Unbeknown to us who were sleeping soundly, we leave Mongolia by travelling through the Gobi Desert, now in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia. After a breakfast in the restaurant car of omeletee and tea (no vodka, I'm afraid!) we notice the scenery gradually changing to green hills and valleys. We stop suddenly at a tiny township called Jining where we glimpsed our first view of The Great Wall of China. This was just so unexpected for those of us who weren't reading our Travel Guides - we had about 15 minutes notice and there "it" was .... JUST GREAT!

Of course, not being fully briefed we didn't know that the Wall stretches 7200km from the Bo Sea (God knows where that is) to the Gobi Desert in the east -- and here we were at the beginning of the Wall. According to my guide which I now have in front my me in Sydney the "original" wall was build by Emperor Shihuang (221-207BC) to keep out the marauding nomads of the north. Pretty much the route that our train was taking into Beijing.

From Jining the terrain became increasingly mountainous and the scenery quite dramatic. We were kept busy rushing from window-to-window to get the best view - eventually we managed to get the "Steward in Charge" to open as many windows as he could .... according to all our information this was very unusual.

At one stage the train acquired a banking engine to help it travel up, up, up through the next stage which was a series of tunnels cutting through the mountains.

This photo gives you an idea of the landscape and a view of Wall as it travels across the landscape.

This is a pic of the Banking Engine which pushes the Trans Mongolian through 30km of mountainous terrain and numerous tunnels.

You've got to be impressed that I actually took a photo of this phenomenon!

While I'm at it, I thought I would include a pic of the original "phenomenon" - OUR first locomotive on the TransSib.

This pic is a bit late in the narrative - you're lucky I've included it as the train wasn't travelling around a corner at the time.