of the Provitnitsas, a woman of limited altitude and it seemed patience with non-compliant foreigners. However, we were unyielding in our resolve not to smuggle polar fleece over the Mongolian – Russian frontier. After this, they left us alone.
At the Russian border, things were run in a much more efficient and extremely thorough manner. Our passports were taken, the train moved to a different part of the station. The Americans next door were freaking out that they didn’t have their passports. After this a soldier came on and whilst we exited our compartment, he looked under every bed, up in the ceiling space and even under the carpet in the corridor. With no polar fleeces in sight, we were cleared to sit in our compartment for a further 3.5 hours.
During our 3.5 hour sit on Russian soil, we were also visited by the immigration bloke, an amiable and hursuit chap, that follows the one shirt, one week rule. You can imagine that this probably doesn’t work so well on the tail end of Russia’s hottest ever summer.
Eventually, our passports were returned, our papers were in order and we’d inhaled more B.O than the W.H.O recommended maximum daily safe level, but we were stamped into Russia and on our way, with a snazzy day-glo orange stamp in our passports.
We had another stinkmeister on the train, not quite as bad as the armpits of hell, we’ll call him the potpouri of hell. Possibly we were living in a glass house, the kind that one shouldn’t throw stones in, as we hadn’t bathed properly since the morning of the 16th. Therefore we decided to have a “crotch and pit bath” by using one of our plates and some fabulous Crabtree and Evelyn bath products that I had collected from 1/2 a lifetime of living in Hilton Hotels. After this our cabin smelt wonderfully fragrant and we also felt around 500% better.
After this there was nothing to do, but eat, read and avoid going to the toilets which are not deserved of their hygiene sash.
Trans-Siberian, not Orient Express.
