DAY ONE: ULAANBAATAR

Today we woke up to with the sun shining through our 1970's beige curtains as we lay still in our creaky beds. It was a humid day and I imagine the rest of the trip will be just as humid.

Here is a picture of our tiny room and bikes!

We adventured off for an early morning walk and ended up perusing the vodka aisle in the local supermarket. Lots of VODKA! We are yet to sample. We headed back to the hostel to share a lovely dry bread breakfast of funny textured butter and jam with a french man. Once the french man figured out  we were Australian he quite elegantly bounced around the room like a kangaroo.

After breakfast we set off to find Immigration to extend our visas, we took the number 11 bus from outside some hotel and headed back towards the airport. The local bus was the usual central Asia experience, crowded and hot. The ticket lady was funky as shit and we were pretty amazed by her mad skills to maintain balance, take money and walk around the bus whilst wearing mega wedges... on the way home we took a different bus and realised the wedges are part of the uniform for these ticket ladies.

We headed out into the outskirts of UB and ended up here.....

Getting our Visas was pretty straight forward and we are now all good to stay a few extra days without any issue. It costs about $2 US each day after 30 days which we thought was a pretty good deal.

Getting back to the city was fun and here is Courtney waiting patiently the Bus Stop.

We finally did a bit of sight seeing this afternoon around UB.

We found some Indie Bikes...

Nearly died crossing the road! a few times 

Checked out where the locals live 

Hung out with Chinngis Khan and associated wedding parties 

and finally....... 

Consumed Mongolian Cheeseslaw!!!!!! 

Heading out to Terij National Park tomorrow and then hopefully the Gobi for a week as Courtney's arm is still broken :( 

Visas

Warning: This may not actually be very interesting if you are not battling your way through this process.


Mongolia

Easy, Printed out a form online, made up an imaginary itinerary, completed form and went to post office to send passport, Itinerary and money order to Canberra.  Came back in about 7 working days

Cost: $150

UPDATE 30/6/14:

This morning we went on a visa extension adventure.  We caught the number 11 bus from near the Bayangan Hotel south towards the airport.  A couple of kilometres before the airport there is a big red and silver spaceship looking building.  Get off the bus here and go to the small blue and white building next to it.

We paid 1000T for the form, filled this out, paid 300 T for a copy of passport and visa, wrote a letter explaining what we wanted, went to the tourist desk, got told to go across the hallway to the bank, paid 30900T for an 8 day extension, lined up at the tourist counter again and received our stamps.  We caught the bus back for a measly 300T and were back in town by lunch time.  It was a surprisingly stress free affair, the worst part was the bus ride.  The person at the tourist counter was quite friendly and spoke good english.  There were also a lot of tourists at the office fumbling their way through together.


Russia

So far have applied for a LOI for a double entry 3 month business visa from waytorussia.net

We will see how it goes.

Cost: LOI $140

UPDATE: 28/5/14

I got my LOI last week and sent everything off to the Russian embassy including money order for $240, the application form, the LOI and my passport. My passport and money order and everything else was promptly returned to me today with a note saying I didn't put the right name on the money order and I needed to include a ticket of my flight out of Russia. No where on the website or on any blogs or information websites that I read say anything about needing a flight.  I had a quick go at forging an electronic ticket but decided it was too hard. I ended up purchasing a cheap flight from Moscow to London for $AUD50. Add in another trip to the post office, extra $9 for the new money order plus 2 registered post envelopes.  What a mess. Hopefully this one works otherwise I will have to figure out how to get out of Mongolia without going through Russia.

UPDATE 30/6/14:

A couple of days after I broke my arm I received my second rejection letter from the Russians, apparently they wanted an original copy of my LOI.  After spending a few hours trying to figure out what to do I decided to cut my losses, forgot about going through Russia and decided to fly directly to Tajikstan.  I have bought a flight from UB to Dushanbe which includes a 12 hour (!!) layover in Moscow airport, should be fun times.  I fly out of Mongolia on the same day as Eliza.

Tajikstan:

I am going to get a 30 days tourist visa on entry at the airport.  I intend on trying to get an extension.