There really isn't a lot in Mongolia.
The train arrived at the capital Ulan Bator at 8am and about half of our companions, human or otherwise, were getting off.
It was cold, really cold, and most of them were going off camping in the Gobi Desert! When you think of deserts you think of camels, baking sunshine and Mirages of lakes and palm trees. I suspect when you get a mirage in the Gobi it's of an open fire, or an AGA or something!
The train motors on through the desert and your lungs slowly fill with the fine dust being kicked up and coming in through the holes in the doors or the open windows. This made a nice change from the coal used to heat the samovar that had been filling our lungs to this point. If you don't have asthma when you get on you probably will by the time you get off!
We were in Mongolia, which means.....Mongolian Restaurant Car! Surely it couldn't be as bad as the Russian one? Everything I'd eaten for the last 5 days had come out of a packet, so I was quite excited at the prospect of freshly cooked meat.
We passed through a couple of carriages to the back of the train to where the russian car had been, to find....nothing! Just a window through which we could see the single track railway fading off into the distance with nothing but scrubby desert on either side, this meant noodles again!
But we soon stopped in a station, went for our little exercise and there it was, right in the middle of the train-PECTOPAH!
The Russian Restaurant car looked like the kind of place you'd find in some grotty seaside town where everything on the menu comes with chips. The Mongolian car, however, was a shiny golden monstrosity of over-exuberance, it was fantastic!
'Lunch?, Beer?, Juice?, Water?' Shouted the waiter as he ushered us to our seats. No sooner had we sat down than the first course was infront of us-looks like we're having the set menu! A salad of tomato and lettuce and pickled cabbage-fantastic when you've had no vegetables in 5 days (I'm not counting the potatoes!)
Course 2 was soup, or more accurately chicken gravy, complete with large lumps of chicken fat. We couldn't leave it, but it was hard work!
Then the moment I'd been waiting for, hot fresh meat. No suprises it was mutton, the staple diet in Mongolia, but it was tender and juicy and SOOOOO much better than mash and noodles!
We were stuffed, but they weren't done yet, they finished us off with some arctic roll.
The day, as with every other, flew by and soon we were in Zamin Ude, the last stop in Mongolia before entering China. On came the soldier, he shone his torch in the area above our door and that was that, these checks were getting more pathetic as we went along!
Once they were happy we rolled through no-mans land and into China.
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