Ok, this train trip was so long, that, I reserve the right to write an another article about it..

So the thing that I forgot totally to mention, was that during the fifth day in the train, 23 September 2006. I went with Pete to the restaurant wagon after seeing that a group of people just came out of there, this was just before the Russian customs..
I took some coffee and Pete took some beer, the wagon became completely empty (except the waitresses) with the last English man leaving from there. So there we sat and the train stopped, we continued chatting away and enjoying our drinks. Next thing we know, the train starts to head back towards the north..
Now, here we started to think that, what the hell !?! Are we going back to moscow or something and we stood up with the intention of walking back to our wagon but the waitress and other Russians were all like No no and waving their hands wildly, so we sat back down. After a couple of minutes, the wagon stopped and the waitress waved at us to follow her, so we followed towards the front of the wagon, and, to our great surprise we saw that our train was far away from us..
So you can imagine the feeling of not being in your train. Well, the train was stopped for customs inspections of course but anyway we took a really fast sprint back to our train.. With our hearts racing like mad, we headed back to our cabin just to be told that we need to deliver our passports to some customs officer. So we had to follow these Russian officials to the station just outside the train, there this officer took our passports and started to analyze the picture on mine, looking first at the picture then me, again the picture then me and the same for at least couple more times.. Then he finally seemed satisfied and let me go back to the cabin, Pete had to go fetch his immigration card in the meanwhile, but he also came fastly back.. Then we were at the border for some three hours just waiting for them to finish checking our informations..

After we got our passports back, the officers checked all the cabins for illegal aliens and after that finally we got to move on.. The Mongolian border was really much faster and they weren't even really interested in any of us in any way.. After all this it was time to get some sleep.