Hmm, suddenly a major flaw in an otherwise seamless journey!

Monday 27th September

Not had the best news in the world today!  Upon speaking to a few of the other travellers in the area, it appears that the visa on entry option for Mongolia has been stopped for the foreseeable future.  Not what we wanted to hear as we are leaving tomorrow evening to go there, so as soon as we arrived in Irkusk today we headed straight to the embassy, only to be told that they were not taking any more visa applications today and we were to return in the morning.  They also informed us that because it was such an urgent visa request it would be 6200 rubbles per applicant so about £450 in total, Unfortunately we have no choice but to do it, however I just wish someone may have mentioned this earlier on. We also hadn't received our formal invite from our tour operator until yesterday so we couldn't have got it anyway. 

Nevermind, if all goes well in the morning then we should at least ibe able to continue our journey, the other alternative is to be stuck in Irkusk for a few more days and the head straight to Beijing. 

Irkusk has a large student campus with 3600 different colleges in or around the area and it seems that the miniskirt has just come into fashion over here. I could certainly think of worse places to be stuck but not sure Pauline feels the same.