Four days aboard the Trans-Siberian Express.

Hi! Now that we have the internet we are finally able to get stuff on here.

After sweltering in the heat of Moscow's hottest ever recorded day we were happy to be heading off to Yaroslavlsky Station to catch our train to Irkutsk. We had stocked up on noodles, coffee, biscuits and the requisite bottle of vodka (which cost roughly three pound fifty). We were in second class soft sleeper or Kupe. This meant four bunks in each compartment with a small table and room to stow your stuff. We met our first train companion Anya, who's mother introduced her as an 19 year old student going back off to uni. We bonded over a love of celebrity magazines (in particular Russian Heat! Magazine) and Brad Pitt in Fight Club and credit to Anya's English skills managed to chat away for hours with a shared understanding of about 50 words. We also met Kate and her mother and cute little brother Daniel who were from Irkutsk and spoke good English and better German than us.

After we waved Anya off at Tyumen we had a day of lounging in the carriage by ourselves which gave us a good oppurtunity to try out our 'Train Yoga' programme (We'd been on the train for over 48hrs and were a bit restless). Later that night we were woken up by a family from Kyrgystan occupying various beds up and down the carriage. I peeked out of my sheets to see a woman sat on the end of my bed breastfeeding a small baby, and a girl (who we think was the baby's aunty) moving into our spare bunk. Between the family they had two babies, two toddlers, various adults and grandad who had a full set of extremely striking gold teeth. And they were all lovely, the babies slept through the night without so much as a peep (except when Rich waved at one and made it cry) and in the day the girls sat with us and let us admire the babies, which we did for a considerable amount of time as they were ridiculously cute. And with our new improving Russian skills managed to convey our names, ages, jobs and of course the requisite showing of family pictures.

To our surprise we were given food, which after we tried to give it back as we assumed we'd be charged for it, was delicious beef goulash, a rock cake and some horrible vinegary bread. We got a food parcel every day, which was lucky as we'd only got noodles and soup to last us. At the end of each carriage there was a big water heater from which you could get absolutely scalding water from - frightning when the train is bouncing over the tracks at 50mph. Saying that, at every stop hawkers on the platforms were selling loads of things like bread, cakes, beer, ice creams, cups of berries and whole dried fish if you wanted, so we never would have starved.

The views from the windows were very similar for the first couple of days, which was dense forest right up to the tracks. This was broken up only by random things, one being an Obelisk marking the Europe-Asia border which was much lauded in the book but after we squashed our faces up the window for half an hour looking for it it turned out just to be basically just a 6ft white post with 'Europe' and 'Asia' written on it. After that the scenery opened up a fair bit and there were meadows of cows and hills covered in small wooden houses, all painted in a slightly schizophrenic combination of colours.

The next morning we arrived at Irkutsk very early and were given the perfect excuse to finally stretch our legs properly as we couldn't find our hostel and we ended up on an unscheduled tour of Irkutsk's streets full of old wooden buildings. This would have been more pleasurable if we weren't wearing our 15kg packs at the time. We finally accidentally stumbled on a hostel of which the name was never revealed to us, however Gorina the owner made us very welcome and amused us greatly with her red dressing gown, hearing aid which she kept removing and her continual shouting of 'kleine problem!' at our Swiss-German roomates. We booked the bus to Olkhon island for the next day as to get out of the town and enjoyed our first shower in four days, which is quite possibly the most I have ever enjoyed washing in my entire life!.

With Kate in our cabin.

A small part of our family from Kyrgystan. Initially unsure of the photo-taking etiquette, we knew we were okay to take pictures when they started snapping us on their camera phones.

Our first train beer.

The strange and sometimes delicious food.

Our train.