Ready, set, eat...(posting from the road)

Our train slowly crept over the Mongolian border and then stopped. It seemed like an odd place to stop as there was nothing around us...except for...soldiers hiding in the bushes! Out of the dense scrub bushes Monoglian soldies appeared and crawled around and under our lone carriage...looking for stowaways or bombs…(NB Pete was nervous the entire time…)


After our impromtu search we proceeded a short distance further down the tracks to the Mongolian equivalent of Naushki - Sukhbaatar. Here another thorough search of our cabin was conducted while our passports were heavily scrutinized by a woman who literally looked like she could be a Mongolian Barbie Doll. After getting the official okay we eagerly disembarked the train for a chance to explore this teeny, desolate boarder town.
We are still on the train with no hot water with which to prepare our instant mashed potatoes or noodles, and with the cake a distant memory, our first priority was on food. Across from the station, on what suspect is the main (or only) street we found a "karaoke/pub" sign and eagerly followed it into a small room with a few tables. I am not sure if it was the successful attempt at charades or the desperately thirsty looks on our faces but within seconds we had cold beers in front of us.

Knowing that we cannot be the first tourists to be utilizing this establishment, we requested a picture menu so we could rapidly order something to eat - this is generally a much faster way to get the dish you are looking for and with less than 60 minutes to our train departing...every second counts. Of course I had never used this tactic in Mongolia…the picture menu here was pages of dishes listed in Mongolian Cyrillic letters interspersed with photos of scantily clad women, panda bears and penguins. WTF - who has a picture menu with an endangered animal on it?? So I pulled out my trusty notebook and started sketching. I drew a chicken - the waitress shook her head no. I drew a cow - again and negative nod. I drew a pig - negative. That left...sheep. Since I hate mutton, I decided to try and draw some vegetables...again no.

Frustrated, running short on time and starving we just pointed to random dishes on the menu and decided just to dig in. While we were waiting a Dutch pair of travellers joined us. Side note - that is the neat thing on a trip like this...you get to meet, and occasionally meet up again with other travellers. We had seen the Dutch couple when we were at Lake Baikal as well, they seemed to be replacing our American trio that we hadn't seen since Moscow.

So while the eight of us patiently waited, watching the clock tick by, the waitress would occasionally emerge to tell us, via charades of course, that a dish was no longer available. She would then point to another line of scribble on the menu. You understand the absurdity of this situation...we are in a desolate Mongolian town desperately trying to eat something, our train will depart and certainly leave us behind and our waitress is trying to tell us that this squiggly dish is not available but we should try this other squiggly dish. WE HAVE NO IDEA - JUST BRING US SOME PLATES OF FOOD - WE WILL NEVER KNOW THE DIFFERENCE is all I can think (maybe I did say a little something). Anyway...IT's ALL MUTTON!

With less than 20 minutes dishes of food start to arrive...and it was fantastic. All eight of us just shoveled it in as fast as we would, threw some Tugriks down on the table and bolted back for the train...only to find it gone.

Panic set in until we realized that it was only gone from where we left it...it had been relocated to a different track in order to be repositioned with another train. So we all hopped down onto the track and ran across a few sets of tracks to clamper onto our carriage just before we set off for Ulannbaatar!