Fatduck Travels: Chugga chugga choo choo!

25/26 July 2017

Trip day 7/8

Day 6 Beijing and Day 1 Mongolia

It's train time. I leave Beijing today for Mongolia. Woo!

Packed my bag this morning for the train ride. Everything still fits (yay!) but fits slightly differently as I have some dirty clothes. My packing cells don't quite line up as well as they did when I left but it's good enough.

A last walk around the area to pick up some food for the train ride and then off I go.

Wasn't particularly clear what I had to do to actually gain entry to the train station. I was rescued by a nice local who pointed me to the giant line of security guards checking IDs. I had assumed this was the ticket office and I didn't need to go there because I already had a ticket.

One thing I learnt today: Australians like going to Mongolia.
I sat next to an Australian guy in the waiting room.
A group of maybe 50 Australian scouts came through going to some jamboree in Mongolia.
Some more Australians sat behind me.

Many other westerners on this train as well. I originally sat in the wrong berth (learn to read a train ticket dickhead!) with a couple of English people who were escorting some high school kids through China and Mongolia as part of some sort of a leadership and development program. Interesting stuff. The company pitches a trip to schools and then the kids have to raise all the money for it themselves and run the whole thing. Budget, accommodation, events, food etc... The adults are really only there to step in if things go terribly wrong. I'm sure I would have been too scared to do that in high school but the world is a smaller place now.

Here's the train platform:

The train is really good! It's much nicer than I expected. I thought I had ordered a third class ticket (essentially open bunks in a carriage) but this train doesn't have those. So I'm in a nice second class carriage with 3 girls - 2 Germans and a Frenchwoman who lives in Canada. Nice people who have done a shitload of travel. Here is a shoutout for a couple of blogs they run:
- http://www.embracingthetravelbug.com
- http://www.purelife15.wordpress.com

The cabin is really comfortable and the bench is long enough for me to stretch out! The train is air conditioned and the food in the restaurant car looks pretty good. I'm very impressed so far.

The window of the cabin is like watching a nature documentary. The scenery at the beginning of the trip was really beautiful ... big mountains and rivers. We then moved into a changing landscape of farmland, industrial stuff, more mountains and whatnot. Some lovely views (fields of sunflowers for example), some interesting ones (like the Chinese penchant for building a cluster of half a dozen apartment blocks that look exactly the same in the middle of nowhere) to some boring/dirty ones (industrial type stuff).

Day 1 of the train ride was getting out of China. It's such a huge country! Granted this wasn't a bullet train but it still took us 10 hours to get from Beijing to the border.

The most interesting part of the journey was probably the track changeover between China and Mongolia. They use different track sizes between the 2 countries which means all the carriages have to be changed over from one size to the other at the border crossing.

So we get to the border and the Chinese military come onboard and grab everyone's passports to do whatever they do with them. The army guy was dressed impeccably in his dress uniform and was very polite.

After they take the passports the train gets moved to a different section of the railyard for the changeover to happen. The changeover process takes about 3-4 hours. During that 3-4 hours they cannot run the air conditioning or toilets in the train so you're essentially stuck in this hotbox in the middle of the night while they do the change.

The process is pretty simple but it takes a long time:
1. Separate the carriages
2. Line them up with the hydraulic lifts.
3. Detach the wheel bit from the carriage bit.
4. Lift the carriage with the lifts.
5. Put the new wheel bit under the carriage.
6. Drop the carriage onto the new wheel bit and re-attach it.
7. Join the carriages up again.

Apparently the process of detaching and lifting the carriage is quite noisy and shaky for those inside the carriage. I slept through the whole thing so I can't really comment on it :)

Fascinating process but I can't help but think there has to be a better way to achieve this than lifting up every carriage and changing the wheels over every time a train goes between China and Mongolia.

Eventually everyone tries to get some sleep then we get moved back to the train station and the Chinese army comes back onboard and wakes everyone up to individually hand passports back.

You feel quite vulnerable during this whole process. Someone comes on board and takes your passport, locks you in the train carriage, then drives the carriage off somewhere. It'd be easy to make a trainload of passengers disappear. Thankfully there is probably too much paperwork in China for that to ever happen.

So then we leave China and cross over into Mongolia where they stop the train again and this time the Mongolian army comes on board and takes everyone's passports. The Mongolian army woman was scary! She came on in her camo gear with a very stern demeanour ... quite terrifying to wake up to in the middle of the night.

A couple of hours later (at least the aircon was going this time!) we get our passports
back and continue on our merry way.

This whole time the toilets were offline and I was busting for a piss. There was some pacing happening. Builds character I guess.

Woke up pretty early the next morning to see the Mongolian scenery passing by. We were travelling through the edge of the Gobi desert at that point so it was sand and hills. Stark but beautiful in its way.

One of the other things that happens during the changeover is they change the dining car from a Chinese car to a Mongolian car. What a difference! The Chinese car is a simple car with tables and chairs. The Mongolian one has big carved wooden walls and chairs. Very impressive! Wish I'd gotten a photo.

The day rolled on. We made a couple of brief stops at Mongolian stations to pick up or drop off passengers.

The scenery slowly changed from desert to plains to rolling grassland and hills. It's a spectacular country with amazing scenery. And you can see so far! There is the odd hill or mountain but it's mostly just rolling grassland as far as the eye can see in as many shades of green as you can think of. Great country if you love the outdoors and long road trips.

Eventually we arrived in Ulaanbator about an hour behind schedule.

There are a lot of private citizens who act as unofficial taxi drivers here but apparently they can try to cheat you a lot. So I decided to get the bus into the city since my hotel was very central.

However - dickhead that I am - I had looked up how to get the bus to the city from the airport not the train station. One of the girls had a Lonely Planet guidebook that listed the bus I needed to get which was great - but that bus did not pass once in the half hour I was looking for it. Eventually I tried to ask a few locals how to get into the city but they didn't speak any English obviously. Eventually I hit on a magic word and a lovely old lady pushed me onto a bus that got me to the city in the end (despite the driver indicating it did not go in that direction - dick).

Checked into the hotel, went for a walk, had a couple of beers at the local microbrewery (they were OK - a Pilsner and a dark Pilsner were all they had on) then headed back to the hotel.