After almost a month in Russia and more than 5000km on the rails, from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, it was time for us to leave Russia (just before our visa expired). So we took the train to Ulanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. But what sounds fairly straight-forward turned out to be a major act. In fact, we spent almost a day crossing the Russian-Mongolian border, most of the time just waiting for the next bureaucratic procedure to happen. In Naushki, the Russian border town, our wagon was detached from the rest of the train – and just sat there for about 3 hours, until Russian border guards appeared, who collected all the passports. Other serious looking people with dogs came onto the train, and everybody had to leave their compartments for the dogs to sniff every corner for drugs. This was followed by another round of custom people inspecting the compartment, this time with flashlights. Finally, we received our passports back with Russian exit stamps. Yet another 2 hours later, our wagon was finally connected to a locomotive again and started rolling through no-man’s land towards Mongolia. As soon as we reached Sukhbaatar, the Mongolian border town, the procedure repeated itself. Russian exit stamps were checked, then Mongolian visa, then the custom people searched the compartments again. It was surreal -and we thought crossing the Israeli-Jordanian border was time-consuming…. The nice thing was that we made some friends during all that waiting time. There were quite a few foreigners on board, some of them also on a similar quest than we are. So we toasted to quitting our jobs and being able to experience this adventure!
