The day was hot but the pint of Chinggis was cold.

We’d traipsed through the dusty edges of Ulaanbaatar’s business district looking for the theatre of a Mongolian throat-singing troupe with little success.

When rain came down hard and fast from across the steppe, making ponds of gargantuan potholes that pockmarked the streets of Mongolia’s capital and interrupting our search, we sheltered under the awnings of the Grand Khaan Irish Pub. We dried out while our beers sweated in the afternoon heat, retracing the steps of a journey that had taken us across Eurasia but still landed us in the familiar trappings of an Irish-themed bar.

Eight days previously, my wife and I arrived in Moscow’s Yaroslavsky station on a balmy Thursday evening in late June, backpacks and nerves in tow. In a corner of the terminal’s waiting area—vaulted ceilings and chipped stucco—a television broadcasted Mario Balotelli dumping Germany out of Euro 2012. I watched, pacing and sitting, waiting for our night train. Married since April, we had planned to celebrate with a grand adventure.

A Camino pilgrimage was quickly ruled out; too strenuous. I’d been in thrall to long-distance rail travel ever since reading Paul Theroux’s misanthropic The Great Railway Bazaar, so we settled on a train journey east: from Moscow through Siberia and the Gobi to Mongolia, Beijing and terminating at Hanoi. Ominously for us newlyweds, Theroux returned from his trip to find his wife shacked up with another man.

Our first stop was little more than a launchpad east, with time enough for a lap of the Kremlin and a burger at the McDonald’s on Red Square. Maybe our cabin-mate on our first three-night train ride cottoned onto our disinterest. A middle-aged woman surrounded by plastic shopping bags filled with tea, smoked meats and fresh fruit, she exuded disappointment at our (to her) incomprehensible inability to speak Russian.

Communication between us and her extended little beyond apologetic shrugs, but we were quite happy indulging ourselves in drawn-out card games and conjuring up nicknames for fellow passengers. Exhilarating shopping raids whenever the train made a stop interrupted the soporific pace of train life. We survived on jumbo-sized crisp packets covered in Cyrillic script and tubs of instant noodles rehydrated by scalding water from the chrome samovar at the end of our carriage.

***

We trundled east, and the train’s confusing rhythm overtook us as the landscape dissolved into unending, evergreen forest. I read and re-read paragraphs, and abandoned any pretext of essaying our journey in my notebook. The Trans-Siberian moved us in space but not time; whatever time zone we travelled into, the train continued to work to Moscow time. I could run my clock by the train timetable pasted to the wall of our carriage, experiencing sunset in the “afternoon”.

““We were in adventure’s grip, existing outside of the tensions of everyday life and determined to wring from it every last drop of excitement.””

Or, I could adjust my routine to the passage of time outside my window, uncoupling myself from the timetable as a reliable chronometer. I did both, or neither, emerging discombobulated three days later from a late afternoon train into the early evening smoggy air of Irkutsk station, traversing several hours in one bound.

Dubbed the “Paris of Siberia”, Theroux was right when he wrote, “missing Irkutsk cannot be everyone’s idea of a tragedy.” Industrial exhaust fumes hung low above disgruntled women perched on stools next to bulbous yellow tanks of street-side kvass. Irkutsk was a stopover, a means of breaking the train’s relentless monotony and facilitating a visit to Europe’s oldest, deepest inland lake—Baikal.

There, at the water’s edge, we marvelled at the unfathomable size of the lake as it stretched into the far horizon, blurring with a deep blue sky at a distant wobbly shimmer. We ogled market shacks infused with the pungent fug of iridescent amber smoked fish with bulging glassy eyes.

A brief passage through smoke-choked Irkutsk was worth this glorious landscape. Suitably awestruck, we returned to our minibus for the journey back, exchanging pleasantries with an elderly Russian man keen to inform us of his renown as a Stalin look-alike.

***

We left Irkutsk and Baikal behind us as our next train wound through sand dunes and dust-swept border posts. Arriving screeching into Ulaanbaatar in the early morning sun, our bleary-eyed senses were jolted awake by the acrid whiff of sloshing plastic tubs spilling their viscous white liquid across the platform.

This was airag, a Mongolian fermented horse milk delicacy and our introduction to the city’s bewildering mix of the traditional and the new, scruffy informal yurt settlements in the shadows of glimmering corporate towers. Our plan was to experience the former (just not airag), and failing in our search for authentic Mongolian throat singers landed us in Ulaanbaatar’s largest Irish bar.

Our enforced stop gave us some time to decompress and, with nowhere to go, ruminate on our whistle-stop journey across half of Eurasia. In the five years before our departure from Moscow, I’d lived through the sudden death of a beloved grandfather and my mother’s yearlong, ruinous and fruitless fight against cervical cancer. I had graduated from university, moved country, and got a job—barreling along, not slowing down for fear that I might never start up again.

We would return from our exhilarating journey to other, grown-up stresses—new jobs, a mortgage, and children. From a seven-year distance, this all sounds maudlin, but at the time we weren’t thinking about this. We were in adventure’s grip, existing outside of the tensions of everyday life and determined to wring from it every last drop of excitement.

***

Leaving Mongolia, our journey’s pattern was set. Train days were interrupted by the dazzling sights of East Asian cities, and interminable, anxious border crossings. Fragments are still suspended crystal clear in my memory.

Our blushing discomfort as we sat and watched waiters at a Beijing hot pot restaurant bring plate after plate of glistening prawns, pink slivers of marinated duck, great big vats of boiling oil—a feast ordered for two but delivered for many because of the lack of a common language.

Wondrous karst mountain ranges trundled past our cabin window as we journeyed southwest towards the Vietnam-China border. Later, my shirt dyed deep blue by the broiling noonday heat of subtropical Hanoi, crawling indoors in search of glorious thirst-slaking mojitos, succulent soft-roasted pork and noodle broth.

There were water puppet shows in Vietnam and gymnastic displays in Beijing. And, when we’d drained our glasses and the sun had dried out the rutted streets of Ulaanbaatar, we eventually found our Mongolian theatre—warbling throat singers and all.

Illustration by Grace Helmer.