overland asia bound: spring is near

December 2016

After leaving Russia we made a quick dash for Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital. Arriving early in the morning we had a bit of trouble finding anything open. We needed to finalize a few documents to apply for our Chinese Visa and to make it a bit more exciting we had left that for the last possible moment. Well that’s the story we’re going with anyhow. In the end we found a coffee shop with WiFi and finished the itinerary for our Chinese Visa applications together with all the necessary hotel bookings. Having done that we found a print shop to print all the documents and then made it to the embassy just in time for opening hour. Smooth! We submitted everything and were told to come back in four days.

Afterwards we had some food, bought a Simcard and after some searching, found the way to the absolutely luxurious flat of our host Amarsanaa. This was the view:

In the following days we relaxed, found some fantastic Mongolian food in a vegan restaurant and walked around to get a feel for the city.

My favourite part of the week was when our host took us on a hike to a nearby mountain with the local Rotaract club.

The wintery atmosphere was absolutely stunning and it was even better to finally get out of the smog clogged city and breathe in fresh air.

On top we played some games to stay warm which we appreciated a lot in now -20 degrees Celsius.

After successfully getting our double entry Visa we boarded a train to Beijing. As we were gradually moving south the snow slowly started to disappear. When we arrived at our host’s flat, the ever present smog thickened with the hours passing and we were quite awestruck by this view:

On the next day it was a whole different story though. There was a lovely wind blowing fresh air into the city and we could really feel the difference. So we enjoyed walking around for a bit under the clear blue sky.

Funnily (to me) you can find a lot of these open public toilets in Beijing. Yep, privacy is a whole different story here. Once you get to a touristy part, there will be separating walls in between though :).

After having a nice dinner with Surin we boarded our first Chinese sleeper train towards Kunming, the so called Spring City. Spring was near and also the second part of our cycling adventure!

overland asia bound: finding winter in siberia

November 2016

After many a good conversation with family and friends, after way too many loaves of bread and pieces of cake and after just enough hikes in the German alps it was time to get going again. So follow us on this photographic journey into wintery Siberia!

In Krakow we stopped for a couple of days to finally meet our online friends Wendy and Jurek from dropthetension.com. We had first stumbled upon their blog when researching crossing from Australia to East Timor via boat.

It was awesome meeting you guys, joining you for the networking breakfast and even getting a small tour through beautiful Krakow.

With little breaks we traveled east through Lviv and Kiev to Moscow again. This time around we would have a couple of days to explore more.

We went to a big market / flea market without buying anything. Still nice to see the things on display.

We spent about 20 minutes in this shop talking to the owner about the special techniques they use to dye the jugs. They are all handmade and the techniques were developed by their family over a long time.

When we saw these, we had to take some pictures especially for our friends Annika and Roberto :).

After coming back from the market we joined our fantastic host Lisa and her friends for a hot drinks party. Awesome idea! In case you hadn’t noticed on the pictures… it was starting to get cold!

After a walk through the outskirts of Moscow on the next day we set off towards the train station once more…

… and found this! A station to clean and refill your milk bottles! How awesome is that?! No trash and you don’t even have to clean the bottles yourself :).

After a rather short ride on the Transsiberian we stopped for a day in Tiumen.

Unfortunately I got sick so we opted to stay in a hostel instead of accepting the invitation from Helen, a fellow couchsurfer.

We did meet up on the next day and she showed us around in her lunch break. I loved chatting to her and discovering all the fantastic wooden houses!

After stopping in Novosibirsk for a few hours to change trains we boarded our train to Irkutsk. A town deep in Siberia with temperatures plummeting to under -30 degrees Celsius in winter.

Fortunately we had just missed a cold spell and it was only around -10 degrees. One hat was still enough most of the time.

We spent a day walking around Irkutsk and marveling at all the uniquely beautiful houses…

After warming up in a cafe for an hour we were ready for the second part of the walk, this time along the river.

Funnily enough, when we walked into the central market area, we saw a couple with an ortlieb bag. We were wondering for a while if they were cycling here? In Siberia? In Winter?? Well, there is only one way to find out. So that’s how we met Anabelle and Loris, two French cyclists who were surprised by an early winter in the Baltik countries and then decided to put their bicycles on the train to China. It was awesome to meet them and so we invited them to hike along the Baikal lake the following day.

After seeing some more beautiful houses we were off into the woods and scrambled up the snowy path to get a bit of a view over lake Baikal.

Three hats! Yep, it was seriously cold at this point, so stopping for long leisurely breaks was out of the question.

The view was nice enough but even with downing several cups of hot tea we were soon frozen and chose to hike back quickly.

After one more stop in Ulan Ude where we talked about whether to stay longer we ultimately decided to continue to Mongolia. Wintery Siberia was beautiful to look at, especially with the sun out. But walking around for hours on end to discover hidden places in towns as we usually like to do is just not that much fun in -15 degrees Celsius.

So we took one more train to Nauschky, a small town on the Russian – Mongolian border. We had some time to spare, as the cross border train was due to wait for 4 hours at the border.

We will definitely come back one day, just not in November. Either in summer, to cycle the Altai region into Siberia or in February / March when the Baikal lake is actually frozen and supposedly stunningly beautiful. Next time :).