The Trans-Mongolian Experience

So I got on the second leg of the Trans-Mongolian train, from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude, and unlike the previous leg, it was completely packed. Every seat was taken. I shared the compartment with two Thai guys and a Dutch guy named CJ, who was kind of a hippie-looking train enthusiast. He had been working in Hong Kong, and had gotten laid off, so he was headed back to Holland. The two Thai fellows were not very talkative, but CJ and I got into some conversation on the train. Since there were four in the compartment, all the berths were taken, both upper and lower. The two on the to say on the lower seat until bedtime, when they clambered up to bed. I had previously thought there was no ladder to the top berths, but it turns out there is one that unfolds from the wall on both sides of the compartment door.

All the tourists on the train were pretty friendly, and there was vodka aplenty generously passed around for anyone who wished to partake.  Some of CJ's former co-workers had given him multiple bottles of vodka for the journey. Most of the tourists were with one tour group led by a Russian guy named Alex. The people on the train were from a mix of countries all over the place. I spoke in Spanish to Isidro from Coahuila, Mexico, and in French to Linda from Quebec. There were a lot of Canadians, some Brits and Australians, and many others.

We had a pair of female provodnitsas, or car attendants, on our train car. The provodnitsas share a living compartment and work in shifts out of the working compartment. The first provodnitsa was really nice, but the second one was from hell. She kept snapping at people to go back to their compartments when they were taking pictures ("go back to your compartment!" was probably one of the few things she could say in English), or doing just about anything outside their compartments. So I decided to be super-nice to her all the time, even when she was being a complete dick to me. Of course, this pissed her off more, almost to the point of losing control. I just kept engaging her with smiles and hellos, and she would yell at me to return to my compartment, and as soon as she turned the corner, I would be in the exact same place as though nothing had happened with a smile, a hello,  and a thank you.  I was probably lucky I didn't get abandoned in the Gobi Desert somewhere just so she could be rid of me.

This whole series of interactions I had with the provodnitsa was a source of complete amusement to people in the compartment. I was in an unusual travel situation where the average age in the car was about my age, and many people were older. So I felt well accepted and part of the group. Dang, maybe it is ageism when I'm traveling among a bunch of twentysomethings and they blow me off, or don't include me in their group. But the folks on the train would watch my antics with the provodnitsa and laugh, realizing that she didn't like anybody, but she didn't like me especially. CJ started calling her my "girlfriend" and a couple others picked up on that. People were making faces behind her back when she would pass by, and sometimes when she would snap at me, I would make an exaggerated face of mock chagrin.

There was only the one international car, though some domestic cars would get periodically attached and then detached. We got to Sukhbaatar, Mongolia at four in the morning as most were asleep. I woke up around five just in time to see the sunrise. But we were all locked in the train car, and not only that, the bathroom was locked as well.  Guess they don't want it emptying its contents on the tracks at a station. So people were slowly waking up, and howling when they found they couldn't relieve themselves. Then the Mongolian authorities came on board to do their exit check. It wasn't terribly intrusive or anything.  After the Mongolian inspection, around seven-thirty in the morning, they finally unlocked the car so people could use the restroom at the train station. Along with many others, I zoomed over to the train station to use the restroom. But you had to pay an attendant, and I hadn't gotten my money off the train in my haste. I thought I'd have to return to the train to get money, but a kindly gentleman paid my fee. It wasn't much, just 200 tukriks, which is about ten cents when you convert Mongolian money to US.  We were stopped at Sukhbaatar from four to eleven in the morning, but after they unlocked the train car, they gave us two hours to explore the city, so I wandered around and checked it out, taking pictures. In Sukhbaatar, one of the wives of CJ'S former Mongolian co-workers met him at the station with a load of Mongolian food and some beers.

At this point, the train car was just sitting on the tracks by itself. There was no locomotive or caboose, and all the other cars had been detached. But by the time we were ready to leave, they had attached an engine and a few other cars, and we rolled on.

When we passed the Russian-Mongolian border, there was a small marker, a few buildings with some soldiers, and a chain-link fence along the border with razor wire circled on the top. We didn't stop there, but we speed at the next big town, Naushki, for the Russian border inspection. They came aboard with about four groups of officials, some asking redundant questions. The last group came through with dogs. We were stopped in Naushki for four hours, and they have us a couple of hours to wander the town. It was just a tiny Siberian town with hardly any businesses, and the ones that were there were just in houses. I walked all the way across town and found a little out-of-the-way cafe, and ate lunch there. Then about fifteen minutes later, Alex the tour guide led his whole group in there. Hey, I picked the right place...the same place the experienced guide took his people to. And I was glad I got there and got my food before they arrived, because I would have had to wait a long time while the large group of at least twenty or so ordered and got their food.

After returning to the train, we all had a lot of stops. Some were just in the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. We spent much more time on this train stopped than moving. I looked on Google Maps and saw that it was only an eight-hour drive from Ulaanbaatar to Ulan-Ude, but the train took about twenty-five hours.

When it was time to get off the train, I was the only one getting off at Ulan-Ude. Everybody else was going to Irkutsk, which was another night's journey. But the train kept stopping as we approached Ulan-Ude. I was pretty sure that the provodnitsa would not tell me when the stop was, so each time it stopped, I would gather my stuff, hobble out to the end of the car, and get snapped at by the provodnitsa to "go back to my compartment, not yet!"  Of course, I would smile at the mean lady and sweetly say thank you in Russian. This repeated overt and over in what seemed like an interminable pattern, until we finally did actually arrive at the Ulan-Ude station. I got off, made a point to say thank you and goodbye to the provodnitsa while she coldly ignored me, and set off to find a taxi to take me to my hostel.

Two Markets

I've been to two markets in Ulaanbaatar, and they couldn't be more different. The first one is the State Department Store. This is like Macy's on steroids, if Macy's were the size of a Wal-Mart. It is seven stories high. The first floor has a grocery store, and all the other floors have all kinds of stuff. Actually, I only went up to the fifth floor, so I don't even know what is on the top two floors. My tolerance for shipping is just not that high.  It's probably pretty overpriced by Mongolian standards, though not too overpriced for Westerners. The grocery store is pretty decent, though; I bought a lot of stuff there since it was close to my hostel.

The second market is the Naran Tuul, and it is the complete opposite. The Naran Tuul, or black market, is an enormous shopping mall-slash-flea market gone rogue. It is one of the most dangerous places in Ulaanbaatar. Supposedly you can get just about anything here, if you know who to ask and where to go. People randomly get charged a cover charge to come in, but I didn't get charged. Guess that must mean that I run with the in crowd. Ha. I didn't get robbed there either, which I took as a good sign. I did take some precautions that made me feel a little safer. There is a covered part with narrow, winding catacombs, and then an uncovered part on the outskirts. There are designer labels on fake goods, and some of them are spelled terribly wrong...like Abibas, Calvin Klain, and My Little Phony (the last of which is kind of aptly ironic). The whole thing is surrounded with shipping containers containing goods, and there are also shipping containers scattered throughout the interior. I didn't want to leave without buying SOMETHING, even though I really didn't need any consumer goods (well, i needed a scarf and maybe a balaclava for colder climates, but I didn't find anything like that). So I bought a bag of what looked like donut holes from a vendor who was selling bread products from a shopping cart for all of about fifty cents. They turned out to be more like bread balls, but they were tasty, and I spent a couple of days munching on them. There are some real deals; you could probably buy a pair of pants for five to ten bucks, for example. If I lived in Ulaanbaatar, I would probably buy a lot of my day-to-day stuff here.

Random Musings from Mongolia

Though they drive on the right in Mongolia, most of the cars are set up for driving on the left; that is, they are right-side drive cars. And driving here is really an open frontier. People don't seem to be particularly affected by things like traffic signals, signs, or whether there are pedestrians potentially in the way of their path when making their driving decisions. So if you are a pedestrian, the best thing to do is GTF out of the way in every circumstance, because you are at the bottom of the food chain. It's not like I haven't been in that circumstance in other countries before. I am just surprised I haven't seen more accidents because of it.  Also, people will just park in the most nonsensical places, like the only entrance to a crowded parking lot. Then someone will pull behind, and just sit on their horn, even though there is nobody in the parked car. But Mongolian tow trucks get a lot of work due to this...I've seen cars towed in circumstances like this on a few occasions. Intersections can just be complete gridlock, as people will just pull into the intersection from all four sides, and not cede way to anyone. And then everybody will just sit on the horn. But there doesn't seem to be a lot of driving on the sidewalk, like there was in Beijing. And there aren't a ton of bicycles and scooters like in China, either.

I mentioned earlier that I don't have data in Mongolia. So I'm dependent on WiFi to get on the Internet at all. Which means that when I'm walking around the city, I have no Internet access at all. But a couple at one of the hostels I stayed at in Beijing turned me on to an android app called Maps.me that does just about everything Google Maps does, but offline. Google Maps claims they allow you to download offline maps, but it doesn't work in some countries. It didn't work for me in Mongolia at all, so I downloaded Maps.me when I was on the hostel's WiFi. After I downloaded the map data for the entire country of Mongolia in about a minute or two, it has worked great for me offline; about as well as Google Maps does online.  And it is open source and free.

I've heard a few people answer their phones here in Mongolia, and every single one of them has said something that sounds almost exactly like "Bueno" when they answer the phone.  It surprised me to hear that,  because I hear that all the time among Spanish speakers back home.  And I answer my phone like that occasionally, too, especially when solicitors call, and I can then pretend I don't speak English.  Of course, one of my favorite phone greetings has always been to put on a voice sort of like Lt. Worf, and answer the phone with, "Speak freely, with no fear of retribution."  Somehow I don't imagine that happens in Mongolia a lot.

The bathroom in the hostel has a toilet plunger with a bicycle pump-like mechanism on it. What a great idea...haven't seen that in the States.

Money in Mongolia

I haven't seen any coin money here in Mongolia at all. Even the smallest denominations are represented by paper money. There are about 2000 Mongolian Tugriks to the dollar, and I have seen bills for as low as 10 Tugriks, which would be about half a cent. Whenever anyone gives you change, they seem to want to get rid of as many small bills as they can (e.g., rather than give you a 1000 tugrik bill, you will get a stack of 10s, 20s, 50s and maybe 100s), so you can end up with a half-inch thick wad of currency that is worth very little. So I've been trying to pay with exact change whenever possible, and doing the same thing; that is, getting rid of the smallest bills possible. Otherwise I'll just end up with a pile of tiny bills. And I hear that once you are outside the country, nobody will want to touch Mongolian currency, so it will be hard to trade it for something else. But sometimes I can't pay with exact change, so I'll end up with another huge pile of small bills, and the cycle starts again.

Genghis Khan (or, as he is called here,  Chinggis Khaan) is on the 20000, 10000, 5000, 1000 and 500 tugrik bills. I have no idea who the other guy is who is on the 100, 50, 20 and 10 (OK, I just looked it up, it is Damdiny Sühbaatar. You can look up who he is). Apparently there are even smaller notes, corresponding to 1 and 5, and even change for a one, but they are no longer in common usage, as they are pretty much worthless. I would bet they are not worth the paper they are printed on. It seems strange that there are no bills available bigger than 20000, as that is about ten bucks. In China, Mao was on all the paper money that I saw. 

More Goings On in Ulaanbaatar

I wonder if I should be worried about the fact that Mongolia has a Department of Pickpockets. There seems to be a lot of information about how there is a lot of pickpocketing here. So far, I haven't had any problems. I have to watch out for the maneuver whereby someone blocks you in front, someone blocks you in back, preventing retreat, and a third person rips you off. Or variations on that theme. The main thing is that there are apparently people working in groups to steal stuff.

Yesterday, I picked up my train tickets for the next leg of my journey. Finding the place was relatively difficult, but I gave myself the whole day to do it. In fact, I found it by early morning. There were no street names in the directions I was given, and a crudely drawn map showed the place as being directly behind Sukhbaatar Square, when in fact, it was over a kilometer behind it. I couldn't figure out how to get the door open to either enter or leave the building (upon leaving, I was trapped in a small, completely dark chamber for a bit between an inner and an outer door), but in both cases, I just followed someone else who obviously had expertise in opening doors.

But I had a good time wandering around and taking in the sights of the city. Ulaanbaatar is relatively compact and easily walkable. When I first got here I was overwhelmed and disoriented, but now I have a pretty good handle on how the city is set up. There are visible mountains to the north and south, so once one becomes familiar with them, it is easy to become oriented.

After picking up my ticket, I just wandered around for a while. I ended up finding a vegan restaurant that was attached to a Buddhist temple near one of the museums. It had really delicious food, and I got to experience traditional Mongolian food done vegan. Everything on the menu looked delicious, and I wish I could have just sampled a little of everything.

I met an American guy a couple of nights ago who is a visiting scholar from Albuquerque working with one of the museums. He was telling me about an effort he was working with to save a Mongolian horse from extinction, and that it had been brought back to viability from only 11 known individuals. I told him that it seems that the remaining individuals would be pretty genetically homogeneous, but he did that wasn't the case, as the ones remaining had been scattered around the world in zoos, rather than being a small band in one place.

Every once in a while I will hear people speaking English in public, but this is rare. Yesterday, I ran into a couple of German guys I had met on the train in the city, and we were surprised and glad to see each other.

More wanderings on the agenda for today.  It was below freezing when I woke up this morning around sunrise, but it warms up really quickly...by early morning, it will probably be at least 8C (around 50F), and the high is supposed to be around 19C (maybe 70-ish F).

Arriving in Ulaanbaatar

Well, crap. I was counting on having data in Mongolia, and was kinda blindsided by not having any. I thought I'd have a problem in China due to their blockage of websites, but in fact, I had no problem there. Now I don't know where my hostel is, if they will pick me up, or how to pick up my purchased tickets for the next leg of the Trans-Mongolian Railway. And I can't get online to find out. If I had realized that, I would have looked that all up ahead of time.  Gotta either find some WiFi pronto, or find a tourist bureau or something. Or both. I'm about a half hour away from Ulaanbaatar.

On top of that, I've been fleeced for every little snack I've bought since the train dining car changed to the Mongolian car. It's not too bad, it's just mildly annoying.  People can really use exchange rates against you if they are prepared and you are not. When I first walked into the dining car, the waiter just started bringing me stuff. Just coffee and snacky stuff, and then presented me with a bill that was about three times what I had paid for a full meal in the Chinese dining car. Then, later, I ordered a drink that was around four dollars, and paid in US currency with a twenty (he gave me the choice of paying with Chinese, Mongolian, or US money), and he was going to give me fifteen in change; a ten and a five. I told him he could give me Mongolian money as change, so he comes back with the equivalent of ten dollars in Mongolian money as change. I just can't stop doing things that get me ripped off more.

So I get to the train station. The hostel is definitely not there to pick me up. Everybody else I have been traveling with has a ride, and nobody has heard of this hostel. Shit. I go in the train station, ask at the information desk, they have no idea what I am talking about. I have nothing other than (thank god! otherwise there is no way I would have found the place or remembered the name) the address in English and the phone number and name of the place that I had entered in my calendar app. Nobody can decipher it; I ask if I can use the phone to call them by putting my extended thumb and little finger up to my ear like a phone cradle, but they shake their heads to indicate no.

I am getting nowhere fast. I sit around for a while, and then some lady takes me by the hand and leads me outside. There is a taxi there, I show him the stuff I have in English, and he is perplexed. BTW, Mongolian addresses have no street name in them. They might be something like "Room #39, Entrance 2, Building 10A, Sukhbataar District, Ulaanbaatar." And the English versions are completely indecipherable to someone who doesn't speak English.

He tries to make some calls, including calling the number I have for the hostel, and gets nowhere. I don't think they are answering the phone. He motions me to get in the cab,  so I do.  He starts driving, but I don't think he knows where he is going.

He keeps trying to call the hostel, but gets no answer.  So he is just driving around, I'm pretty sure. Somebody calls him, it is the proprietor of the hostel. He talks to her for a few minutes, and he looks at me and says, "OK," and makes a thumbs-up gesture. He wants me to talk on the phone; the manager speaks English. She says she is in the country, and will be in town in about two and a half hours. She says I can wait at the first door of the State Department Store. I repeat this back to her vacantly. I have no idea what is happening.

We drive a pretty good distance from the bus station, and I have no idea where we are. This is the first hostel that I have not had any means to follow where I am and where I am going. He drives up to a place, and motions me to get out. He will take me to it. 

I follow him into a building, up the stairs, to the third floor.  There is a sign there with the name of the hostel. Good, we are at the right place. I pay the guy, he leaves me there, and I try to go in, but the door is locked. 

I knock on the door, but there is no answer. So I sit in the narrow staircase with my pack. There is a small child who is playing in the staircase, and she is curious about me. She tries to speak to me, and doesn't seem to understand that I don't speak Mongolian. All I can do in reply is smile kindly.  After a while she gets bored and goes to play upstairs. I keep sitting in the stairwell for a while, and then someone shows up with a key to the hostel, and lets me in. She speaks very little English, but is able to show me my bed. She tells me the owner is on her way. But at least now I know that I have a definite place to lay down.

I wait another hour and a half or so, and the hostel proprietor shows up. She speaks English, and I pay for my room. It's about twenty bucks for four nights.  I relax at the hostel for a while, then set out to check out the surroundings.

From Sadness to Excitement...From Beijing to Ulaanbaatar

I always get a little bit sad when I am getting ready to leave a place. And it was a little bit sad to leave Beijing. I had met some friends there, and we all had hung out in the lounge at the hostel to chat. But it turned out we were all leaving at the same time. The city was interesting, and I hadn't even scratched the surface of what there was to see.

But that bit of sadness turned to excitement as I prepared to take the Trans-Mongolian Railway. I mean, crossing into Mongolia on a train! I had booked my tickets far in advance (back when I was in the US), and had picked them up at a travel agency in Beijing. So I was ready to roll on this new adventure, and that was exciting.

I decided to walk to the train station, which was about 1.6 kms away from the hostel.  On my way to the train station, I met Simon, who was also taking a train out. We walked together to the train station, and then I tried to cash in my subway card with no luck. Simon decided to go on to the station while I did this, because he would have had to go through a security check.  Theoretically, it was possible to cash the card in, but at the two subway stations where I tried to do it I encountered an impenetrable wall of Chinese bureaucracy, so I gave up.  There was only about three dollars left on it (plus the card deposit), and I would have had to go to a third station, and I had no idea where it was. And my train was getting ready to depart. Maybe I'll be able to find someone down the road who is heading to Beijing who can use it.

I boarded the Trans-Mongolian train a little before noon. The cars were nice; I had a sleeper seat/bed all to myself. There were four sleeper berths in the compartment; two upper ones and two lower ones. I have what they call the hard sleeper and I believe it is second-class, though it is plenty comfortable to me, and I would not see any reason to pay more for the first-class soft sleepers. But maybe that's just me. I saw some compartments that looked like they had fluffier cushions, and only two berths (but still top and bottom), and then a plush chair on the other side. Having a top berth has got to suck significantly more than a bottom one, and I'm glad I don't have one, but expect I might at some point. There is no ladder to get up to it (like there is in hostel bunks), so you just have to clamber up to it. You can't really sit in it all that comfortably like you can in the bottom berth, so you would have to lay down, or share the bottom seat with the occupant until bedtime. Or maybe you could just hang out in the dining car. I hope they are cheaper than the bottom berths, because if they are the same price, it would suck to lose that lottery. But it would be tolerable if it were the only choice on a packed train.

There were also electricity outlets in the compartment (but only in the bottom berths), which surprised me; stuff I had read online had led me to think the trains would not have electricity,  or at least it would be limited to the attendant's compartment.

I shared the compartment with Klin, a Thai woman who was a student, and we both occupied the lower berths. It was strange that we were sharing a compartment, since there were only three people in the whole train car, which consisted of nine compartments with four beds each. But I guess those were the tickets that had been booked. I had been led to believe from stuff I read online that these tickets were hard to get but it sure didn't look that way. A bunch of us on the train compared what we paid, and most of us paid in the $200-$300 range (not bad for a train ride of about 26 hours), but one Belgian guy only paid about 50 Euros. I would wager that it would be significantly cheaper than an international train if you could take a domestic train to the border, walk across the border, and then take another domestic train.

The first area we rode through was a spectacular mountain range a little ways outside Beijing. We snaked in and out of mountain tunnels frequently, which sometimes messed with the pictures I was taking, as just as I would get a shot lined up, we would enter another tunnel.

Then we entered the province of Hebei. This area was flatter, and not as majestic as the mountains. Every area from here out was flatter, there were no more beautiful mountain scenes.

Then we entered Inner Mongolia, a region in China, which had some nice views, but was terribly littered in some areas with trash, and it looked like some rapacious strip-mining and resource extraction had taken place, even within some of the cities and villages. The biggest city we passed through in Inner Mongolia was Ulanqab, a city of more than two million inhabitants.

The sun set over Inner Mongolia, and I took a nap for a short time. There was nothing to see in the dark anyway. Earlier in the day, I had met up with a bunch of tourists in the kitchen car who were playing a dice game that was a Hungarian variant of Yahtsee (called Yahtzi, had somewhat more complex rules), so I joined in for a few games.

Then the train stopped at Erlian (also known as Erenhot) a Chinese town on the Mongolian border.  All the wheels needed to be changed out underneath the train to accommodate a different gauge of railroad track in Mongolia. As they prepared to change the wheels, the lights flickered, and the electricity outlets stopped working throughout the process. I suspect that they turned off the electricity throughout the train, but then connected the lights to a generator or some external electricity source.

We were stopped here for a little over three hours while they accomplished this task, and some of us went outside for a while. The train had been truncated at some point.  When we left Beijing, it was quite a long train, but now it was down to just nine cars. I guess the other cars must have been domestic train cars, and had been removed at stations along the line. But then they added more cars at this station, so the train was longer again going into Mongolia (I found out later that I could not get to some of the new cars they added in front, as the door to the new section was locked). It was fairly chilly outside, and I had to get the down shell jacket I had purchased in Beijing. Some of the passengers were having a wine party outside the train. I had read online that one could explore the town whole this was going on, but they herded us back on the train after just a few minutes, so there was no opportunity to do so.

Chinese customs agents boarded the train, made us fill out departure forms, and took our passports for about an hour before returning them. After a short bit, Mongolian customs also boarded and did a very cursory check. But, strangely, they didn't even take the customs form we had to fill out. They just stamped it and have it back to us.

I had been drifting in and out of sleep while all this customization had been going on. I did watch the changing of the train's undercarriage from the inside of our car, which was interesting. They separated out all the cars from each other, jacked the cars way up, very slowly, and rolled the new wheel assembly under each car. We could see all the newly stranded passengers in the next car pressed against the window at the back of the car while they were doing this.

I also got a text from T-Mobile telling me that I didn't have data or texting for free in Mongolia as I had in the other countries so far. I've been somewhat spoiled by having free data, even though it was slow. So I turned off data on my phone (so I don't inadvertently get charged some enormous roaming fee), and now I'll only be able to connect to the Internet in Mongolia when I can find WiFi. No big deal, it will just be a new adventure. Humankind has only had WiFi for about a nanosecond of our existence anyway, and somehow we managed to survive.

After sleeping through the night, I awoke just in time to watch the sun rise over the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Shortly after that, the train arrived in the village of Sain-Shanda, where it stopped for about half an hour. I was hoping to get out and wander for about fifteen minutes, but the train doors were locked, so no such luck. After that there were sparsely spattered small structures in the desert very infrequently, punctuated with the occasional yurt.

Early in the morning, I went back to where the dining car had been, and it was not in the same place. I just kept going, and it was way back at the end of the train. But they had replaced the Chinese dining car with a Mongolian dining car. I sat down, and the dining steward immediately starting bringing me stuff, even though I didn't order anything. I had wanted coffee, and I got that, but all sorts of other stuff arrived too. Oh, well, I was a bit hungry. Then he came to collect the bill, and it was much more than the Chinese car had charged for food. Maybe it had something to do with the exchange rate, since I had Chinese yuan, and no Mongolian money. He offered me the choice between paying with Mongolian, Chinese, or American money. I wonder if I would have gotten a better deal with dollars.

The Gobi Desert in Mongolia is enormous, and mostly flat, with some undulating dunes, sparse grasses, and low shrubs. Periodically cattle, horses, or sheep will appear on the landscape.  There is also the occasional resource-extraction environmental nightmare. But it doesn't seem to have earth-destruction machinery and open sores on the land, or rampant trash piles, as often as Inner Mongolia did in China.

Mongolia will be colder than the places I have been so far. It may get down to freezing temperatures at night. Good, that will give me a chance to use some of the cold-weather clothing that I have been lugging around that takes up so much room in my pack.