In the age of air travel, taking the train is a pretty retro way to cover the 6,000-plus kilometers between Moscow and Beijing. But for two China expats-turned-backpackers killing time on our way back to the Real World, two weeks of train hopping from Russia to Mongolia to China makes perfect sense. Neither of us are under any illusions that living in a tiny cabin with each other, and two perfect strangers, for nearly a week will be easy; chances are good that once we arrive in Beijing, our final stop, we’ll never want to see another train. Regardless, it’s a chance we’re willing to take, because Russia and Mongolia are two countries we’ve always wanted to visit. The Trans-Mongolian is also a great way to tick off our nine months of travel across Asia, Australia and the Americas — much of which will happen by train.

Days 1-4: Moscow to Irkutsk

Most people think of the Trans-Siberian Railway as a single route connecting Moscow with the Pacific port town of Vladivostok, which was certainly the case when the line first opened in 1916. Since then the network is being constantly expanded, now with lines — including our route, the Trans-Mongolian — meandering across Russia and neighboring countries. Regardless, all trains start in Moscow, which is where we found ourselves late September, armed with plenty of snacks, water, roubles, books, cards, earplugs, baby wipes and music in preparation for four solid days on board.

Ready to go at Moscow's Yaroslavl station

Everything started out fine, and we were actually relieved to be sitting down after a non-stop weekend in Moscow. We’d booked ourselves into a second-class cabin, which meant four small bunks, two roommates and shared bathrooms on either end of the carriage. (It doesn’t seem like much room, but compared to the dormitory-on-wheels of the third class carriage, we’re traveling in relative luxury). At first, it looked like we got lucky — one bunk was filled by a sweet but sour-faced Russian senior who alternated between barking into her cell phone and offering us food from her bottomless collection of snacks — while the fourth bunk remained empty.

Our train seems to be one of older convoys in the trans-Siberian fleet, meaning we saunter — rather than speed — along, while the train occasionally shudders and jerks so violently I’m sure we’ve jumped the tracks. Regardless, this gives us plenty of time to consider the passing scenery, which looks very similar to the endless birch forests of Canada or Alaska once we finally get out of Moscow. We pass small villages made of single story wood houses, many of which look abandoned or unequipped to deal with a Russian winter, and the occasional person cutting across the tracks.

Read More: Moscow: The Kremlin, Churches and Vodka on the Side

The train stops for a few minutes in some of these towns, but we’re generally too afraid to get off. There’s no schedule to speak of, and neither of our surly, poker-faced carriage attendants speaks a word of English. This makes it difficult to tell exactly where we are, or how long we’ll be stopping. Tom and I do our best to follow along in our guidebook, while our bunkmate — who is clearly a regular, with her floral train tracksuit and packets of instant borsht — helpfully points out our location on the map. We chugged through the industrial sprawl that is Perm (pronounced not like the hairdo, but “Pear-em”), a sooty industrial city beside the Volga River once known for one of Soviet Russia’s grimmest labor camps. We also pass through Yekaterinburg, the Siberian mining town where Tsar Nicolas II was infamously exiled and eventually murdered, minutes after crossing from Europe into Asia.

By our third day, somewhere in Siberia, I’m feeling very greasy and disorientated. That we have no idea of the time only adds to the confusion; the train keeps Moscow time, the official time zone for the entire country, but local time zones differ by one to five hours. The past couple of days have brought us weeks closer to winter; the leaves outside are increasingly gold and red, with evergreen and pine thrown into the mix. I’m also not sleeping very well — the train is surprisingly hot, especially up on the top bunk; on night two, a Russian man who slept only in his underwear kept us all awake with his earth-shattering snoring in our fourth bunk (luckily he was only with us one night). To stave off the grogginess — or just embrace it completely — Tom and I are spending more and more time in the dining car, sampling a hit-and-miss selection of Siberian beers while a surly barmaid plays the local radio at nightclub-level volumes.

Finally, early on the morning of Day 5, we finally arrived in Irkutsk, the unofficial capital city of Eastern Siberia. We’ll spend the next three nights here before boarding a different train to Mongolia. It’s incredible to think that we’ve been on board a train for five days, but are still just halfway across the country. Russia is huge. On a separate note, I’ve never been so excited to take a shower.

Days 5-6: Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar

After four days exploring Irkutsk, the former “Paris of Siberia,” and the beautiful Lake Baikal region, Tom and I are back on the train. This leg will be significantly shorter than our original train journey; this time, we’ll spend just two nights on board before arriving in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. Once again, we’re traveling in a second-class cabin, but this time the rest of the carriage is significantly more empty. With the exception of a Mongolian man and his young daughter, everyone in our car is an English-speaking Western tourist. This makes the journey feel somewhat contrived, but its also nice to communicate again with people in English. One of our bunkmates, Esther, has sold her house in Holland to travel indefinitely; the other, Julia, is a Russian tour guide escorting a group of 12 Western travelers from Moscow to Beijing. Both of them were very nice, as were all the people on her tour — several Brits, a couple of Australians, one Kiwi and an American woman from Reno.

Waiting at the border between Russia and Mongolia

This train was much nicer than our original train, but scenery-wise, this leg was the least interesting of our journey. The land was almost completely flat, with dried grass and little shrubs; sometimes I felt like we were traveling through a huge dried up backyard. It doesn’t matter, though, really, because we spent most of our second day at the Russian-Mongolian border. In this case, it was really nice to have the Russian guide in our cabin — the Russian border guard seemed unsure that Tom, who has grown a beard since his passport photo was taken — wasn’t traveling on a stolen passport. In the end, the Russian border control inexplicably took six hours to process the handful of people on board. According to Julia, however, we should still count ourselves lucky; sometimes customs here can take twice as long. When we finally pulled into Ulaanbataar, Mongolia, early on the morning of the third day, it was snowing. After traveling East for the better part of a week, winter is finally here.

Days 6-7: Ulaanbaatar to Beijing

It was early morning when we arrived at Ulaanbaatar’s central station for our Beijing-bound train, marking the third and final stage of our 16-day Trans-Mongolian odyssey. We’d spent the past three days living in a Ger and riding semi-wild ponies out on the Mongolian steppes, so coming back to Ulaanbataar — a rather soulless concrete city filled with snarling traffic and half-finished apartment blocks — was something of a let-down. Thankfully, we found the second-class carriage of this Chinese train was actually quite pleasant, albeit with frilly decorative touches that looked like my grandparents living room circa 1989. Besides being more modern (and far longer) than either of our Russian trains, it was outfitted with smiling Mongolian attendants and blue and white balloons to celebrate the train’s anniversary year.

As such, we departed Ulaanbaatar’s grim urban sprawl in relative comfort, as the train wound through suburbs of gers past rolling hills, and unworldly rock formations that define this part of the Mongolian steppe. From here, the hills gradually fade in size before folding into the vast expanse of grassland, and then dusty scrub mixed with increasing amounts of sand — as we near the Gobi desert. With nothing to break up the monotony of the arid landscape except the occasional wandering herd of sheep or goats, we decamped to the dining car to spend the last of our Togrog on beer and chocolate.

Around 9pm, we reached the Chinese border, following a brief stop at Mongolian customs. Here we are inspected by medical quarantine officers before the military police boarded the train, matching up people with passports, before the entire train was none-to-gently shunted into a long shed. Mongolian and Chinese railways differ in width, meaning that the wheels have to be changed before the train can continue on to Beijing. As such, each carriage is raised from its wheels with pneumatic lifts, allowing workers exchange them for wheels suitable to China’s rail network. End to end, the whole process took over four hours. The train didn’t leave again for Beijing until after 1am, while we struggled to sleep amid all the violent jostling of the carriage.

Changing the wheels at the Chinese border

When we awoke the next morning, Mongolia’s desolate landscapes and herds of wild horses were long gone, replaced with the dense sprawl of Chinese industrialization (read: back-to-back factories, vast farmlands and China’s quintessential haze). Just outside Zhangjiakou, the terrain becomes suddenly mountainous, with soaring peaks and steep ravines as we cut through a series of mountain tunnels. Just an hour later, we’ll arrive in Beijing, China’s capital city, on the eve of a national holiday expected to bring millions of people to a city that already boasts a permanent population of 25 million. The difference between China and Mongolia, with only three million people, couldn’t be more stark.

Despite all the instant coffee, card games, inefficient border crossings and those especially pungent times when you can tell that no one on the train has showered for days — we had an excellent time, and are already planning out which Trans-Siberian route we’ll do next. More immediately, we’ll have a couple of days to rest up in Beijing before boarding the train again, this time heading west towards Tibet.

Jen Swanson & Tom Mountford