I have been back in Ulaanbaatar a few days now, and really had such an amazing time on my 2 week tour of Mongolia, so a run down of what we did....... day 1- got up at 6am as we had 260km to travel for the day, going south into the gobi. I am in a group with 2 american guys, a french couple, 2 dutch guys and tom and myself. We didn't have time to do very much else that day, though we did visit the remains of a 17th buddhist temple called baga gazaryn, walked for...

Tomsk was a really nice place to visit........and we had our first sighting of snow. It lasted about 20 minutes and didn't settle! So on par with English snow at the moment. We walked alot around Tomsk as it was very pretty, in particular one of the parks with memorials to WW2 and looks out over the river Tom. From there we caught another train (something like 30 hours on this one) to Irkutsk. Stayed there for a few nights, though there is not actually that much...