Outer Mongolia

I've only included this post so I can title it as I did (sorry). But it's true, I am outer there, and after another 30 hours on a train i've arrived in Beijing.

The border crossing into China was smoother than our arrival into Mongolia a few days ago, but was certainly more tense. Having two cabin attendants that were intent on stressing us out, they made sure we were perminantely on edge for the 5-6 hours we were between countries.

Constantly being very precious about a corridor carpet they repetedly layed out, changed, took back in or straightened for unknown reasons, they regimented us to all sit at the bottom of our cabins uncomfortably for 5 hours and wait for nothing to happen. With all this build up, we were certain of another, if not far worse set of cabin searches than before. All that happened was a dominatrix style woman, heavily made-up, appeared in our doorway larger than life with a uniform that didn't look real, mini skirt and knee high boots. She looked at us intensly, took our passports and disappeared.

Eventually the train went into the shed, with us on, and got it's wheels changed ready for the wider tracks of China. Miss Dominatrix returned, gave us our passports and we continued across the last of the Gobi Desert towatds Beijing. I arrived safely but not before clashing with the cabin attendants over a pillow case. The story is as stupid as it sounds so I won't bother telling it, but I suspect no invites to summer boat trips for these two!