Trans-Mongolian Railway to Ulaanbaatar

The hills south of Ulaanbaatar.
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The Trans-Mongolian railway runs for 7865 kilometres from Beijing through to Moscow. To do in the journey in one go takes arounds five and a half days. We are breaking the journey into three sectors, the first of which has brought us to the capitol of Mongolia.

We departed Beijing early in the morning, having to be at the station before 7am. It seemed as though we were in the tourists end of our carriage, sharing a 4-berth compartment with two Australians, whilst three more Australians, a German, and a Japanese girl occupied the surrounding compartments. The day on the train passed quite swiftly, with the line following the Great Wall for much of the time. To our surprise we were handed free meal  tickets for the Chinese part of the journey, the simple meals of chicken or meatballs were something of unexpected bonus. In the evening we reached the Chinese border town of Erlian. The train stopped here for almost three hours. The main reason for this is that Chinese railways are a different gauge to that of Mongolian and Russian railways. We waited in the station waiting room whilst the carriages were taken away to a shed where they were individually raised by hydraulic lifts, then the Chinese gauge wheels were rolled out from beneath, and the Russian gauge wheels were put in their place! When we finally were able to reboard, the train took us on the short journey across the border to Zamiin Uud, where our passports and visas were taken away and checked, just as they had been in Erlian. The whole border process took almost five hours.

Damdinii Suhbaatar.
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In the morning we woke to the grassy Eastern Plains. This scene of short sparse grasslands continued for the whole morning until we finally began to descend the hills to the bottom of the basin in which the city of Ulaanbaatar sits. This first leg of the journey took about thirty hours.

Ulaanbaater was our first experience of a homestay, and we weren't quite sure what to expect. The flat we stayed in was on the top floor of a rather ramshackled looking apartment block, but to our surprise, it was just like being in someones home back in the UK, very modern and clean. The lady that owned the house spoke no English, but we were able to communicate easily enough through pointing. She cooked breakfast for us each morning, which was very nice, and I presume local, it was certainly different to back home.

Travelling on.
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We spent what was left of our first day getting our barings in the city. We were surprised at how warm it was. The sun was shining it was around 10 degrees, warmer than we had thought. However, this changed somewhat for our second day. We woke to cloudy weather with occasional snow showers, the temperature for the day slowly dropped from just 1 degree, to about -5 degrees in the afternoon. We spent the morning at Bogd Khan (Holy King) Palace & Museum. It resembled a mini Forbidden City, but without the extensive refurbishment. Its rustic feel made it look rather better than its Chinese counterpart. Unfortunatley, due to oversite on out part, we didn't have enough tugrek (the local currency) to afford the 'camera permit', so no photos. After some lunch and a walk around the Sukhe Bator Square (again like a small version of Beijings Tiananmen Square) we decided to escape the cold and visited the Museum of Mongolian National History, with various displays including the exploits of Chinggis Khan, better known as Genghis to us. It proved to be very interesting and kept us out of the cold for most of the afternoon.

The final day in the capitol saw the return of the sun, but the temperatures continued to stay at around -5 degrees. In the morning we walked to the Zakh (city market). At first I thought the entry charge of 50 tugrek each was a little steep, but eventually the currency converter in my head reminded me that was in fact equal to about 2.5 pence! The market was huge, and practically anything you could possible want was available, particularly clothes with dubious sounding brand names, often with just one letter different to that of Western brands (eg. Rengler). Later we wandered back into town and failed miserably in our attempts to buy some local khuushuur (lamb pasties) from a local woman who seemed completely dissinterested in selling us anything at all. We are instead going to go to a nice a restaurant that we have found just near the square, after we have finished this blog. It sells good local beer and has a range of very nice food (we ate there on our first day too). It is quite fancy compared to the fast food we are used to, but a full meal for two comes to more than about 8 pounds. This evening we start the second leg of our railway journey.

J.

Note: The computers are a bit slow here, and we can't sit around all day waiting for the photos to upload. It will probably be Moscow in a week or so before we can get them online. Sorry about that.