Who should turn up in my carriage on the train from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing but Ludwig, who left DB the same day as me, also to spend a year travelling - what are the chances?! Mel, Pav, Tom and I were hanging out in the ornately-designed Mongolian restaurant car with Ludwig and his friend Bjorn from Norway. At Sain Chand station (about eight hours after we left UB) we were joined by Killian and Aoife. We had great craic and got through a lot of beer... which made the Mongolia/China border crossings that night more amusing - first Tom was interrogated by a Mongolian visa official because he has a beard in his passport photo and doesn't have one now (it wasn't easy to take her seriously - she was wearing knee-high boots and a huge hat), then the Chinese customs officials made me empty my entire rucksack and they went through everything, they even took all the medications out of their boxes and they were perplexed by my three months' worth of contact lenses - there were about ten of them gathered around staring at them! They seemed more curious than concerned, they were looking at all my guidebooks and "oohing" and "aahing" at where I was going to next.

At the border the Mongolian restaurant car was switched for a Chinese one, which was very plainly designed by comparison but had a yummy pork and green pepper dish (despite a long menu they only served two dishes).

We passed through the Gobi Desert as we headed south through Mongolia, it is very pale and sparse. The landscape as we moved into China was stunning and not what I expected (I don't know what I had imagined it would look like but I was surprised anyway), it looked almost Mediterranean/Italian, orange mountains with loads of rich vegetation and cliffs that dipped down into wide rivers in places. We saw bits of the Great Wall from far away. As we approached Beijing I was surprised by how much greenery there was.

All the other guys were hanging round in Beijing for a few days to a week but I just had a few hours before my train on to Shanghai (I'm coming back to Beijing in a week's time to see it properly). What I saw in that short time I loved - it didn't fit my preconceived idea of Beijing (allegedly breathing Beijing air is equivalent of smoking 70 cigarettes a day!) - in reality it was beautiful, clean, spacious and relaxed with impressive buildings and lots of green areas. A couple of preconceptions that did ring true though were weird food (we saw scorpions on a stick at one street stall) and people hocking and spitting everywhere, which seemed quite disgusting to me because I'm not used to it.

I hung out with Killian and Aoife until I had to go for my train - it was hot and sunny, we were all enjoying the warmer weather We had some yummy noodles and then drank coconut water fresh from the coconuts and ate some weird sugar-coated grapes. Actually, Beijing was so nice that it seemed too good to be true - I left wondering whether there is a darker side to the city that I hadn't seen yet...