"Dirty"

There isn't a shower on the Trans-Mongolian Express.

I thought I'd wait until now to throw that out there. Unless you have a first class cabin like some kind of loser, there is no shower. No bath, no anything. Well, not quite anything.

There's a toilet.

And in the toilet is a sink.

You may think that a train toilet is quite an unpleasant place to have a wash, and you'd be right. You would also be forgiven for thinking that due to the fact there was only a sink, the train would get a little smelly.

The Chinese Guys who ran the train did a pretty good job of keeping it clean though. They vacuumed the hallways, mopped the toilet floor once in a while and got outside and cleaned the windows every now and then. They are also violently vigilant about the no using the toilet at a station rule. So vigilant that they will come and open the door as the train slows down to shout you along, then lock the toilet for the duration of the stop. Remember that.

So it's been a few days, and it's starting to get hot, and you really, really want to feel like you're a little bit clean. So you take some shower gel and some clean clothes and a towel and you find the least plague-infested looking toilet and lock yourself in. Then you fill the sink with cold water of ambigous origins and start to undress.

You hold your clean clothes while you undress, because you want to be able to put them on top of your dirty clothes - your dirty clothes only getting more dirty as you put them down on whatever tiny surface you can find in the vibrating toilet.

And then you start the rather odd process of cleaning yourself, rocking back and forth, trying to stay on your feet and really, really enjoying the experience.

So there you are. Naked, soapy, hot until the cold water makes contact, trying to get the water building up on the floor down the tiny, hair filled hole in the floor....

And the train starts to slow down.

And you think to yourself - "Next time, I'll check the timetable BEFORE I get undressed".