It was like Christmas morning, only better. The day we had been planning and anticipating for months had finally arrived! We were up at 6:00am for our Trans Mongolian railway departure day. We were both so thrilled that we couldn’t sleep the night before and even though we were completely exhausted, we were still buzzing with excitement.

The Beijing railway Station
We arrived at the Beijing train station around 6:45am, after navigating our way through the subway system in this enormous city – which was surprisingly easy to do. We shuffled our way into the packed railway station and up to the second floor. We only waited for about 10 minutes before they called out our train…it was time to board!

Riding on the well-known Trans-Mongolian railway was something we had both wanted to do for a long time, and being greeted by the train attendant wearing white gloves was like a dream come true. There were numerous modes of transportation that we could have taken to get from China to Mongolia, but we both love travelling by train and were really looking forward to this journey.

Boarding the Trans Mongolian Train…tickets please!
We stepped onto the train and found our compartment. It was just us and another young man from Germany. There are typically 4 people to one compartment in 3rd class, but we only had three. We lifted up the bottom bench seat (which doubled as my bed), put our bags underneath and got comfortable.

Our compartment for 30 hours, 4 beds and 3 people.
Not long after that, a man came around with sheets for our beds and tickets for a totally free lunch and a totally free dinner in the restaurant car. What?! totally free food on the most well-known train in the world? We were completely shocked, especially because we were in 3rd class and not 1st…or even 2nd for that matter.

As soon as we got on the train, our backpacker mode completely kicked in and before we knew it, we were chatting with other travellers about where they had been and where they were going. We were all sharing travel stories and giving suggestions to each other as well. We both just fell back into the joys of backpacking, and quickly realized how much we had been missing that during our year of teaching English in China.

Hanging out with new pals from Germany and Portugal…back to being a backpacker!
We were maybe an hour into the journey when the landscape completely changed from concrete city life to rocky mountainous ranges! set between the crags were small, jade coloured lakes with local people fishing. The sky was a beautiful blue colour, the clouds were fluffy and white and the scenery was spectacular!

We were all staring out in awe of how beautiful everything looked – especially Nick and I, we hadn’t seen mountains and really clear, blue skies like that for a while.

Gorgeous views from the train, just outside of Beijing
As the day went on, the landscapes continued to change – from rising, jagged peaks to flat farmland with lots of corn crops and rice fields. After that, we concerned some flatter areas with rolling green hills, before the scenery changed yet again as we approached the border town of Erlian, revealing dry landscapes dotted with industrial plants.

A ideal end to a ideal day on the Trans Mongolian
The border crossing was a bit of an ordeal…a 4 hour ordeal! We pulled into Erlian around 8:15pm and didn’t end up leaving there until midnight. We knew it would be a long waiting time while the train had its wheels changed over from the Chinese size to Mongolian track size, so we chose to go inside the train station to exchange some money and purchase some food.

As we were standing in line to purchase our food, the train whistled and chugga, chugga, choo, choo’d its way down the tracks and out of sight. We both looked at each other with the same thought in our heads…did we just lose our ride to Mongolia?!

We wouldn’t want to miss our ride on this train!
In the end the train just had to relocation up the tracks (but completely out of sight) in purchase to do the wheel change over, which would have been fine if they had let us back on the train. We could have been laying down sleeping in our beds but instead we were locked inside the station, so bored and sitting in unpleasant chairs for 3 hours. Not to mention the fact that our bags were left on board, completely unattended.

Around 2:00am, we were allowed back on the train and as soon as our heads hit the pillow, we fell into a deep sleep. The following morning was stunning and we just sat and looked out the window at the flat, dry, dusty desert surrounding us. We had arrived in Mongolia and were in theGobi Desert!

During our last hour on the train we left the desert scene and it really started to look like the Mongolia we had imagined in our minds all of the months leading up to this journey. beautiful green steppe, rolling hills, herds of livestock and the common yurt homes dotted the landscape all around us.

Rolling green steppe and a yurt..does it get much more Mongolian than that?!

Getting closer to Ulan Bator – a yurt settlement just outside of the city
The train was hugging the mountains while gliding its way effortlessly around the bends. After 30 hours of being on the train, we arrived in the capital city of Ulan Bator. Seeing the rolling hills and the yurts was the ideal way to end a ideal journey on one of the most well-known trains in the world.

Here’s A quick video Of Our Journey. check It Out!

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