Gobi Free

A 30 hour train ride is usually a pretty boring affair, and so too is a blog post about it. On April 20 I made my way to the main railway station in Beijing, waited around until about 7:30 am, then boarded the Tran-Mongolian K3 train that leaves once a week for Mongolia and Russia, connecting to the main Trans-Siberian line in Ulan Ude, Russia. I will be making the trip to Moscow in three legs, with this being the first, from Beijing to the capital of Mongolia, Ulan Bataar.

My roomate in the four-berth compartment was another American, Tom, who had just retired and returned from a tour of North Korea. My questions about North Korea, along with all our common experiences as Americans, provided endless topics for conversation on the train ride through the Gobi Desert. While I love getting to know people from all parts of the Earth, there is something about meeting a good fellow American, especially in Asia where they seem to be a relative rarity, that cannot be matched. No longer do you have to call college "university" and you can speak of home as something real and present, not as a far away and foreign thing. We had some good conversations.

As we grew more and more distant from Beijing, the landscape outside our window became more and more desolate and dusty. We were slowly coming into the Gobi Desert. Eventually the last vestiges of real civilization faded away, and all that was left was the brown expanse dotted with the occasional crumbling ruin of a village. There is really only one thought that entered my head upon realization of the fact that I was in the middle of the Gobi Desert: WTF am I doing in the middle of the Gobi Desert? It was an existential crisis. It just seemed like such a strange place to find myself, a place where I never would have thought I would end up in my life.So what more can I say. We rode all day on this train, and then upon nightfall were joined by two burly Mongolian guys in our cabin, who got a kick out of looking at books in English. One of them claimed to be the Chinese correspondent for the Mongolian national news agency, and I did not doubt it. He said he knew one of the authors of Tom's Lonely Planet. Perhaps he did.

The border crossing was not one of my favorites thus far. Upon reaching the Chinese exit point, we disembarked from the train and sat for three hours while they changed the wheel-base of the entire train, to allow it to run on the Mongolian and Russian tracks. Apparently they lift each train car individually and put it onto a whole different set of wheels. At least this is what I am told; everything looked the same to me. Finally right about midnight, we pulled away from China and entered Mongolia, stopped again to get our passports stamped (no visa required for Americans staying up to 90 days, in case you're thinking about a holiday in Mongolia). We gladly retired to bed at this point and passed through Southern Mongolia in our sleep.When we awoke around sunrise the next morning, we we truly in the desert. Nothing but dirt, sand, and the occasional scrub brush or patch of melting snow. It was a pretty magnificent sight, not quite like any desert scene I have ever laid eyes on.

Thus we passed the next few hours until our our arrival at 13:30 hours in Ulan Bataar. UB is a strange city. It has nearly a million people I think, and it is such a contrast from the rest of the country that we saw. For hours we passed total desolation, with the occasioanl Ger (a Mongolian round tent). No one and nothing but shepherds and grazing animals. And then suddenly this concrete city rises from the desert, and it seems unnatural.

So arriving in Ulan Bataar, I had about 30 hours to kill before I had to get back in a train. Tom and I joined forces and headed for a hostel, where we checked in and then set about exploring this town. Going out, I put on every article of clothing I could muster to brave the nearly freezing temperatures and gusty winds. What a contrast from Malaysia! We took care of business, Tom picking up his return plane ticket and I my onward train ticket, then went to a Mongolian restaurant to find sustenance. We got a true taste of Mongolia in the Chingis beer (a vile liquid), and our hearty meat and bread dishes, which was an interesting cross between some Chinese dishes and things that seemed more Russian.

In fact Mongolia is really a crossroads between the two superpowers of China and Russia. During my brief stint here, I couldn't really decide whether I was in Asia proper or Siberia. The people looked a bit Chinese but had a different twinkle in their eye. The writing system utilized the cyrillic alphabet, as does Russian, and the architecture seemed more Soviet than Chinese.
Mongolia is an interesting place that I can't fairly judge from so little time there, but what I found most interesting is that this was the birthplace of one of the largest empires ever seen on this planet, but there is not a single ancient monument to show for it. Sure, the modern Mongolian state has built statues in honor of Chinggis (aka Ghengis) Khan and his decendants, but The Khans never built any grand structures. There are no ruins to visit in this country, as far as I can tell.

So Tom and I hung out for the rest of the day, relaxing and going out for a couple drinks (we found a better Mongolian beer). The next day he headed out to the countryside and I spent the day killing time in this rather boring city, doing what I do best by walking around aimlessly, bouncing into and out of cafes and antique stores. Eventually I had killed all the time that I could, so I picked up my bags and tried to hail a taxi, which in this country means raising your hand at every passing car and seeing who is willing to gve you a ride for money. I nice peace corps girl helped me find a ride to the train station and I boarded the next train to Irkutsk, Russia.

And now I am in Irkutsk and would love to tell you about it, but I need to get back out into that world and explore it, because I leave at 2:30 in the morning for the next leg of my journey, and it promises to be a grueling one: 84.5 hours to Moscow.