Reality check: Train booking.

Our idea of how the trip would develop, based on the material we read and the people we spoke to, was the following (quite ingenious in our mind).

1. We land in Moscow.
2. We buy our first leg.
3. As soon as we arrive in the next city, we buy the next leg.
4. And so on.

Supposedly, Russians buy their tickets at the last minute, so even buying it the previous day or two days before is good enough.

Well, there's no two ways of saying it: this is a lie. I'm not sure if this is the next generation of Russians or whatever, but they plan ahead, at least in July. It is extremely hard to find train tickets for the train you want, if you're only booking a few days earlier. In fact, after discovering this, we started to plan our whole journey, and we even had troubles finding some tickets for two weeks later.

So plan ahead, people. Russian Railways (RZD) have now an online ticketing system, where you can buy any ticket for Russian trains with a credit card. You can even do this from the sanctity of your own home in Reno, Nevada or Wollongong, New South Wales. As long as you pay, your ticket is in the system, and you can collect it in special booths at major Russian train stations (not necessarily the station where your trip starts). You just have to learn a little bit of Russian, create an account, find the train, choose the seats and pay. Remember that you cannot book more than 45 days in advance.

The only thing is that RZD has no advanced engine (like the one Deutsche Bahn has, for example) offering connections. You can find one at Marshruty, but you have to specify the place where you want to connect. So if you want to try different combinations (to see if there's a cheaper ticket, or if you can break your journey) the work is completely left to you.

The other myth to be busted is that there are always seats available in Platskart (the cheaper carriages). Someone even told us that the Platskartny carriage is the last to be filled up. It might be because of the crisis, but this couldn't be more wrong. Of all our journey, we only managed to get Platskart tickets for two relatively small legs; everything else was full. It is to be said that Platskart is much cheaper than Kupe (less than half the price), so it's quite understandable.

Again, lesson learned: if you want cheaper tickets, plan ahead. This will give you less flexibility, but only nominally. After all, you don't want to be flexibly stuck in some place because you don't find any ticket out of it.

Lastly, every guide says how cool it is to break your Trans-Mongolian journey in Ulan Bator; but nobody tells you that it is nearly impossible to buy tickets from Ulan Bator to Beijing in Russia (apart from Moscow). No Russian train station will sell you tickets that don't start or end in Russia, and most travel agencies don't bother.

We managed to find a travel agency (Baikal Complex) in Irkutsk who would do it. The agency was in the outskirts of the city; after a wonderful 20 minutes of bus ride across town, we found ourselves in the middle of a series of panel buildings, who constitute a neighbourhood on their own. There is only one street, and no street numbers. The numbers are on the buildings. In building 62, apartment 35 (no sign, of course) we found the agency. They offered us tea and proceeded to contact their partners in Ulan Bator, who managed to get us the two last tickets (phew!) of the UB-Beijing train on the day we needed.

So, have I mentioned it already? plan ahead.