drink iced water, it was pure heaven! After a few quick snaps and a feeling of general amazement that little villages survive in such places, mind due having said that, we really are not acclimatised to such hot conditions, all the westerners who had dared venture off the train were sweating buckets while the water sellers were cool as a cucumber! We had a 25 minute scheduled stop and the heat on and off the train were pretty similar so it was with great relief when we were on the move again and the hot breeze started flowing through the windows once again! The Gobi desert is an incredible place, there is no way I could live there but it certainly does have it’s own special charm.

Not just on this journey but all of the train journeys of this trip the time just drifts by and before you know it we’re getting ready to cross the border into China and getting ready to fill in the multiple forms

that are required for both sides! Once you hear the words ‘get in your cabin’ you know its form time, of course we only had 1 pen between us and 1 English form, the rest being in Mongolian! Once that was done we moved into no-mans land which seemed pretty long but soon enough we heard the ‘get in your cabin’ and knew we must be at the Chinese side, to are amazement and amusement a lady appeared at the door and zapped our foreheads with a infrared gun thingy - similar to ones used at checkouts! All 4 of us got zapped and there was a nod of approval from zapper lady and then she was off to zap the rest of our party, then we had the same forms to fill in but this time 1 English and the rest in Chinese! Whilst the form filling was in progress we learned that the zapper was a thing to measure your temperature god knows what would have happened if we had have been too hot and thankfully poor Sarah had taken some paracetamol about an hour before as she was running a temperature - lucky