We have spent the whole of Saturday trying to organise a way of getting home, having been guided by our hero Dave to UB, getting out of the place is proving more difficult than we imagined. We have spent hours on the internet and running around and all over the city. We had originally planned to go by train to Beijing and fly from there.Hmmm. The train runs 4 times a week and there is not a single seat available this month.
Our only option to get there are to take a local train (13 hours) or a minibus to the Mongol border town. taxi to the border. cross border, taxi to nearest chinese town Erleen, then a 23 hour bus journey to Beijing. Great. The reservation I have with this route is that the bus is on a first come first served basis and there is no guarentee you may even get a seat. I dread the though of being stranded in some chinese border town for days. The only other option is get a minibus back to the russian border (5 hours). cross, then onto Ulan Ude to catch a train.
We have been looking at flights from all major russian cities and their is one company flying 737's via Kaliningrad who are quoting £125 one way from Samara on Sunday 19th and £200 from Omsk. Another is quoting £360 from Krasnoyarsk via St Petersburg. The advantage of this is there are many trains going east to west in Russia and and even if meant staying on for 4 days to Moscow their are tons of flights for around £150 - £200.
We did not realize how cut off UB really is, only a couple of airlines sold out months in advance and not a train ticket to be had. At least this way we are guarenteed to be moving in the right direction and can get home. The hotel receptionist helped us today to find a way out, there are 2 seats reserved by russians that may be available at 5 towards Irkutsk, there is nothing towards China. We are off shortly in she hope of getting out this evening.
