I was up by mid morning on 16th August, just in time for the train to stop at Ulan Ude. I staggered off the train in shorts and sandals, not realising that the temperature had dropped significantly. I was freezing! The platform was full of blue-eyed Russians, which was quite a culture shock after 4 months in China and South East Asia.

During the 15 minutes that the train was stopped, a lot of trade went on between the Chinese on the train and the Russians on the platform. Amongst the advice that I had been given about the Trans Siberian was what goods to buy in Beijing to then sell at a considerable profit in the USSR. However I hadn’t followed that bit of advice.

A new Russian restaurant car was attached at Ulan Ude. Unfortunately it had to operate (for some odd reason) on Moscow time, and therefore didn’t open until 11 am, by which time we were all starving.

Giuseppe, Charlotte, Alison and I headed down there, but service was slow. There was an elegantly dressed and grumpy Russian waiter who we soon named “Ivan the Terrible”. The only thing he brought fairly quickly (as Giuseppe discovered) was beer.

In the early afternoon someone yelled that we’d reached the coast. This was clearly impossible right in the centre of Asia, and it turned out we were starting to follow the shore of the world’s deepest (and largest) fresh water lake – Lake Baikal.

Apparently Baikal contains nearly 25% of the world surface fresh water. It was almost too wide to see the opposite side, being nearly 50 km across.

Lake Baikal was a beautiful deep blue colour, and we followed its shores for most of the afternoon.

After a stop at Irkutsk, we played a “silly game” – I managed to get Alison, Charlotte, Giuseppe and 3 Germans to play “Cardless Pig” – a game that I’d originally played with a group of university friends in the English Lake District. In theory it’s a card game where cards are passed around until one person gets 3 the same, at which point they put a finger on their nose. Everyone else then has to immediately put their finger on their nose, and the slowest person to react loses a life.

The thing is that cards aren’t really necessary – so long as someone puts their finger on their nose after a suitable time, you can all just mime that you are passing cards and looking at them. The skill is in the reflexes. A person who is consistently slow, and loses 3 lives, has to then perform a “forfeit” – some silly activity which is thought up by the other players.

Needless to say, the real fun is in the forfeits! In our case, one of the Germans ended up having to open the train window when we next went past some houses, and yell at the top of his voice “I love Russian women!!!!”. And poor Giuseppe, the Italian journalist, had to put a sheet over his head with his glasses outside the sheet, going up and down the corridor pretending to be a ghost, saying “wooooooooo…. woooooooooo!” to the bemused Chinese passengers…

Later we heard that the party that evening was going to be in carriage 9, so we duly trotted down there, suitably equipped with alcoholic refreshments.