That lake water is certainly clear... the boat guide encouraged us to throw coins into the water to see how transparent it was. I chucked a 50 kopeck coin in (I mean, it's hardly worth keeping anything that small) and counted 17 seconds before it finally sank out of sight.

But anyway, September 11th. We seem to be making a habit of arriving in countries as major terrorist incidents break out. We were in Vancouver on the 9/11 (and then had to get into the US a few days later) and this year we arrived in Russia not long after two Russian passenger planes had mysteriously exploded in mid-air and a car bomb had gone off in a Moscow tube station. And of course, the South Ossetia school siege was coming to an end while we were in Moscow. Russian hotels seem a little short on English-language satellite channels, but apparently nothing major has happened today. Wonder if they had any two-minute silences or anything in the UK...?

Once breakfasted and packed, we checked out and headed to the bus stop, it's lakeside position allowing us one last view of Baikal's vastness. When we'd bought our tickets from the little tourist office in Listvyanka the day before, there'd been little information about the actual bus service, but we presumed we'd be able to get off somewhere fairly near our Irkutsk hotel, or at least somewhere in the city centre. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

So, when the driver said something to the tune of "this is the last stop", we got out. It seemed a bit shabby for a city centre bus stop, but we weren't sure what to expect of Irkutsk anyway. So we started walking, trying to find a street with a street sign (note to Russian local government offices: street signs are a Very Good Idea) and eventually found a church which corresponded with one shown on our map (note to Bryn Thomas: please list more streetnames on the maps in the next edition of your book). This proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that we were... about 2 miles from our hotel. Oops.

Still, making use of some significant arm waving, pointing to the map and gratefully remembering the word "centr", we managed to ascertain from a couple of locals the direction we needed to take. A few minutes later, while double checking some street names on our map, a friendly young Russian approached us and helped us figure out the quickest route to our hotel . Most Russians probably know no English, but the ones who do are usually very keen to try it out. Despite some of the hotel and service workers we've come across, there are some very friendly people over here, more so at this eastern end of the country than in Moscow.

The centre of Irkutsk is a lot nicer than our initial impression of the outskirts had suggested. There are quite a few crumbling Soviet-era monstrosities (and we Brits are hardly in a position to criticise countries for ugly 1960s architecture) but also an interesting mixture of quite grand 19th century buildings and a surprising number of traditional wooden houses, complete with intricate fretwork trim... even in the city centre. We had a quick wander round a few of the main sights... the cathedral, the bank of the river Angara (the only river to flow out of Baikal), the park in Kirov Square and the art gallery. The gallery was quite a surprise... several rooms of paintings, including a Monet, a Pissarro and various schools of Russian painting from the last 200 years. There's supposed to be a painting by Edwin Landseer (designer of the Trafalgar Square lions) but we couldn't find it. After a chat with a New Zealander who was having trouble finding an internet cafe (and who was travelling the Trans-Siberian in the opposite direction to us, intending to get to England and find work eventually) we went for a couple of beers at the cheerful Cafe Karlsen and then back to the hotel for some food and an early night.

[Incidentally, the Irkutsk branch of the Hotel Baikal-Intourist chain is by far the best hotel we've stayed in in Russia. Every member of staff we met was cheerful, friendly and patient and the whole place just seemed to work, far better, in particular, than the smaller Listvyanka branch. When telling one of the restaurant staff that we'd be leaving at 5:30am and therefore asking whether we'd be able to get a packed breakfast, we expected one of those "maybe... ask later... not today... no" replies. Instead, she smiled broadly and asked us what time we wanted to come and collect it.]

We had a pretty early start this morning... taxi at 5:20 from the hotel, although it didn't seem too bad as we'd gone to bed pretty early and got a decent night's sleep.

2nd class is not dissimilar to 1st except there's no TV (which didn't work in our 1st class compartment anyway) and the furnishings are slightly more spartan. There are four berths in each compartment, although the other two in here are unused... this was a compromise, as Intourist couldn't book us into a 1st class cabin on this train. However, the atmosphere is completely different. For example, there are about 1000 Mongolian traders running up and down the corridor, dragging boxes and stashing things in every nook and cranny the train has to offer, and some it hasn't, such as corridors and gangways. They're all pretty good-natured and largely ignore the Europeans completely, but it gets a bit irritating, especially as the border crossing is delayed so much because of their antics. You would not believe the trolley loads of stuff some of them have.

Going back slightly... the scenery going round the bottom of Lake Baikal was stupendous and beautiful. It was sunrise as we went past; a clear sunny day with a blue sky. The conditions were perfect and the lake looked fantastic; tranquil and blue and a contrast to the hive of activity in the corridor. Once we left the lake, it was still pretty good; the scenery was much more dramatic than we'd seen previously, with more hills, mountains and ravines with rivers running through.

We went through this steppe countryside (which was hilly some of the time) until about 6pm when we reached the border. Time passed pleasantly, if uneventfully, until then. And then we stopped... and stopped... and stopped...

Filled in a customs form and an exit form, moved into the corridor while a Russian gentleman in fetching green uniform searched our compartment (somewhat perfunctorily, it has to be said) then trickled slowly towards the Mongolian side of the border for the same process to be repeated, except that the guards seemed a bit more friendly. They're not interested in the tourists; they're all after what the locals are trying to bring over the border, but even then it feels like they're going through the motions. They don't seem to have confiscated anything, even the stuff under the floor, which they did find. A fierce-looking dog was brought through the corridors, but it didn't seem to find anything.

The worst of it all was...
1. I only just managed to get to the toilet before all this rigmarole, as they started locking the toilet doors long before the regulation 30 minutes beforehand (they always lock the toilets in urban areas).
2. All the windows and curtains had to be shut, so it got extremely stuffy and hot.
3. The samovar stops working, so we couldn't eat our food or make hot drinks.

It's currently 12:25 and there are some signs of moving, but I won't get my hopes up. I have to say this has all been pretty tedious and if I were to recommend the Trans-Siberian experience to anyone, I would probably say go to Vladivostok to avoid all this shit at the border. Anyone who wants to go to Mongolia or China could fly there and get in without all the hassle. I can't believe we've got it all to go through again when we go over into China.

Well, I'm drinking my third vodka and water (surprisingly palatable, even though it's a bit warm) and we've finally moved after a fearful lurch. We can't decide whether the driver simply hasn't learned to start the train or whether he simply doesn't want anyone else to get any sleep as he can't have any... six and a half hours through two customs stops, certainly a record for us. And there's a massive queue for the toilet (unsurprisingly)...

After a not particularly restful night (the Mongolian traders decided to start doing some socialising at 1am and then managed to shift their merchandise round even more) we made a monumental effort to get up, dressed and packed in time for the train's arrival in Ulaan Baatar. Writing with the benefit of hindsight, we'd probably spent the previous 24 hours getting a rather dull view of the people of Mongolia, so were hoping things would change. Disembarking at the station, we (and several others) were met by a couple of people from our guesthouse, which was nice.

So... the UB Guesthouse... we'd booked this place over the Web, amazed at how an en-suite twin room could only be 12 US dollars per night. Well, we'd been over-optimistic, as the place is essentially a youth hostel! It's a very clean, friendly and well-run hostel, and we did indeed have our own twin room (not exactly en suite, though; we were sharing a bathroom with a six-bed dorm) but still a youth hostel. Full of hippy student backpacker types. All the people we spoke to were incredibly nice and friendly, but there's just something about long-term backpacker types that really annoys me. It's probably the whole competitive aspect which puts me off... that endless blathering "well yah, like I've been on the road for a year now, had all my luggage stolen in Thailand and caught malaria in India, which was like so totally unreal and we found this hostel in Sri Lanka which had an open sewer running through it, but it only cost like 25p a week"... blimey, I thought going on holiday was supposed to be a pleasant diversion. How about I add the finishing touch to your gap year by driving chisels into your sinuses?

So yeah, we're not really hostel-type people. It's a great way of being silly on the cheap when you're a student, but when you grow up and become a human being, spend some real money, for Christ's sake. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, you're not a human being until you know which channel BBC World is on in your hotel... ;-)

We went off for our first wander in UB (as all the groovy travelling types call it) vowing to find something better. We did, and went to the opposite extreme, grabbing a "standard" twin room at the very business orientated Continental Hotel (we're not really business hotel types either, but at least these places have non-bunk beds and minibars). They say "standard", but it's absolutely enormous, and far more plush than anything we've had so far on this trip. However, it's only about £55 per night for the room... cheaper than the last two Russian hotels we stayed in and far nicer.

But I digress... our first job was to find the Intourist office to collect our tickets for the Beijing train. We soon learned all about the UB address system, which doesn't seem to follow our approach to street numbers and actually seems quite random. Eventually we found the Juulchin (former Mongolian state travel agent) office, where Intourist tickets are distributed over here, also noticing that Juulchin offer a number of guided tours. We wanted to see some areas outside of the city, so we booked a trip for the following day.

After a restorative coffee and cake and a crash course in Mongolian currency (one UK pound = 2200 Tugriks, which will buy you a pint of lager or a standard pizza... they have no coins and the notes go down to 20 Tugriks... a one penny note!) we went a-wandering again. The first major impression of UB is the pollution. Car ownership is quite low in Mongolia, but the majority of the vehicles seem to be concentrated in this city. The basic road structure is of two ring roads and one large boulevard, all of which are regularly congested. Driving quality is generally very bad with little consideration for pedestrians... crossing these six-lane roads is a matter of taking a deep breath and going for it, with the assumption that the drivers may honk, but they won't run you over.

The architecture is largely solid and Soviet-style, but much of that is crumbling and there's a lot of shiny new buildings appearing all over the city... there's a feeling that the signs of the Russian past are slowly being erased. After a short walk round, we did our first tourist stop at the Choijin Lama monastery (see pic left). One of only a handful of monasteries (out of 700 across Mongolia) to survive the Soviet demolitions and purges of the 1930s, it's now a nice little museum, with plenty of Buddhist art and architecture on show.

For a bit more understanding about Mongolia's troubled past, we then went to the Memorial Museum for Victims of Political Persecution, a small but sobering museum dedicated to the tens of thousands of intellectuals, monks, teachers and political activists murdered by the Russians during Stalin's purges of 1937-39. The museum was set up by the daughter of the Mongolian president of the time, who himself was executed for refusing to carry out Stalin's orders on his own people.

More cheerfully, we then went for a couple of pints of dark English-style (but locally brewed) ale in "Dave's Place", an English-style pub on Sukhbaatar Square, followed by pizzas at the "Pizza Della Casa" Italian restaurant. Excellent authentic pizzas, and the meal for the two of us (starters, main course, beer, coffee) only cost a tenner!

Back to the UB guesthouse for a good night's sleep (apart from having to wait ages to get into the bathroom) knowing we'd be somewhere posher the next night...