It took ten hours at the border yesterday, and the custms official were only going to allow the red car (but all six people) through, but MASSIVE THANKS to DAN WEDGEWOOD at Adventurists for calling the border after it had shut and sorting it all out.
We arrived Sunday night when it was closed, camped that night in the queue and entered the Russian controls at 1030. That was fairly straightforward and we got into No Man's Land without any problems.
Entering Mongolia we had to drive through a swine flu vaccination pool thingy and they wanted to make us have jabs. No thanks.
Then we ended up waiting about 5 hours with team Flamingo Go Express for paperwork. There were 5 spanish teams' cars in the parking lot. The appropriate tax forms hadn't been done for them so they were forced to leave the cars and take taxis the 350km to UB. They must have been there a few days. The Mongolian border staff had the keys and were outright stealing things out of the cars - footballs, vodka, sweets, flags, chairs.
At 1800 they came out and said tax had only been paid on 7 of the 8 cars in the parking lot and that the white Corsa had to stay. We'd seen what that meant. I called Dan in UB and he called 'their man at the border'. Strings were pulled and at well-beyond-the-eleventh-hour the officials (who hadn't always been the friendliest, though some of that was our fault) came out begging to be our friends.
We all got through, so did the cars and we belted it to UB.
We're researching lfihts, trains and visas for the way home. When we've done that we'll turn the cars in or possibly go out west or to the Gobi to have a look around.
Mongolia is stunning. Apart from my phone being stolen, it looks great and the people are lovely. I'd like to spend a week or two here I think, but I'll have to see what the flights home are like. Better internet access now so hopefully can get photos online.