and this was the center of an empire

i'm in moscow now, going back in time to several days ago to write briefly about my train trip. the trans-siberian rail trip was the best train trip i've been on so far (i've got more train riding to do in europe). 5-1/2 days is a long time to spend on a train, but it was very comfortable and the food turned out to be pretty decent. so anyway, i'll write about each day if i can.

the train left on time out of beijing on the morning of the 29th. it was a beautiful day, the best weather i'd seen in china, and of course i was leaving. the sky in beijing was a bright blue and it was pleasantly warm. the train headed out to the north, quickly getting into hilly regions mixed with agricultural areas. they grow rice in the southern parts of china, but it's not wet enough up here, so they grow wheat and corn and soybeans and all kinds of other stuff. we passed a couple parts of the great wall, one that was rebuilt for tourists and one original.

i'm in second class, which is basically most of the train. there is 1 first class car too. my car has 8 cabins/compartments with 4 beds each, 2 on each side. there is a corridor down one side of the car. in one cabin are the 2 conductors for our car. all conductors on this train are chinese. most people on the train are mongolian, but i booked my trip through an agency and so all their people are on this car. in my compartment is a guy from pennsylvania, a guy from england, and a woman from new zealand. next door is a family from denmark that apparently is very wealthy as they just travel around in a motor home, all around the world. the put the motor home on a ship to copenhagen so they could take this train. on the other side is a cabin with 2 mongolians and a welsh couple. everyone is very nice. the mongolians all have tons of stuff with them...boxes and boxes of fruit, vegetables, and other personal stuff that they are taking home, but also crates, boxes, and bags full of stuff that they buy in china and take back to mongolia to sell...they are all importers, i guess. lots of liquor, clothing, blankets, shoes, brushes, makeup supplies, medicines, etc. so until the train gets to ulan bataar, it is crammed full of this stuff.

the windows open which makes for easy picture taking, so that is a bonus. we made stops every couple hours or so. the land outside got flatter and more desolate as we went north, eventually becoming a desert with low scrub brush growing...no trees. it was also very dusty and windy. this is part of the gobi desert, and for a couple of hours we had to close the windows to keep out the dust. sand and dust was drifted on the railroad tracks and the train even has to slow down. the windows don't close too well, and dust blew in anyway, coating everything.

we finally got to the border of mongolia by about 9:20pm, beijing time. all of china is on beijing time, which is kind of crazy. for western china, that's like los angeles being in the same time zone as new york. but mongolia is on the same time zone, but has daylight savings time, so it's actually even later there than in beijing! mongolia is on the same time as tokyo, which is very odd. china's railroad has one gauge (the distance between the left track and the right track) while mongolia and russia have another, wider gauge. so at the border they have to change all the bogies, the wheel assemblies. this took about 1-1/2 hours, and i actually got stuck on the train during this. i waited a little too long to try to get off. they pulled the whole train into a giant warehouse and picked it all up with a bunch of little jacks. they moved the bogies out and rolled the newer ones in (the narrow tracks fit inside the wider tracks). so that was interesting.

crossing national borders by train is not fun, though. before the wheel changes, we hit customs and immigration on the chinese side. they were very rigorous, especially with the mongolian people because of all the dutiable goods they were carrying. but even us tourists they made open our bags and stuff. that all took about 2 hours. then the 1-1/2 hour bogie changing. then more fun customs and immigration, even tougher than the chinese, once we got to the mongolian side. this took another 2-1/2 hours. during this time we had to sit there waiting...we couldn't go to sleep, because they came to ask us questions every now and then. so it was after 4 am by the time all this took place and we added the hour for daylight savings time. this put us about 4 hours behind schedule.

mongolia got flatter and more desolate the farther we went also. finally there was very little vegetation at all. but then we started climbing. oh, i forgot to mention the dining car. in china, we had a chinese dining car, which basically just cranked out one thing...plates of rice/tofu/chicken on the bone/carrots. it tasted ok, but eating that 3 times in one day wasn't real fun. it was free too. then once in mongolia, they took that dining car and gave us a mongolian dining car. i was excited when i went there for lunch, because they had a big menu. it took me awhile to decide what to order, then i got the waitress to my table. i showed her what i wanted, and she said they didn't have that. so i picked my second choice...no, they didn't have that either. ok, what about this? no. this? no. finally i just told her to show me what they have, instead of me picking the stuff they don't have. keep in mind this is a menu with about 30 pages of various kinds of food on it. so she pointed to 2 things, and said that was all they had. chicken noodle soup and a roast chicken dish. so for lunch i had the soup, then for supper i had the roast chicken. it was good and i paid in us dollars and got back the mongolian money as change. ok, so we climbed and climbed. by now we had 2 deisel locomotives pulling the 16 cars up the tracks. we started getting into some hills and mountains with lots of animals grazing and even some trees and rivers. mongolia is very beautiful. it is definitely somewhere i'd like to go for a couple weeks to get away from it all someday.

ulan bataar (i saw that name spelled about 10 different 'official' ways) is where most of the population lives. we stopped there about 4 hours behind schedule for about 1/2 hour. most of the people got off, but some of the mongolian merchants stayed on, and lots of others got on also. i walked around the station area for a little bit, and even bought postcards and some snacks in a little store. they very gladly take us dollars there. i was sitting writing out a postcard when i heard someone yell 'mike you have to get on the train now!' and looked up to see the train already leaving. i took off running and the conductor kept the door open so i could jump on the moving train...it was pretty funny. it wasn't moving more than about 10 miles an hour, so it was easy to catch and i had 4 other cars to try. but everyone was watching and laughing. the conductor was yelling at me in chinese, but even he was smiling.