Preparations: Red Tape.

So, now you have a few weeks to spare and you have decided to do it: the Trans-Siberian, the Far East, the Pacific Ocean, Mongolia, China. Let's just book the plane to Moscow and jump on a train! Hmm, not so fast.

You need visas. These little pieces of paper can prove to be one of the most expensive and time-wasting tasks of your trip. So, the first advice is: start thinking about visas at least one month in advance. Particularly if your aim is the Trans-Mongolian, since you'll have to cross three countries, each with a different visa.

Let's start with China: surprisingly enough, the Chinese is the easiest visa you'll get. Discarding the patience to wait at the consulate (and there is a Chinese consulate practically in every country), you'll just need to compile a couple of pieces of paper, give a photo, some money (not too much, though far more for US citizens than for EU citizens), wait a few days (3 to 7) and off you go. You have to enter before 3 months from emission and you can stay for up to a month. Pretty flexible, for one of the last Communist countries. No real limit on where to go, either.

Mongolia: you have two options here.

• You only want a transit visa (valid nominally 5 days from when you enter the country; consider though that you'll need 1 to 2 days just to cross the country with the train), in which case you should go to the Mongolian consulate only after you already have the Chinese visa (if your final destination is China) or the Russian visa (if your final destination is Russia). If in doubt, get the Mongolian visa last. In theory, it should be possible to get the visa also at the border, but better safe than sorry.
• You want to spend a few more days in a yurt, so a transit visa is not enough. You should then get an invitation from a Mongolian entity (the Mongolian consulate itself suggested Zaya Hostel, 10 USD for an invitation letter).
• The third option is to have US, Israeli or another citizenship which allows you to travel visa-free to Mongolia.

In any case, the Mongolian visa process should be very fast (should you manage to find a Mongolian consulate near you, which is not necessarily easy): in Budapest, the visa was made by the Consul himself while we were waiting.

And finally, Russia. Probably one of the messiest visas in the world. You need an invitation letter, then you have to compile one or more papers (more if you are an American), including the exact dates of your visit (and have valid insurance for that period) and a list of the places you want to visit, and a photo. Advice: use a specialized travel agency. Even then though, it might be tricky. For example, if you are a US citizen in Europe and cannot prove that you will have a job there for 6 months you might see your visa refused. In such cases, it might be easier (although a bit stressful) to send your passport to some agency in the USA and get it back via post.

Plus, once in Russia, if you stay for more than 3 days in a place, you should register your visa there. Hotels will do it for free, otherwise you can ask hostels or travel agencies who will do it for a fee.

Oof! That's quite a lot. Still sure you want to go?

Preparations: Trains in Russia.

Buying tickets to make the Trans-Siberian (Trans-Mongolian or Trans-Manchurian) trip is not as easy as buying an Inter-Rail ticket.

Russian Railways do not have a "Trans-Siberian Pass", whereby you have a ticket from Moscow to Vladivostok and you can then use it as you prefer, breaking the journey wherever you see fit, maybe booking the sleeper ticket separately.*

When you want to buy a ticket for a Russian train, you have to be in Russia and you have to know exactly the date when you're travelling and the train you're taking. Tickets are nominal (you need to show your passport). Another interesting quirk is that all train timetables are displayed in Moscow time, through the whole Russian territory. Apparently, in some trains even restaurant carriages use Moscow times, thus offering breakfast in the afternoon or dinner in the middle of the night.

We have decided to travel platskartny (плацкартный: third class, a whole carriage filled with sleepers), and buy the tickets as we go, which is the only way to break our trip. Anyway, apparently Russians do not buy their tickets until they're at the station packed with their luggage ready to leave, so if we buy the follow-up tickets whenever we arrive in a city, we should be all set. Only trouble might be with the train leaving to Mongolia, but we'll see about that.

* Funnily enough, we've recently discovered (a little bit late though) that you can do exactly this if you buy the ticket through Slovakian Railways. You can buy a Citystar return ticket from Slovakia to any point in Russia (including Vladivostok, Irkutsk or what have you) for as little as 135 Euros (yes, you read it right - return ticket, any station). And if you're more than one person, there's even a discount. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen a "Bratislava-Vladivostok" return ticket with my own eyes. The only hitch to that wonderful plan is that you have to be in Slovakia to buy the ticket (which we are not, and now it's too late to organize everything through a third person. Ahh, next time).

Preparations: Links

Just a few links we have collected that might be useful in preparing the trip:

• General info:
• The Virtual Transiberian on Google Maps. To be seen especially if you're not going: you can see hours of footage from the window of the train in different spots of the trip. Plus the maps of some cities with a few landmarks.
• The WikiTravel page on the Trans-Siberian (and the Wikipedia page, since you're there).
• The ever-reliable train-loving Man in Seat 61, with lots of resources, tips and advice on the trip. Some of the links seem a bit like sponsorships, but hey, there's lots of info there, you can't complain.
• Trains in Russia: (more on that later)
• The official website of Russian Railways (RZhD), in English. You can't buy tickets online, but you can get the timetables (provided you are able to search in Cyrillic). Oh, and some sparse information.
• UFS Online. In Russian, and you'll have to fiddle with your keyboard to look up the trains (unless you do manage to input your requests in Cyrillic, that is). But the prize awaits: the website actually gives you some prices, and possibly even sells the tickets! I didn't go that far though. But it's useful to at least have an idea of the cost of each leg of the trip.
• Tutu (nice name, huh?). See above, but it doesn't have the prices. There's also flights and hotels (but you don't want to use any of those, do you?)
• This page is only for real geeks, or for those who are stuck with the Russian Railways timetable lookup. Every Russian station has a corresponding number, and this page lists them all. So you can use it to lookup (in the RZhD website) from 2060001 to 2060500 and you'll get all the trains from Gorky (pardon, Nizhny Novgorod) to Kazan.
• Travellers' comments:
• Some Trans-Siberian travel tips and costs, dating from 2007
• A Trans-Mongolian Railway FAQ, and several blog posts about the Trans-Mongolian trip

Obviously, suggestions are welcome... We might add some more while we go. Merry browsing.

Preparations: The Itinerary

So this is it. We're going. Nerd as I am, I had to go to Google Maps and trace my itinerary, including every intermediate station that I found on the trains that we are (supposedly - but that's another post) going to take. Result: a few hours spent painstakingly finding villages in the middle of Russia, and an awfully cluttered map, which you can see embedded here but you'd probably be happier to view in a separate window (the link is below).




View Trans-mongolian route in a larger map


Actually, double-nerd that I am, I had to go and do this thing also on a different maps service, Yandex. The great thing about Yandex Maps is that they have much better quality maps of Russia than Google (they must have access to maps that Russia won't give to Uncle Sam), so you can actually see the railway line all the way through the trip. The downside is that a) the map cannot be embedded in the blog as coolly as the GMap above and b) the whole interface is in Russian. But if you want to go do the Trans-Siberian, here's the first tip: you've got to start learning some local language.

So get on with it and check out the Yandex map of the itinerary.