Dear god please don't let me end up in Russia

I trudged the 1.5 miles from the hostel to the train station with all of my belongings, sweating in the stagnant evening air. Having saved two whole dollars in taxi fare, I patted myself on the back, bought a Snickers bar, and plopped down on a bench facing the railway. I was catching a train to Orkhon, a tiny town a just south of Russia, to work on a farm for a few weeks.

At 7:30pm, a bright blue train clanged up to the station, marked entirely in Cyrillic letters that I could not interpret. My ticket showed that the train to Orkhon would depart at 8:30pm, but that didn’t match any of the timetables in the station. Unsure of whether or not this was my train, I held my ticket up to the lady next to me on the bench and silently implored her to help. After searching it for an amount of time that did not inspire much confidence, she pointed to the bright blue train. I smiled in gratitude and climbed into the train car.

If you were wondering what a $13 overnight trans-Siberian train ticket will get you, you have come to the right place. Let me start by pointing out what it does not get you: toilet paper.

My ‘bed’ was formerly two seats and a table that I folded down into a segmented bed, similar to one of those couches with uncomfortably deep cushion cracks. The attendant handed me a musty blanket and a pillow stuffed with rice. Soon, it became clear that I had unknowingly selected the bed closest to the toilet and unofficial smoking section. Fortunately for me, I was gifted an unparalleled ability to sleep anywhere at any time, a trait that earned me the superlative ‘most likely to sleep through college’ in high school. So naturally, I conked right out.

I woke up just after midnight, sensing that the train had not moved for a while. Everyone around me on the train was gone. I sat up, looked out the dirt-speckled window into the night and saw two unmarked buildings at the station. Not having a clue where I was, I checked the map on my phone, only to find that my location had not updated since I left Ulaanbaatar. At this point, a mild panic set in as I grappled with my situation: I had no idea where I was in Mongolia, there was no route information onboard, station names were either obscured or unintelligible to me, and my ability to speak fluent Mongolian had not developed as quickly as I would have liked. To make matters more concerning, I was on a trans-Siberian train and Russia was just a few stops past Orkhon. I thought to myself, dear god please don’t let me end up in Russia.

Trying to remain calm, I assessed the two pieces of information I had: I knew that Orkhon was two stops past Darkhan and that the arrival time in Orkhon was listed as 4:22am on my ticket. Plan A was to figure out which stop was Darkhan, the second biggest city in Mongolia. Easy enough, right? Wrong. I spent the remaining four hours of the journey with a tinge of anxiety in my stomach, watching a whole lot of black nothingness pass under a pale crescent moon. Somewhere along the way, Darkhan had slipped past without me knowing. I turned to Plan B:  trust entirely in the ticket’s listed arrival time and get off the train at 4:22am.

A few minutes before the purported arrival time, I sat up on my rickety bed and looked out of the window. The sky had lightened just enough to show mountain silhouettes and a faded sprinkle of stars. I also saw my face in the reflection, illuminated by the bathroom light. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the situation I had found myself in. I prepared myself for the moments to come, crafting Plan C’s and D’s should I not find my way to the farm.

The train slowed, groaning in protest, and I gathered my backpack. I leapt out of the train and landed on grass, not quite what I had expected at a train station. The train attendant darted his flashlight to the left, still the only light at this early hour, and I followed without question. To my complete relief, two other farm volunteers spotted me – clearly the only passenger not from here – and ushered me towards the car. As we drove along a dirt road away from the train, I was unknowingly moving from one obstacle to the next: living on a Mongolian farm.