Some of you might already know that I am a bit of a train nut. Bikes, boats and trains kind of sum up my travel preferences – I’m a slow travel kind of gal. So it is with great delight I share with you some highlights of the Batt Trans Mongolian Rail adventure.

Right lets start with a few Batt facts and figures. The journey from Beijing to St Petersburg is some 7925 km taking nearly seven days of continuous train travel and five nights of kipping in a rock ‘n rolling bed. During this time I ‘shared’ five blocks of chocolate, traveled through the Gobi desert (and caught a glimpse of the lesser known Mongolian Easter Camel – Easter Bunny’s regional contractor), counted approximately one billion birch trees (Day Six, “ I spy with my little eye, something beginning with ‘B’), learnt how to say ‘please’, ‘thank you’ and ‘hello’ in three different languages (I also learnt how to say garyachayavada – which is Russian for hot water bottle – but ended up not needing to use this vocab gem)  and developed expert bladder control due to the toilets being locked ½ hour either side of station stops. You travel through eight time zones though very confusingly once you board the Russian operated trains, they all run on Moscow time and anyway you kind of enter your own little time bubble as the world speeds by endlessly outside your window.

I suspect a lot of people don’t see much out of the window on these trains – this is because they are taking a very close look at the toilet bowl. Some serious drinking goes down during these train journeys. OK, I confess I ate a lot of chocolate but this didn’t see me starting any brawls in the restaurant carriage or running semi naked up and down the corridor. Never a dull minute on this service though several contemplative ones involving Birch trees.

The railway’s construction started in the 19^th Century – a time when the train was considered to be a weapon of mass destruction. For this reason it is impossible to travel on the same train out of Russia and into Mongolia and China. The gauge changes – cunning foreign defense strategy, eh!

Some of the liveliest moments on the train involved border crossings – some how these were nearly always in the middle of the night. They involved filling out forms in ‘mystery English’ (a bewildering variant on English) and hoping you hadn’t accidently ticked any boxes that admitted human trafficking, contraband or mammoth remains. Then came the inspectors and some very sassy looking women decked out in combat uniforms. They smile sweetly and order you out of your cabin while they leap about inside hunting out your chocolate stash. In the meantime your passport is ‘taken away’ and the toilets are locked. It’s minus 3 degrees outside and you’ve got your fingers crossed that this is all going to end happily ever after.

It did.. and we are now a few hours out from Moscow where we will spend the next three 3 days checking out the capital of this wonderfully quirky country and find the answers to tricky questions like – is their any such thing as a vegetarian menu in Moscow? How many gold topped churches can you fit into one city? And will Stalin’s body ever be buried next to his Mum’s (which is apparently what he wanted) …to find out the answers to these and other riveting questions stay tuned to the Batt Blog.