How to Get Lost

We arrived early this morning. We were up by 5:00, but only arrived an hour later or so. After a sort-of-nap (couldn’t sleep), we were picked up by our guide (again; she’d also taken us to the hotel from the station) and shown around the city.

First up was Sukhbaatar Square — a large open area in front of the Mongolian Parliment. It’s sort of like Red Square, but is named after a man who is credited with being the hero of Mongolia, who led the armies who finally pushed China out of “outer Mongolia” and declared an independant Mongolia. He died mysteriously (insert obligatory conspiracy theory here) and is buried at the north end of the square in a mausoleum. Unlike Lenin and Mao, however, you can’t get in to see him.

Then it was over to the Gandantegchinlen Monastery, the largest in Mongolia and also the main one. It’s relatively old, though a lot of it (like most of the monasteries in Mongolia) were ransacked by the Soviets under the guise of socialism. There’s an 80-metre statue in the largest building in the complex to replace the one the Soviets stole and melted down into bullets.

Then it was off for a cultural presentation of song, dance, and music, including Mongolian throat singing. (I swear I sound like that some mornings!)

Tomorrow, we’re off for the back country for some “camping” (ger camps, though we’re not sure what to expect). Needless to say, we won’t be posting for a few days — I doubt there’s internet way out there.

We knew this was going to be rough. We knew this was going to be long. It wasn’t as bad as we thought it might be, but it was still long.

We took Train 364 (formerly 264) from Ulan Ude to Ulaan Baatar. (The train itself runs Irkutsk to UB.) As we would find out, the whole train doesn’t go to Mongolia — only the cars that contain passengers going to Mongolia. We found this out when we got to the Naushki station, on the Russian/Mongilian border.

The Russians started shunting our car around. I think this was mostly to kill time. Why else would they continually back up, go forward, back up, go forward, and so forth for about an hour? Incidentally, Russian cars (as Amy and I decided) are not built for the harsh conditions of operation in Russia. They’re built to withstand the abuse from the engineers. I thought they were going to shake the whole car apart!

We finally ended up, alone, completely separate from the rest of the train:

As we would also decide later, this was because our car was the only one going to Mongolia. The other cars were part of the train that terminated at Naushki, and would return to Irkutsk with new passengers.

And so began our wait. And wait we did. It would be a few hours before we saw anyone official-like board our train. At first, it was just someone to check our passports and make sure they were in order. That was a quick check. It was easily two more hours past that before the real officials came out. (When they did, soliders closed down the platform — you couldn’t go out there until you were supposed to be out there.) While we waited, we amused ourselves by watching a pile driver:

Yes, we were that bored.

With the final forms filled out (the exit customs form) and our passports, stamped, we resumed our waiting.

Six hours after we got there, we finally left, a single car towed by a lonely diesel locomotive out to Sukhbaatar, 21 kilometres inside the Mongolian border.

To wait some more.

After a couple of hours, the Mongolians started to let us in. This involved three forms (entry/exit form, health form, and customs form). After the health form was signed, we got scammed into US$10 health insurance. I’ve heard this is bogus, but we were too tired to care at that point. In between the official stamping of passports, we received a barrage of people who wanted to exchange our rubles for togrogs — which we’d already done in Naushki. They kept at is, the same people asking many times, despite us saying (more and more loudly every time) that we have none!

Finally, passports stamped (using their hands as the table for stamping, despite one being in the cabin), we finally left Sukhbaatar for Ulaan Baatar.

Total crossing time: 10 hours. Ish.

Luckily, mostly done during the day. The other way, I gather it’s mostly at night. Ugh!

This is going to be a short entry, although don’t worry, I have plenty to talk about in the future. I’m just kind of having an “off” night and only have another 12 minutes on this computer.

We made it to Mongolia safe and sound with very little… and I mean VERY little excitement. We’re talking 9 hours sitting at the border. At least it was daytime and sunny out, but not too hot. Overall, I can’t complain.

Tomorrow we head out into the countryside for 4 nights in ger camps before coming back to Ulaan Baatur for one night before hitting the train to Beijing. I think our time here is going to feel much too short!

I promise a better post next time. I’m safe, relatively happy, and miss you.

On May 19, we boarded train 264 from Ulan Ude in Russia to Ulaan Baatar.

We had read that the border crossing would be an intolerable 10 hour process, typically performed in the middle of the night. To my surprise and delight (if one can be delighted at sitting on a rail car for 10 hours without moving), we cleared Naushki in only 6 hours and made it to Sukhbaatar with a decent amount of daylight.

As Geoff already posted, sitting in the car could be painful at times… for him. I was perfectly cool, comfortable, and able to knit. So I did. I knit about half of a shawl. And it kept me pretty darn happy. In retrospect, I’m grateful for the mild weather and the train windows that actually opened! You think I’m joking, but we’ve had some fairly uncomfortable train journeys that could have been vastly improved with a bit of a breeze.