Shake with holy trembling!

We're still in Beijing, stuck here because it's a Chinese national holiday and everyone suddenly wants to go absolutely everywhere on the trains. Oh, the pain and sorrow of being stuck in Beijing! Not. Last night we went to Houhai Lake, in the middle of Beijing, surrounded by willow trees and colourful little bars, and celebrated with the locals. I have a headache now. When I tried to go online last night they told me "The Internet is full". Hmm, what domains shall we delete to free up some space?

I can't be arsed to write about Irkutsk. It wasn't very interesting. We went to a supermarket. I got glared at – actually glared at – by every female I passed on the street. (It made me feel sort of smug, actually. Irkutsk should be the next goth holiday destination. In Western Europe subcultural people try and try to be subversive and rebellious, but it's no big deal to have weird hair or scary boots any more. But in Irkutsk people seemed genuinely shocked.) The flat we were staying in was a bit like the sink estate in Lilya 4-Ever. There were four massive locks on the front door; Galina, the woman who ran it, had to teach us all individually how to let ourselves in. And I cleaned up at poker with Pablo, Andrew and Joe in the apartment, winning the pot every time. This has never happened to me since the time Jo and I won enough money to pay the gas bill playing with Chris and his mates years ago, and probably never will again.

Instead of trying to describe the town, here's some text from a guide to Lake Baikal I found in several pieces in the apartment there:

( The world is wonderful! )

So that's you told, then.

By the way, here's Ivan's perspective on the trip

I'm a Backpacker, Get Me Out of Here!

or, Fear and Loathing on the Trans-Mongolian Railway (September 18th)

I was going to friends-lock this one because it contains a pretty comprehensive character assassination. Then I decided I couldn't be arsed. But before I get to that, I need some input.

Everyone we meet on this trip, everyone, assumes Ivan is my boyfriend, not my brother. They think it's a bit weird to be travelling with a sibling. "Are you sweetie lovers?" we were asked by a little Chinese girl on the street. Ew! No! Stoppit! I'm starting to think I should have a T-shirt made saying "NO, HE'S MY BROTHER" in English, Chinese and Japanese, so as not to entirely scupper his chances of pulling.

They assume this, it seems, because we get on. Tamara and Natalie on the train trip you're about to read about said they thought we were a couple because brothers and sisters are supposed to fight and tease each other. Really? Okay, I used to inflict horrible violence on him when I was eight and he was four, but I'm nearly thirty, for christ's sake. So I was wondering:

[Poll #579791]

Anyway, back to the travel journal. It hasn't been such a good story so far because it hasn't had much conflict in it. By God is that about to change...

7am. Board train at Irkutsk. Been up since five, didn't get to sleep till two due to poker-playing hijinks. Dying to fall asleep in our cabin, except whoops, there are four of us (me and Ivan, another Tamara - this one is an epidemiologist from Ecuador - and Natalie, the Australian girl we met in the hotel in Moscow), and two Mongolian men are sleeping the sleep of the dead in our four-bed cabin. The air is fetid. I can smell their feet. We crowd into the bottom of the cabin, compare tickets, and try to wake them up so we can see what tickets they have. They snore away. We turn the lights on and poke them in the arms. They keep snoring, cartoonishly, the way you do when you're a kid and you're pretending to be asleep. I think with a sinking feeling that we've been double-booked and I'll have to spend tonight sitting up on half a bunk. Down the hall an English couple are pointing out that they paid for a whole cabin to themselves, so why is there a family and twenty boxes of stuff in it? Finally the provodnik comes along, and doesn't even need to look at our tickets. From her tiny body she unleashes a shockingly ear-splitting torrent of fury at the two men and in split-seconds they're down from the bunks like eels and running for it down the corridor. It looks like she's had trouble with them before. Stowaways?

We air the cabin out and settle down for a few more hours' sleep. The family in the next cabin are moving their stuff out bit by bit and stacking it up at the end of the carriage. I don't know how long it takes them altogether because shortly I'm sleeping like the dead myself.

( six and a half hours of hell at the border )