In which we board our third and final train, swap bogies (not as disgusting as it sounds) get our first glimpse of the Great Wall and make some decisions about further off-truck travel.
A bit before our train was due to arrive, we spied Christopher (the American) and Corinna (Brit, travelling on her own, keen photographer) who were also taking a break from the truck, in Corinna's case to recover from Pharyngitis: another of the walking wounded from our truck. Seems her condition (initially thought to be bronchitis) had been so bad that a paramedic had to be called for her when the truck got to Irkutsk, from where she got the train to UB arriving a couple of days after us.
The train was (of course) bang on time, and we were delighted to discover that it was our turn to have a compartment to ourselves. After catching up on Chris and Corinna's news, we took the opportunity of not having to share our space to catch up on our sleep, having first arranged with the others to come to our compartment for tea and cake at four o'clock. We spent a very pleasant afternoon just chatting and joking and getting up to speed with all the gossip and goings on before a bit more rest time in readiness for the long border crossing into China that evening.
The train reached the first border promptly at 10 minutes past seven. A first officer boarded to check our passports and customs declarations followed by a second, who very sweetly introduced himself as Mongolian Quarantine and very politely requested that he might be permitted to search our compartment. We, of course, agreed that he may then watched as he quickly and simply lifted first one seat then the other. After that he thanked us and left. That was it. Quite possibly the simplest, lightest touch exit border outside of Europe. Mind you, we still had to wait an hour and half before the train pulled out. Next came the Chinese entry stage of the process, but, if anything, that was even easier. We had one small form to complete (not, remarkably, in triplicate) and return to an officer who really wasn't that bothered and another to check our passports. There was a sticky moment there, though, when the officer took some persuading that the photo in my passport really was of me. [Officer: "This is you?"; Me: "Yes," like I'm going to say anything else!] In the end, I decided to stand up under the fluorescent light and put on my sternest passport-face. She seemed to think that this was very funny, smiled broadly and just said: "Okay," before returning our documents and moving on. Imagine that: a state security officer, not only with a sense of humour, but one who only moments earlier had genuine concerns that I might have been travelling on someone else's papers.
Paperwork done, we had then to wait for another four hours while a process we'd previously experienced when we took the train home from Beijing ten years earlier.
For some reason – probably a defensive military strategy – Russian rail gauge (distance between the rails) is a few inches wider than Stevenson's so called standard gauge, on which 60% of the world's trains run, including those in China. For historical reasons, Mongolia adopted the Russian standard (as did Finland, by the way) and so trains like ours moving between Mongolia and China have to have their wheels (or 'bogies' as they're known) exchanged. This is done by breaking up the train into individual carriages and shunting them into an enormous shed. There, the carriages are lifted up off their wheels by huge hydraulic jacks. The wheels are then rolled out from beneath them and another set, in the the other gauge, rolled back under to replace the first. The carriage is then very gently lowered back down onto its new wheels. Job done. This procedure is performed on all the carriages of the train before reassembling it, which seems to require a lot of very uncomfortable shunting. Hours of it, in fact, and we weren't finally on our way until about one in the morning.
Day 90 (Ulan Bator & on the train)
Very early start this morning together with Adam and Corinne to checkout, get our key deposits back and catch the hostel's own minibus back to the station, the same minibus that was supposed to have collected us when we arrived. Mind you, seeing where it parked this time, we may well have just not seen it before. Driving through pre-rush-hour traffic in UB was a very different experience from coming back after the ger trip, but even though there was only a fraction of the traffic, what drivers there were at that early hour, still had their hands glued to their horns.A bit before our train was due to arrive, we spied Christopher (the American) and Corinna (Brit, travelling on her own, keen photographer) who were also taking a break from the truck, in Corinna's case to recover from Pharyngitis: another of the walking wounded from our truck. Seems her condition (initially thought to be bronchitis) had been so bad that a paramedic had to be called for her when the truck got to Irkutsk, from where she got the train to UB arriving a couple of days after us.
The train was (of course) bang on time, and we were delighted to discover that it was our turn to have a compartment to ourselves. After catching up on Chris and Corinna's news, we took the opportunity of not having to share our space to catch up on our sleep, having first arranged with the others to come to our compartment for tea and cake at four o'clock. We spent a very pleasant afternoon just chatting and joking and getting up to speed with all the gossip and goings on before a bit more rest time in readiness for the long border crossing into China that evening.
The train reached the first border promptly at 10 minutes past seven. A first officer boarded to check our passports and customs declarations followed by a second, who very sweetly introduced himself as Mongolian Quarantine and very politely requested that he might be permitted to search our compartment. We, of course, agreed that he may then watched as he quickly and simply lifted first one seat then the other. After that he thanked us and left. That was it. Quite possibly the simplest, lightest touch exit border outside of Europe. Mind you, we still had to wait an hour and half before the train pulled out. Next came the Chinese entry stage of the process, but, if anything, that was even easier. We had one small form to complete (not, remarkably, in triplicate) and return to an officer who really wasn't that bothered and another to check our passports. There was a sticky moment there, though, when the officer took some persuading that the photo in my passport really was of me. [Officer: "This is you?"; Me: "Yes," like I'm going to say anything else!] In the end, I decided to stand up under the fluorescent light and put on my sternest passport-face. She seemed to think that this was very funny, smiled broadly and just said: "Okay," before returning our documents and moving on. Imagine that: a state security officer, not only with a sense of humour, but one who only moments earlier had genuine concerns that I might have been travelling on someone else's papers.
Paperwork done, we had then to wait for another four hours while a process we'd previously experienced when we took the train home from Beijing ten years earlier.
For some reason – probably a defensive military strategy – Russian rail gauge (distance between the rails) is a few inches wider than Stevenson's so called standard gauge, on which 60% of the world's trains run, including those in China. For historical reasons, Mongolia adopted the Russian standard (as did Finland, by the way) and so trains like ours moving between Mongolia and China have to have their wheels (or 'bogies' as they're known) exchanged. This is done by breaking up the train into individual carriages and shunting them into an enormous shed. There, the carriages are lifted up off their wheels by huge hydraulic jacks. The wheels are then rolled out from beneath them and another set, in the the other gauge, rolled back under to replace the first. The carriage is then very gently lowered back down onto its new wheels. Job done. This procedure is performed on all the carriages of the train before reassembling it, which seems to require a lot of very uncomfortable shunting. Hours of it, in fact, and we weren't finally on our way until about one in the morning.
***
We awoke the next morning to trees again: a welcome sight after the scrubby nothingness of Mongolia's Gobi Desert. After a while, we saw a few buildings: some old, including a few mud and straw brick constructions, and some brand plus everything else in between. Before long, we were seeing agriculture again. Lots and lots of agriculture. In some places, every available bit of land had been turned over to growing some crop or other and everywhere too were bicycles and motorcycles. We also got our first glimpse of Great Wall, running along the foot of a line of high hills before suddenly, for no apparent reason that I could see, turning sharply uphill and disappearing over the ridge.
At one point our route followed along the bottom of a river valley, downstream of a huge dam. As we went, we saw that the river was crisscrossed by very many small footbridges, fords and ferries as well as much larger structures carrying roads and other railway lines, and again, vines, fruit trees and other crops were just stuck in wherever there was room. The river got wider and the sides of valley steeper, and soon we were passing through sections of tunnel as our valley became a gorge.
By lunchtime, we were seeing more and more new buildings, especially towering blocks of apartments, and by early afternoon (dead on schedule again) we pulled in to Beijing Zhandong railway station. We only had to walk across the station forecourt to find our hostel, a huge – relative to what we've been used to – building with hundreds of rooms over five floors. We'd booked a 'deluxe' double (deluxe, in this context, meaning that it had an en suite) and were pleased to find that, for £30 a night, we had a good sized room, with a window (not automatic) and a fair sized wet room, pretty much in the centre of the town, just two kilometres from Tian'anmen Square and the Forbidden City.
There are no money exchange places just on the streets in Beijing like we'd been used to in Central Asia, but the reception staff pointed us in the direction of a nearby tourist hotel that had an automatic exchange machine, which one of the reception staff there was happy to demonstrate for us. We changed some dollars into Yuan (very quick and easy) and, just to be on the safe side, some more in a bank down the road, (an object lesson in China's form-filling fetish at it's finest). This was followed by a further demonstration of state bureaucracy at the Post Office, from where Juli sent some more bits and pieces home. Then back to shower, rest and change before meeting up with the others for a dinner hunt.
Juli lead our small group of train travellers off to find a food court under a large department store she'd read about in a copy of the DK Top Ten Guide to Beijing she'd borrowed from Adam and Corinne on the train. It's huge. In fact it's big and brash and bright and bewildering. The deal is, you 'buy' a sort of credit card, which you then use in one (or more) of the dozen's of small food outlets selling every kind of Asian food you can think of and perhaps some you might not wish to.
Back at the hotel, we had a look to see which of the websites we use to maintain this blog and save photos on, plus which e-mail accounts were working. Turned out that we could get to all our e-mail accounts, Juli could upload to and access her Flickr account, but that I couldn't do the same with Picasa and neither of us could access our blog to either view or edit it. Fortunately, I'd set up a way to post to our blog via e-mail, which is how you can read this even though we can't.
One last thing to round off this post: we decided to book the cruise that Corinne found to avoid having to fly to Australia. However, when we enquired, we found we couldn't book just a section between Bali and Darwin. Also, it was implied that leaving the cruise early would require additional administration and that it would be a while before they could tell us if it was possible at all. In the end, after a lot of deliberation, we decided that we'd leave the truck trip in Singapore, from where the cruise starts a few days after the others catch their ferry to Indonesia, and stay on the ship all the way to Sydney, where the cruise ends.
Unfortunately, this means missing all of Java, most of Bali and all of the stops the group will make in Australia between Darwin and Sydney, including Uluru. However, it also means not having to carry all of our kit through Indonesia and avoiding ten straight days of bush-camping through the fly-infested Red Centre of Australia. Plus, as we get into Sydney a few days earlier than originally planned anyway, we should have plenty of time to back track a bit to see Uluru and still get back to Sydney in time to greet the rest of the group at journey's end.
Next time, I'll tell you all about what we did in Beijing.
TTFN - N
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