(please back date to 2/9/13)
It’s begun! A dream that I have had for years is now finally being realized. My biggest fears of sleeping through my alarm or going to the wrong train station have all been averted. I am now writing from my compartment aboard K23, the Beijing to Ulaanbaatar Express. I have a second class ticket which means I am assigned to a compartment with four beds (two rows of bunkbeds) separated by a small table. The compartment has some storage space underneath the bottom bunks like toy chests (or coffin racks on navy ships) and the compartment has a sliding door to shut itself out from the passageway. There are plenty of clean windows offering wonderful views of the countryside and even electrical outlets in each compartment (but I can’t use them - American outlets run on a different voltage then either China, Mongolia, or Russia and my Chinese voltage converter won’t fit in the Mongolian socket types of the train). I’m the only passenger in my compartment so I’m free to spread out and take over the table which is awesome. But actually there are very few people on board the train at all. I took a walk down the length of the train (I’m in carriage 2, the dining car is all the way in 13...) and in each car, maybe only a third of the compartments are occupied and almost none of the compartments are full. I don’t have access to the 3rd class cars but the 1st and 2nd class cars are basically the same except each compartment is either filled with two or four beds.
I haven’t seen many travelers. Most of the passengers are Mongolians, probably going home. But the compartment next to me is a group of four Australians, two guys, Jarrad and Sven, and two girls, Claire and Emilja, from Adelaide and Tasmania, all schoolmates but now working and taking some time off to take the trans-siberian through Russia and travel around Scandinavia a bit before returning home (to warm, summery Australia). They (and an elderly couple in first class) are the only foreigners I’ve encountered so far and I am happy to have them in the compartment next to mine for the company. Besides, Aussies are usually a fun crowd.
On my walk I found the dining car. My plan is to graze on food lightly today and tomorrow and get one meal this evening in the dining car. Meals here are usually good, a set menu, but can be expensive. So one meal a day is probably okay.
It’s pretty quiet right now and the scenery is not too exciting, just normal, industrial China. I can hear the Aussies next door playing a game of cars and listening on low volume from an iphone the smooth musings of Bon Iver (an American folk favorite of mine) and a few compartments down a Mongolian man has shut his windows, turned off the lights (but kept his door open so I could see) and is watching some Chinese television program on an imbedded TV. I can hear it from here.
We hit the border tonight around 8 PM in the small border town of Er Lian (二连). The customs process and border stamping takes about two hours to complete but what takes the longest here is the changing of the train’s undercarriage. The tracks in Mongolia and Russia are a different width than the tracks in China so the train has to be lifted off the tracks at the border and outfitted with new wheels. I’m excited to observe this...
The provodnistas (cabin attendants) are Mongolian and the train is Mongolian. Every sign is written in English and Cyrillic (or just Cyrillic). I even tried to ask something to the provodnista in Chinese and got no response. I think I’m done with Chinese. I received a better response when I used English so I think I’ve made the switch officially now. When I first walked to the track that had the train waiting below the waiting platform, there were so few people that I was able to take my time and take photos of the train from the outside. I then approached the provodnista who checked my ticket and personally led me to my compartment. But the compartment number didn’t match the one on my ticket. She left me and took my ticket with her. I was confused so I walked back out to the provodnista and asked her, “Ni keyi gei wo piao ma, wo de huoche piao? (你可以给我票吗，我的火车票?) Can you give me my ticket back? Wo yao kan yixia. (我要看一下) I want to have a look.” She looked at me with a funny face and said, “ticketo?” or ticket in Mongolian I guess. I nodded and then she said, “Nnnnnno.” So I just took the compartment she gave me. I talked to Jarrad, one of the Aussie guys and he said she did the same to them. I think she just puts people in whichever compartments she chooses. Works for me.
I spent much of the day lounging in my private compartment, reading through my travel guides on Mongolia. In the early evening, I and three of the Aussies decided to go to the dining car for some dinner and a beer. The menu was surprisingly varied. The two Aussie guys ordered the crispy chicken while I ordered the sweet and sour pork dish with rice. We all got a beer, PBR, as it turned out. We swapped travel stories over dinner and after we had finished lounging a bit, decided to wobble our way back through the 11 shaky train cars back to our compartments. But before we did, I turned to take a few photos of the dining car. I raised the camera to my eye when one of the Mongolian food attendants came up to waving his hands saying, “No! No!” like I was an infant about to touch something hot. I was a bit off my guard but quickly realized he was going to be in the picture, if I had taken it. Realizing he may have not wanted to be in the photo, I apologized and asked him if I could take a photo of the dining car without him in it and he said yes. I was still taken aback a bit. I didn’t really think about his being collateral damage to my photos. But I’m glad I know now. I have heard that some cultures really don’t like to be in photos for various reasons. And I’ve been in China so long (and they don’t give a hoot what you take photos of) that I’d forgotten that I have to be sensitive to the new cultures that I will soon be encountering. Good to know. I will be careful when taking photos of people in Mongolia.
We rolled into the border town of Erlian at around half past 8. We had received our customs cards ahead of time and were waiting patiently in our compartments when a small, smiling Chinese official wearing a military uniform came aboard and instructed all of us to remain within our compartments, in English. When he came into my compartment he smiled, asked for my passport, and said, “Happy New Year! You know, tonight is the start of the Chinese new year festival. There will be fireworks at midnight.” I returned the cheery greeting and useful tidbit of information with a, “Happy new year to you too!” Then I watched as he counted months out loud in Chinese and on his fingers, my passport in his other hand flipped open to my visa. He finished counting at the fifth month, looked at me, smiled, and said, “It’s good!” Then he left to the next compartment with my passport.
We sat awhile in the station. Then we heard a loud groaning sound coming from outside like a big mechanical dinosaur moments before falling as prey to something larger. It was quite eery and lasted about 5 seconds and then we violently jolted to a start, my neck strained in the process. What I think happened is they disconnected our car from the others and one by one we were rolled into a nearby warehouse full of hydraulic machines and spare train undercarriages, stacked on the side of the track like boxes. This screeching, jolting process went on for a continuous 20 minutes or so. I watched from the warmth of my window as workers shouted at each other, waved their hands in the air, and worked various levers. They arranged our individual cars, untethered, into three different rows within the warehouse and trans-fixed a set of hydraulic lifts to either end of each car. Each lift had a horizontal beam that extended beneath the car. The lifting process was slow. I watched workers below fidgeting in the cold waiting for the car to be fully lifted. One worker delicately blew his nose out onto the track. But the car eventually was lifted a good 10 feet in the air, leaving the two sets of wheels on the ground. They ran a chain though each set of wheels and a machine dragged them all together and out from underneath the cars along the tracks. The cars stood suspended in the air without legs. Another chain dragged a new set of wheels beneath the cars and the workers guided them into place. The hydraulic lifts slowly lowered the cars onto the new undercarriages and that was that. It is amazing what a problem 10 cm difference in track width creates. This is a problem originally created by the former USSR and by extension, the old communist puppet state that was Mongolia. China and the rest of the world use the standard track width. But since these historic tracks were such a man-power marvel when created (especially the trans-siberian portion), to replace them now would be a mistake. So this ‘bogey’ changing process (as they call it) will continue.
As we were getting our bogies swapped, so to speak, we could hear the pop, pop, pop of premature fireworks in the distance and the colorful indirect flashes of the small explosions off the windows of the warehouse. February 9th is the official start of the Chinese New Year Festival that lasts weeks. It is by far the biggest holiday period in China - like the Christmas/New Year combo in the west. People buy and light off fireworks all day and all night, in alley ways, in public parks, in parking lots, between apartment buildings, wherever, and they do it for weeks. It is a very fun and very dangerous holiday. But it also brings disaster for domestic travel. Everyone rushes home during this time and it is nearly impossible to secure tickets for travelers on either trains or planes. I’ve witnessed this holiday, dangerously, first hand when I studied in Beijing five years ago. I’m happy to be leaving before it gets too crazy.
We screeched and jolted our way back to the other cars and back to the border station where we sat for another hour and a half, patiently awaiting the return of our freshly stamped passports. Many people fell asleep in their cabins. I read through my copy of the “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux, an excellent book about an American writer who traveled all of the world’s great classical trains in the seventies from London to Southeast Asia, up to Japan and back to England via the Trans-Siberian. An inspiration for my trip, no doubt. And I recommend this book to anyone interested in a good read - by the far the best book I’ve read in a while. Another compartment of Mongolians, on the other side of the Aussies, spent their time playing cards and drinking. It was two women and one man, all advanced in their years, and whatever game they were playing made one of the women, from time to time, laugh so hard that I thought she would explode. It was pretty amusing. Since we had been moved out of the warehouse, the fireworks became in full view from the train windows and kept me entertained for the duration of my stay on the station tracks. And fireworks there were! The entire station became engulfed just before midnight in a firestorm of color. The Chinese spare no expense when it comes to fireworks.
We rolled out of the Erlian Station at exactly 11:59 for the Mongolian border crossing as I said a final farewell to China and its new year. It was a nice sendoff.
We pulled into the Mongolian border town of Zamyn-Uud about thirty minutes later for the purpose of Mongolian immigration and passport stamping. But this time, rather than a small, smiling Chinese military man in dress uniform, I was approached by a stern, militant, Mongolian woman in a camouflage army uniform who quickly collected my passport and customs papers and disappeared without ever saying a word. Three other Mongolian military people of varying uniforms poked into my compartment for a quick look and then left in a hurry as well. After about an hour or so of lounging in the compartment, trying to keep awake, the militant woman returned and again without words, she handed me mine. It looked like she was in a hurry. It was 1:30 and I was tired. I turned out the lights, closed and locked the door to my compartment, and slept. But before I did I took a look out the window to a flat, grassy landscape illuminated by every star in the sky. The only time I had seen starts like this was at sea. I was fast asleep.
I awoke this morning, and am writing this now, around 9, deep in the famed Mongolian Steppe. The horizon stretches as far as the eye can see for a 360 degree panoramic view. Here, snow meets grass and there is not a cloud in this deep blue sky. It’s a nice scene to wake up to. I’ll arrive in Ulaanbaatar at around 1:30 this afternoon.
e-ruul men-diin to-loo! эруул мэндийн толоо! Cheers!
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| My compartment |
I haven’t seen many travelers. Most of the passengers are Mongolians, probably going home. But the compartment next to me is a group of four Australians, two guys, Jarrad and Sven, and two girls, Claire and Emilja, from Adelaide and Tasmania, all schoolmates but now working and taking some time off to take the trans-siberian through Russia and travel around Scandinavia a bit before returning home (to warm, summery Australia). They (and an elderly couple in first class) are the only foreigners I’ve encountered so far and I am happy to have them in the compartment next to mine for the company. Besides, Aussies are usually a fun crowd.
On my walk I found the dining car. My plan is to graze on food lightly today and tomorrow and get one meal this evening in the dining car. Meals here are usually good, a set menu, but can be expensive. So one meal a day is probably okay.
It’s pretty quiet right now and the scenery is not too exciting, just normal, industrial China. I can hear the Aussies next door playing a game of cars and listening on low volume from an iphone the smooth musings of Bon Iver (an American folk favorite of mine) and a few compartments down a Mongolian man has shut his windows, turned off the lights (but kept his door open so I could see) and is watching some Chinese television program on an imbedded TV. I can hear it from here.
 |
| Mountain view outside Erlian |
The provodnistas (cabin attendants) are Mongolian and the train is Mongolian. Every sign is written in English and Cyrillic (or just Cyrillic). I even tried to ask something to the provodnista in Chinese and got no response. I think I’m done with Chinese. I received a better response when I used English so I think I’ve made the switch officially now. When I first walked to the track that had the train waiting below the waiting platform, there were so few people that I was able to take my time and take photos of the train from the outside. I then approached the provodnista who checked my ticket and personally led me to my compartment. But the compartment number didn’t match the one on my ticket. She left me and took my ticket with her. I was confused so I walked back out to the provodnista and asked her, “Ni keyi gei wo piao ma, wo de huoche piao? (你可以给我票吗，我的火车票?) Can you give me my ticket back? Wo yao kan yixia. (我要看一下) I want to have a look.” She looked at me with a funny face and said, “ticketo?” or ticket in Mongolian I guess. I nodded and then she said, “Nnnnnno.” So I just took the compartment she gave me. I talked to Jarrad, one of the Aussie guys and he said she did the same to them. I think she just puts people in whichever compartments she chooses. Works for me.
I spent much of the day lounging in my private compartment, reading through my travel guides on Mongolia. In the early evening, I and three of the Aussies decided to go to the dining car for some dinner and a beer. The menu was surprisingly varied. The two Aussie guys ordered the crispy chicken while I ordered the sweet and sour pork dish with rice. We all got a beer, PBR, as it turned out. We swapped travel stories over dinner and after we had finished lounging a bit, decided to wobble our way back through the 11 shaky train cars back to our compartments. But before we did, I turned to take a few photos of the dining car. I raised the camera to my eye when one of the Mongolian food attendants came up to waving his hands saying, “No! No!” like I was an infant about to touch something hot. I was a bit off my guard but quickly realized he was going to be in the picture, if I had taken it. Realizing he may have not wanted to be in the photo, I apologized and asked him if I could take a photo of the dining car without him in it and he said yes. I was still taken aback a bit. I didn’t really think about his being collateral damage to my photos. But I’m glad I know now. I have heard that some cultures really don’t like to be in photos for various reasons. And I’ve been in China so long (and they don’t give a hoot what you take photos of) that I’d forgotten that I have to be sensitive to the new cultures that I will soon be encountering. Good to know. I will be careful when taking photos of people in Mongolia.
We rolled into the border town of Erlian at around half past 8. We had received our customs cards ahead of time and were waiting patiently in our compartments when a small, smiling Chinese official wearing a military uniform came aboard and instructed all of us to remain within our compartments, in English. When he came into my compartment he smiled, asked for my passport, and said, “Happy New Year! You know, tonight is the start of the Chinese new year festival. There will be fireworks at midnight.” I returned the cheery greeting and useful tidbit of information with a, “Happy new year to you too!” Then I watched as he counted months out loud in Chinese and on his fingers, my passport in his other hand flipped open to my visa. He finished counting at the fifth month, looked at me, smiled, and said, “It’s good!” Then he left to the next compartment with my passport.
We sat awhile in the station. Then we heard a loud groaning sound coming from outside like a big mechanical dinosaur moments before falling as prey to something larger. It was quite eery and lasted about 5 seconds and then we violently jolted to a start, my neck strained in the process. What I think happened is they disconnected our car from the others and one by one we were rolled into a nearby warehouse full of hydraulic machines and spare train undercarriages, stacked on the side of the track like boxes. This screeching, jolting process went on for a continuous 20 minutes or so. I watched from the warmth of my window as workers shouted at each other, waved their hands in the air, and worked various levers. They arranged our individual cars, untethered, into three different rows within the warehouse and trans-fixed a set of hydraulic lifts to either end of each car. Each lift had a horizontal beam that extended beneath the car. The lifting process was slow. I watched workers below fidgeting in the cold waiting for the car to be fully lifted. One worker delicately blew his nose out onto the track. But the car eventually was lifted a good 10 feet in the air, leaving the two sets of wheels on the ground. They ran a chain though each set of wheels and a machine dragged them all together and out from underneath the cars along the tracks. The cars stood suspended in the air without legs. Another chain dragged a new set of wheels beneath the cars and the workers guided them into place. The hydraulic lifts slowly lowered the cars onto the new undercarriages and that was that. It is amazing what a problem 10 cm difference in track width creates. This is a problem originally created by the former USSR and by extension, the old communist puppet state that was Mongolia. China and the rest of the world use the standard track width. But since these historic tracks were such a man-power marvel when created (especially the trans-siberian portion), to replace them now would be a mistake. So this ‘bogey’ changing process (as they call it) will continue.
 |
| Bogey swapping - view from my window |
We screeched and jolted our way back to the other cars and back to the border station where we sat for another hour and a half, patiently awaiting the return of our freshly stamped passports. Many people fell asleep in their cabins. I read through my copy of the “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux, an excellent book about an American writer who traveled all of the world’s great classical trains in the seventies from London to Southeast Asia, up to Japan and back to England via the Trans-Siberian. An inspiration for my trip, no doubt. And I recommend this book to anyone interested in a good read - by the far the best book I’ve read in a while. Another compartment of Mongolians, on the other side of the Aussies, spent their time playing cards and drinking. It was two women and one man, all advanced in their years, and whatever game they were playing made one of the women, from time to time, laugh so hard that I thought she would explode. It was pretty amusing. Since we had been moved out of the warehouse, the fireworks became in full view from the train windows and kept me entertained for the duration of my stay on the station tracks. And fireworks there were! The entire station became engulfed just before midnight in a firestorm of color. The Chinese spare no expense when it comes to fireworks.
We rolled out of the Erlian Station at exactly 11:59 for the Mongolian border crossing as I said a final farewell to China and its new year. It was a nice sendoff.
We pulled into the Mongolian border town of Zamyn-Uud about thirty minutes later for the purpose of Mongolian immigration and passport stamping. But this time, rather than a small, smiling Chinese military man in dress uniform, I was approached by a stern, militant, Mongolian woman in a camouflage army uniform who quickly collected my passport and customs papers and disappeared without ever saying a word. Three other Mongolian military people of varying uniforms poked into my compartment for a quick look and then left in a hurry as well. After about an hour or so of lounging in the compartment, trying to keep awake, the militant woman returned and again without words, she handed me mine. It looked like she was in a hurry. It was 1:30 and I was tired. I turned out the lights, closed and locked the door to my compartment, and slept. But before I did I took a look out the window to a flat, grassy landscape illuminated by every star in the sky. The only time I had seen starts like this was at sea. I was fast asleep.
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| First light over the Mongolian Steppe |
e-ruul men-diin to-loo! эруул мэндийн толоо! Cheers!
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