The Trans-Siberian Railway: Beijing to Ulaan Baatar (1366 km)

Check out of the hotel and lug my case across the overpass to the forecourt of Beijing station. After going though the security check and baggage X-ray, it takes me a while to find the right place to wait since there is a waiting room 6 which serves other trains but we have to wait directly over platform 6. Lots of Westerners, including a young couple from Perth and Bristol, doing much the same as me. About 1100 we are allowed down to the platform and onto the train where I find I am sharing the compartment with just one young guy from Chile, Claudio. The train leaves at 1122, dead on time, and rather to my surprise it goes through Beijing South which seems to be in the wrong direction. We should be heading North and West not South! It takes us about 40 minutes to clear the outskirts of Beijing, high rise apartment blocks and grimy industry,  but just as I think we are in the countryside we go through a bleak looking town of old single story houses packed in  tightly and oldish 4-10 storey apartment blocks. After that the scenery improves as  we enter mountains and pass a large reservoir.

Yes, it goes all the way to Moscow!

Wood Burning Water Heater

Different Colour Scheme from the Chinese Trains.
Otherwise design almost identical.

High Rise Apartments  in the Outskirts of Beijing

 Just after 1200 we are given meal tickets for lunch and dinner; lunch is scheduled from 1230 to 1300 so we all head for the dining car which is very full. I join a table with three middle aged ladies doing an organised tour from Beijing to St Petersburg. Two of them from Vancouver and the other from USA.  Lunch is sautéed beef with celery. Not as good as the sautéed beef in Beijing but perfectly OK and there is moderately cold beer. During lunch we pass through spectacular mountain scenery interspersed with tunnels. Building the railway must have been a heroic piece of engineering; I think it was completed in the 1950's. Wish I could have taken photos but not easy during lunch.

http://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/Trans-Siberian_Railway

Mountains North of Beijing

They look even better with a beer.

The train is hot; it is the first one since Thailand  without air conditioning,  only a little fan. First class looks very plush and does have air conditioning. The guy from Bristol offers me a battered copy of The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux which I accept since it is a book I have heard a lot about and always wanted to read. Sorry I couldn't do him a swap, since I left "Bangkok Days" in the hotel,  deciding I wasn't going to read it again after leaving Thailand. He and his partner lived in Bangkok for a year or so  and he knows the Penalty Spot bar and restaurant where P works.

At 1440 we stop at a big station, Zhang Jia Kou Nan,  for few minutes. Note that we are back to low level platforms. We are on a wide plain with mountains in the distance. Corn seems to be the major crop and there are massive fields of it. Often interspersed with sunflowers which add colour to the scene. The villages comprise tightly packed rows of one story houses.  A huge contrast to the high rises of Beijing not so far away.

We go through a  range of hills, largely in tunnels,  and we emerge on a less fertile plateau of open grassland grazed by sheep. At 1655 we stop for a few minutes at another big station, Jiningnan. Outside the air is cool and refreshing but the cool air isn't penetrating the carriages which are still warm and stuffy; it doesn't seem to get any cooler inside. After Jiningnan we are on a mostly uncultivated plateau of dryish grassland with grey brown outcrops of rock. Occasional flocks of sheep and herds of cows. We pass some villages where there is more intensive cultivation, typically of long thin strips of various crops, even some polytunnels but then it is back to open grassland. Realise we have crossed the boundary between the intensively cultivated region of SE Asia and China, which I have been travelling through since entering Thailand, since leaving Singapore if you include palm oil plantations as intensive cultivation, and the open lands of Central Asia. 

Had dinner of stir fried  chicken with onion and cabbage,  and rice and got chatting  to  and drinking with, Barry, originally from Portsmouth but who spent most of his working life in Sydney and is now based in Phnom Penh. He tells me he worked as a labourer,  bus driver and doing other odd jobs but now seems able to afford to travel the world. Says it all comes from Australian "Super" which sounds like a good deal to me.

Just before 2200  we stop at Erlian Station to the sound of martial music where a Chinese immigration   official takes our passports. According to the timetable we will be here for 3 hours. Realise the reason for the long  wait is that they change the bogies from Chinese standard gauge to Mongolian broad gauge. The train is taken into a large shed, the carriages separated and each one is individually jacked up, lifted off the old bogies and new bogies put in. It's a heroic technical solution to a problem that could have been solved so much easier by simply changing trains and integrating that with combined Chinese/Mongolian border control formalities. 1230 we are back at Erlian Station where we wait for a while and then the Chinese Immigration officials come running out at the double and proceed to give us back our passports and  literally look under the beds. As the train leaves, we get more martial music and the immigration officials stand to attention. We are on our way to Mongolia where everyone tells me I didn't need to get a visa. The rules have changed in the last month or so.

Shed full of Bogies

Jacking up the carriage

Jacked up off the old bogies 

Rolling in the new Bogies

Dual gauge track

The first station in Mongolia is to Zamin Uud where there is a big "Welcome" sign. The soldiers on the platform  don't look so welcoming.  

The Mongolian Immigration official comes and takes our passports but is not interested in the arrival cards we have just  completed; she is far less militaristic than her Chinese counterpart, white blouse, black skirt and lanyard identifying her as "Mongolian Immigration". She and her colleagues take all the passports to the office in briefcases and we wait about 40 minutes,  when she hands us back our stamped passports and another man comes to look at our customs forms. At least I think that is what they are. Since they are written entirely in Mongolian the only bits I have been able to complete are passport number, name and date of birth. There are several Yes/No Questions which I suspect ask if I am bringing in illegal drugs,  large amounts of currency, endangered species and possibly whether I have committed genocide, but since I have no idea which are the yes and no boxes, I leave them blank. The official doesn't seem to care,  shrugs and doesn't even bother to collect them. And soon we are on our way again at 2.40 am. Go to bed and sleep soundly until about 8 am.

Look out to a totally flat, empty  and featureless landscape. Very arid, just coarse tussocky greenish brown grass  stretching off to the horizon. Blue sky with white streaks of cloud. I learnt later this is technically part of the Gobi desert although it doesn't look like what I think of as desert. The line is single track and clackety clack. Remember when I was a child, someone telling me how to calculate the speed of the train from the frequency of the clacks, or was it from the telegraph poles? The clickety clacks are about once a second so if only I knew the rail lengths used by Mongolian railways I would be there. Another question for Google, but here there is no WiFi and not even a  cell phone signal.

Travelling across an Arid Landscape

Totally featureless

Make myself some coffee for breakfast, have some biscuits and one of the "soyjoy" bars I picked up in Beijing. The soyjoy are not bad, better than the name suggests. The biscuits from M&S in Singapore are definitely emergency rations only. Once in my mouth they turn into a thick, somewhat raspberry flavoured, sweet doughy mass.

The landscape doesn't change much and I wonder how people navigated across it with no landmarks and, as far as I can, see no water. Apart from the railway, lined with a pile of detritus that people have thrown out of the windows,  the only signs of human impact are the fences on either side, power and  telephone lines, and a road running parallel about 200 m to the right. During the next half hour I see one truck and two cars on it. Later on some features appear, It's not quite so flat; there are some horses  and cattle and I see my first  "Ger"; I understand that "Yurt" is non PC.  More horses and cows and occasionally pools of water so it is not as arid as I imagined. Pass what I think is a coal mine and at 1030 we arrive at  Choyr. A chance to get off and enjoy the bright sunshine, fresh air, pleasant breeze and ideal temperature. On the other tracks there are  long trains of coal.    

After Choyr it is back to flat and featureless again for at least the next hour.  Noon and the scenery hasn't changed. Decided it was time for lunch so set off for the PECTOPAH, makes me feel like I am in Russia already, although I assume it's Mongolian. For a moment I wonder that Mongolian doesn't have its own word for "restaurant" and then realise that neither does English or Russian; we all copied the French.   It's worth visiting for the decor alone; no easy clean plastic in here. Intricate wood carvings cover the walls and almost any available surface.  There is even an antique gun on display. The menu comes with pictures and translations in English so I order a steak and a beer. Don't think I have had a steak since I left Singapore and for the first time since leaving Singapore I have seen lots of cows. The steak isn't going to win any awards but it's quite tasty and the beer is cold. Not many people in the restaurant, a Chinese family and me plus the staff. The daughter in the Chinese family  is very friendly, speaks some English and we take some photos together. Later we exchange telephone numbers and email addresses.

Mongolian Restaurant Car

Mongolian Restaurant Car

Steak and Beer 

About an hour before we arrived in Ulaan Baatar some hills and trees appeared and there were a couple of small townships mostly of single storey dwellings with brightly coloured roofs but also "gers" in small fenced compounds. We arrived just outside the station on time at 2.40 pm but then sat there until nearly 3.00.  Both Claudio and I  got off and I took a couple of photos of the locomotive as they uncoupled it and it chugged off.

At last, some Hills and Trees

Gers

Township near Ulaan Baatar

Locomotive chugging off

Coming out of the station I couldn't find any obvious taxi rank but a young woman trying to sell accommodation in a  guest house and tours offered me a taxi to Kaiser Hotel for 10 000 Tugrik , about US$6 which seemed a fair deal. First problem was getting out of the car park since people had parked in the access lanes. Next problem was that the taxi driver who was clearly "unofficial" had no idea where the hotel was,  resorting to asking passers by. So it was after 4.00 by the time I arrived.