Welcome back to the Trans-Mongolian Railway! Again, I am finding it difficult to discern one day from another on this epic three and a half day journey across Russia to Irkutsk, Siberia and then onto the small beautiful town of Listvyanka. As before I am going to attempt to describe the events of this journey, in no particular order, not because I'm going for some crazy new writing style, but because when you get caught in the wave of crossing five different time zones via a train journey you become so scattered that you simply can't remember.

I shared the cabin on this journey with three single guys, Paul from Scotland, Andy from Hong Kong/Brisbane and Colin from Texas. Probably the most memorable event of the tree days was our game of three Kings. A drinking game where by you put all the cards around a cup in the centre and every card has a different rule. The jack card, is the make a rule card. Some of our rules included, no pronouncing the letter 'D', you must say In my pants after every sentence and no using your left hand.

Towards the end of the last game, Linda a girl in the last carriage from Finland came to join us, I'm sure she thought we were all quite mad.

Killer Bunnies the strange, but brutal Belgian game we used to play on the truck in Africa finally made an appearance, vendettas were formed. Mostly, against me who at one point managed to have six live bunnies, all the special cards and the best weapons including the Nuke.

At the station before Novosibirisk (New Siberia in Russian) they had parked off to one side one of the original steam engines from the first Trans-Siberian Railway complete with its big red communist star on the front. Me and the guys had a great time posing with it, I even climbed up to just in front of the cabin. Teddy also had a photo with the old steamer.

I advised the group to try to adjust to Irkutsk time as soon as possible, this of course mean going to bed really early and getting up really early and I you've just read about our drinking game, I'm sure yo can guess how many times that actually happened. Even on the last night I ended up in the dining car drinking with Andy, Linda and Colin until about midnight local time.

Andy and I ended up in another cabin, playing the original game of Chinese whispers with two men, one Chinese and the other Russian. Andy can speak Mandarin, so every time the Russian guy wanted to talk to me, he had to relate it to the Chinese guy, who also spoke Russian, who related it to Andy in Mandarin, who then relayed it to me in English. The Russian guy was showing me his photos of his trip to India and Nepal, very interesting as most Russians usually only travel to resorts with swimming pools. They also had whiskey, and I had Pepsi so that was very handy.

Our next door neighbor was a man from Azerbaijan, who I named Eddie, because he told us his name was so many different things starting with the letter 'E' I just couldn't keep up. He was so friendly, but he didn't speak a word of English, which I wouldn't expect. He bought us all beer, partly I think so he could sit in our cabin and have someone to drink with. I went and sat in his cabin for a while and communicated with him in my limited Russian, which come to think of it, isn't really that limited anymore. I even learned some new words. He kept telling me how beautiful Baku is, I think Azerbaijan has made my top ten must travel list. I've met two really friendly people from there now.

Our meals started out pretty good on this trip, then slowly progressed from canned span sandwiches to the dreaded two minute noodles. Andy and I got super excited upon finding cooked chicken at Novosibirisk in the dead of night, which I then had on sandwiches the next day.

On the subject of food also, Andy had bought a tin of horse meat at the supermarket in Moscow and was determined to eat it on the train/make me eat it on the train. None of us wanted him to open it in the cabin, so at the opportune moment Colin (with me as an accomplice) pinched the can out of Andy's food bag and hid the horse meat in a safe place. Andy was not amused, especially when he found the can of horse meat in his jacket pocket when we finally got off in Irkutsk. I love my tour.