It was supposed to have 6GB of data pre-loaded for 690 roubles (about £12), but I got as far as four days in and 750MB and it just packed in. No idea why - irritating, but just one of these things I suppose.
So I'm playing catch-up with this blog now. Everything has been written at the time, but I obviously wasn't able to post it until I got to China.
Anyway, on Friday afternoon I picked up a rather carb-heavy lunch from the platform hawkers at Ilanskaya station. The potatoes were nice, the eggs went well on an egg sandwich later on, and the hot dog/roll thingy was pretty tasty. I took one bite of the meat thing I picked up and immediately decided that I valued my insides too much to have any more. Still have no idea what it was, but it wasn't nice, I can tell you that.
The 1 litre can of Baltika set me up brilliantly for a mid-afternoon snooze, and when I woke the unchanging scenery of Siberia finally started to change. Gone was the constant scrublands and taiga, and in its place in the distance was the magnificant Sanyan mountain range which separates southern Russia from north east Mongolia.
After days and days of looking at nothing at all, it was mesmerising to watch something so beautiful in the distance get closer and closer over a number of hours.
Decided not to chance the buffet car for dinner tonight - last night everything I asked for was met with a "nyet" as all they had was the Russian beefsteak. It was decent enough, but I don't think I could handle it three nights in a row. So I tucked into some pasta that I had brought myself and made up using the boiling water from the samovar.
Had a pretty restless night's sleep (my fourth night out of six on the train, and the first one where I really did not sleep), which was only cured by me deciding to start reading War & Peace at 3am. Four chapters of that did just the job and I slept soundly after that.
Woke pretty sharply to see something this morning that I had been looking forward to all trip, something that is supposed to be one of the highlights of it - the magnificent Lake Baikal.
1500 miles long, the largest freshwater lake in the world, indeed one-third of the world's entire freshwater is contained in there. And you know what ? Like so many of the world's landmarks which you look forward to seeing, it was such a disappointment.
Yes it was awe-inspiringly big, but it was so big it looked just like the sea. Dark, cold, gloomy, rainy - I've been on more scenic train journeys by the sea in Scotland
Over the years when I've been planning this trip, one of the ideas I toyed with was stopping off in Irkutsk to spend some time in the tourist village of Lustvyana, on the banks of Lake Baikal. Glad I didn't bother now. And if you ever meet anyone going on about how they would love to see Lake Baikal one day, tell them not to bother as well.
In saying that, I still have plenty to look forward to over the next few days - Mongolia, the Gobi Desert, Beijing, Tianamen Square, the Great Wall of China. Lots and lots of look forward to. Trying hard to be positive, because its been a long long journey and am understandably flagging now.
3 1/2 days gone, 2 more to go.
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