As we all know the the world is on fire, and if one wants to travel, you just have to go with whats avalible. Trond booked tickets 3 months ago with the travel agency in China for railway tickets from Bejing to Ulan Bator. It was a lot of emails and the language barrier was significant. But with a little trust and patience. It all worked out. And it was quiet the experience. We got to see a lot of both China and Mongolia we woulden’t have seen otherwise.
The first leg of the trip took us to Erlian, where we had a wait of 12 hours (!), that was “everybody out!” and finding a hotell to lounge around in until approx 1730 when we boarded again and started the 2-3 km ride over the china-mongol border.
After crossing the border, our passports where collected in a 80s spy movie briefcase, a customs guy went trough our room and looked in my bag… Then we waited some more, then a lady clearly military came and had a second look – checking underneath bed, overhead compartment ..looking at suitcase, then a bit more wait – and we got our passports back. All of this took close to an hour, and the train started moving! Woho!
but no, it stopped, backed up some hundred meters and then stopped. And there we sat for 3,5 hours… With no internet, because our holayfly eSims where fucked (I got them fixed just now, in Ulan baataar).
So 12 hours wait, 15 minutes across boarder, 3,5-4 hours wait. And then! Then it got dark, and we started our trip towards Ulan Baataar.
We kept the same coupe the whole trip, a 4 pax soft sleeper all to ourselves really was a luxury.
The toilet situation was something we had wondered a bit about, and also one of the reasons we opened for nicer seats. I gotta say, it was not real bad – it worked, you saw the moving ground trough the toilet. The smell was, it was, hm, pungent ? It smelled of old piss to put it bluntley. The ‘trick’ was to use it when the train moved, and there was som air circulation .
Was not to bad . I have seen and smelled worse.
Sleeping, or kinda sleeping, trough the night – its a bit of movement and the beds are not super comfy, we woke at 06:something to a beautifully day, some hours out of Ulanbator.
The landscape is pretty flat and barren, lots of horses and cows. Really not that much to see, but it is cool riding trough the massive landscape.. weather here is colder than China, so some snow n ice.
Arriving into Ulanbator on schedule, no internet and no money – we found a taxi driver that showed us an atm and told us that the prise was 25.000 .. how much nok was that? We did not know 🙂
Finaly here 🙂