Right, this is highly irregular, but the last train journey was outrageous I just had to write something about it.

Firstly, we have arrived in Ulan Bator safe and sound. We have a couple of days here to potter about before heading out on our week long expedition through the Gobi Desert. The hostel seems excellent, and has a bit of atmosphere a couple of the Russian ones were lacking.

Now, we left Irkutsk at 05:00 yesterday morning. A pretty uncivilised time in anyone's book and the only civilised thing for us to do at that time would be to stumble, bleary eyed onto the train, throw our bags down, and pass out for a few more hours sleep.

Sadly, this wasn't to be.

We entered our compartment on the train to find a mannequin on one bed, and with various good sprawled on the rest of them. After some confused discussions (pointing and making shrugging motions towards all of the tat everywhere), the train stewardess cleared our allocated beds by piling the junk into the corridor to allow us to get into bed. I should point out that we got off very lightly with things in our room. Two Dutch girls we met tried to walk into their room but were confronted by boxes. Floor to ceiling. Hundreds and hundreds of boxes. I didn't envy their chances of a nights sleep.

However, this didn't concern us at the moment. Finally, we could get some sleep.

We clambered into bed and started to doze off until suddenly the compartment door was thrown open and a torrent of Mongolian women barged in with bags and boxes of food, cash, toilet seats and any other imaginable goods. Now, I was expecting a bit of coming and going when sharing a room, but to have half of Mongolia's female population in our room was a bit much. As we started to wake up, we realised what was going on. These women were frantically shoving all of this stuff into any nook and cranny they could find! Upon filling their allocated space for the bed they had paid for, they started eyeing up our spaces. Through shouts of "No" and arm waving we managed to put them off enough for them to leave and storm a neighbouring compartment.

By this point, I was curious as to what was going on out in the corridor as the noise had raised from a gentle bustling, to what I can only describe as what it must sound like if you put tin cans in a washing machine. I stepped out into the corridor (narrowly avoiding a collision with a flying Mongolian) to see boxes and boxes being emptied in the corridor, boxes being flattened, every compartment being filled with whatever was in the boxes, as well as carpets being pulled up and trap doors being opened. All of this was supervised by the train stewardess.

As the commotion continued, it became more and more apparent the scale of what was going on. Firstly, the team of smugglers (there was no doubt about this now) had booked up a bed in every room so they had a legitimate reason to have everything spread out. Obviously this was to reduce their liability, while if one of them got caught, it would only be that compartments stash that was taken.

Also, money was openly changing hands. At first, we just thought the stewardess was involved. But then after a few unscheduled stops to load and unload various goods we could see that the whole train must have been paid off. This clearly continued into border control with officials laughing at compartments full of boxes and waving through any goods they seemed to see.

Finally, as we entered into Mongolia and money started changing hands between the smugglers (they had obviously earnt their pay) the vodka started flowing and the songs started being sung.

The compartment door kept opening throughout the night, but it didn't matter by this point - we were home free! We were just glad we hadn't been framed for the importation of 5000 packets of crab sticks and boxes of salami (these were what we eventually had stored in our room).

All in all, it was an eventful journey and one we certainly wont forget. We've picked up some tips for if we need a change in career as the money seems pretty good!

It's been quite a journey into Mongolia. I just hope that the rest of this country is as exciting as it's been so far.