eh!
After all our vigorous checks we were deemed fit enough to be let through the boarder into China, its kinda weird that they check your temperature and a man comes and looks at your passport and asks you you’re name whilst he‘s holding your passport, well in fact he said to me Helen what is your name - so then you have to say its Helen R.D I was going to say something else for a laugh but I thought better of it! You also fill in various forms but on the 2 train boarder crossings no one ever checks your luggage, they looked under the blankets on our beds much to our amusement but that was about as far as it got in terms of looking for stuff - maybe they thought we weren’t the sort to be smuggling in explosives, - that was a declaration question one of the forms - funny!

The next major event was the changing of the bogies on the train, basically they have to change the train wheels as the

gauge of the tracks is bigger in Russia than anywhere else, apparently they built them like this to stop invading armies! I suppose they were thinking that it would cut off the supply routes if the invaders couldn’t bring their trains into Russia, method in there madness I guess! We were hoping that we could have got off the train before the changes happened to get a few cold beers but I think the train was early and there seemed to be some general confusion as to what was happening so we just waited to see what happened next. The train went into a huge like shed and after much jolting about the train carriages were put on hydraulic ramps and the men in little straw like hard hats starting do there thing and before we knew it the bogies were changed and our carriage was back down on the tracks. When a lot of the carriages were done the train went back outside and then just kept going backwards and forwards to what seemed an age. After a good 20 minutes of going backwards and forwards the train moved up