It doesn’t take long to hit a snag

So you spend weeks doing the research, spend a load of money on the tickets. The one thing left to make your Trans Siberian experience complete is to be in the right place at the right time to catch your train. Ooops.

After a quick ride to the airport, a night awake waiting and hoping for a standby ticket on the next flight to the next train stop, disappointment of not getting one, booking a ticket for the next day to a place further along the line, a trip back into moscow, a night in a hostel, trip back to the airport and a flight on Aeroflot we caught up with the train 46 hours into the trip. We did make New Years on the train though and had an interesting evening drinking champagne and vodka with a pair of italian guys who’d escaped their partners for the holiday.

Two days later we made it to Irkutsk and headed for our Hotel in Listvyanka next to Lake Baikal. The Lake was beautiful and the town very peaceful, it was also our first sighting of the Sun since we started our Trip. Two days later and we’re back in Irkutsk, staying in a rather shabby hotel waiting for our train to Mongolia at 5:45 tomorrow morning.

It was pretty annoying to miss the train but we got to meet some cool people at the hostel in Moscow and luckily we only missed a about a quarter of our total St Petersburg to Beijing Journey.

Oh and Aeroflot wasn’t that bad!

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