15 days on the trails of mongolian virgin landscape on the zebra style, “wooden floor” furgon -driven by Loya and co-piloted by the tour assistant - translator, Zayka.

Furgon is the only possibility to survive on the bumpy, bumpy mongolian tracks... when it broke "super Loya" could easily repair it by sticking some piece of steele or changing its parts on the middle of nowhere.

Km. 8377.98 to MONGOLIA

Mongolia is quite unique; it has a population of 2.45 million and a density of 1.4 persons per sq km. -worlds lowest population density.

50% of them are nomads, sparse around the 21 provinces -aimags- in the country.

The dry capital is “under construction”, or “in ruins”… it’s like Antofagasta, but in the middle of the dessert. There is no green at all, even if marked as so on the map. But you do see brand new black Humvees driven surely by a famous singer or wrestler… The rest drive the classic Russian UAZ (perfect for the off-road situation) or second hand Japanese cars.

There are in total 20,000km of roads, only 2,000 are paved!

Mongolians style sunglasses, singing, love pictures and mother Russia -all the educational and cultural basis is founded on their concepts, plus russian is their second language -almost spoken by everyone.

...most important of all is that Mongolians are extremely nice, simple and generous people; they function as a huge family…

state of the art russian power machine

our first glimpse of siberia

what time is it???

at Novosibirsk station... one of the many stops

...instant noodles, for a change

at Lanskaya buing our lunch ... in the -only 20 min- stop

with Zina... the russian cook

We bought second class tickets… and luckily the four bed cabin was only for us!! But this doesn’t exclude the fact that the bathroom is one per wagon… and doesn’t have a shower… nice…

The Trans-Siberian route from Moscow to Ulaanbaatar took us 6 days... across a vast territory, stopping on big soviet stations, where we could stretch our legs, get fresh air and buy local food - or instant noodles... As an alternative we ate at the train restaurant where Zina prepared the purple soup, Borsch –one of the most popular dishes in Russia.

We lost track of time, mainly because the train stations maintain Moscow time. So, far east it was already sunrise at 2am.

We killed time reading, playing cards (Nico surprisingly won all the time), trying to read the station names in cyrillic and just starring at the cabin window for hours. The landscape was at the beginning russian steppe, then it progressively turned into siberian pine forests, witch dramatically changed once crossing into the center of mongolian dry plains to finally reach Ulaanbaatar.

As we went further into Siberia temperatures decreased… we reached Irkurst, the biggest and most interesting of the Russian cities on the way plus it’s next to Baikal, the deepest - 1,637 meters-, largest freshwater -20%- and oldest lake in the world… with lots of cold fresh air.

At the end the experience was amazing… Imagine waking up at 2am every day when it’s actually 7am… or flying from A to B in 6 days… constant noise, movement, sun popping up and down at weird hours and “locked in” the cabin. Conclusion, TRAIN-LAG is much worse than jet-lag… by far.

...traffic jams, language misunderstandings, and a HUGE! city didn't stop us from catching the Trans-Siberian.

Km. 2571.98 to RUSIA

...we arrived at Moscow and got our tickets to jump in the train. About Moscow we can say that it is huge, caothic, has a lot of contrast and most russians are not very friendly at all....... but we where still excited, plus the underground is amazing!