The most important thing we did today was have a solid nap in the morning.
The rest may be safely consigned to the dustbin of history.
After repeated injunctions against not letting anyone on the train as you to ‘hold onto something for you’ while we crossed the border, and warnings as to the possible severity of cabin searches where possibly illegal trading and importing/exporting may be occurring, and further reminders re; being quite nice indeed and polite to the customs officials – wait for it – absolutely nothing happened.
Well actually one thing happened. And it didn’t have much to do with customs.
Customs, it turned out, resembled a well-known play by Mr Shakespeare – and no it wasn’t ‘A midsummer Night’s Dream’.
First thing; we didn’t arrive at the Russia-Mongolia border until 1pm.
So we had the morning to kick around, play cards, daydream about catching up on travel journals, and get dealt an incredible hand with about 8 diamonds that allowed me to win my first game of Hearts in quite some time. Also someone who regretted it later passed me the Ace and the King of Diamonds.
But anyway.
We pulled everything out from under our seats, we packed our bags, we hid our traveller’s cheques and cash in excess of about 250 roubles in various places (some people put US dollars, which can smudge or worse, in their socks, and then walked around kind of gingerly). Then we waited. We interrupted our card games. We went to the toilets on the platform before they shut at 3.30pm. A surprisingly large number of people went to the toilet at 3.26 or even 3.28pm.
Just before 4pm our train carriage was shunted over to the Customs Control Zone. We put our baggage on the seats for easy inspection. A lady came on and handed out Customs forms. We made many stupid mistakes on these forms, and we started again. We somehow didn’t have enough pens between us. A different lady came on the train, but this was no big deal either; she was just collecting the Customs Forms and translating the appropriate parts into Russian. Then she gave them back to us.
Someone else came to collect the passports. They took the passports away. They took our passports. We observed them sitting on a bench drinking tea.
Finally, Customs. They looked at our forms. We stood outside our carriages. They glanced briefly.
Our forms were stamped. Some time later, with the beginnings of cabin fever fraying our wits, our passports were returned. Except for Ann’s.
As a Thai national, she is allowed to stay for 30 days in Russia without a Visa. If for some reason her flight to Russia was booked a day earlier than she expected, despite emailing so and so and being assured it would be fixed, then she would have stayed one day more than allowed. So we sat down and busily debated what might happen; if you have a visa and stay an extra day that’s one thing. If you don’t have a visa and stay an extra day, that’s another thing. And all train stations in Russia run on Moscow time. So despite it being 6.30pm here, it’s midday in Moscow and they’re probably just calling someone to issue something and will bring your passport back in a minute.
However no one from Customs had said anything to that effect; Ann just didn’t have her passport.
Then our train carriage got shunted back onto the rest of the train. We thought the train would then have to be shuffled back into the same order as before. We thought they were moving us down one way so that they could later on move us back the other way. When we saw the Mongolia border signs, we began to wonder what was going to happen. Can you get into Mongolia without a passport? Do they pack you up and send you back to Russia? Would her passport somehow be waiting at the other end after whatever necessary ‘processing’ for a one-day overstay? Do you have to stay in Mongolia and wait for the passport to arrive?
It was all the same for us; Ann had called her boss and they had a back up plan which involved someone from Ulan Bataar taking the group through to Beijing.
About Mongolia Customs officials, I can safely say that they are efficient, and also well-dressed, and chap that inspected our carriage actually seemed to have a proper look. But then again it was obvious that our carriage was full of tourists, and that there was no semi-legal importing and exporting of any kind going on.
Now I’ll skip forward a bit to the end of the story, and in doing so I’ll skip the following parts.
a. the part when Ann actually got her passport back from the Provodnitsa just before the train left Russia.
b. the part where half the group knew it was a practical joke and the other half didn’t.
c. the part where the half that didn’t know started organising a donation
d. the part where it backfired badly after Ann didn’t get off the train at all, and everyone broke down crying as she was presented with the donation, an improvised card, and a nice speech.
e. and I will definitely skip the part where she had to come clean and explain that she had her passport all along.
None of us actually thought the joke would go on that long.
Was I popular for being let in on the joke and not telling the other boys? Err, no.
OK. Having skipped that part, I can now tell you about how Shanika, Nat and myself got off to go the toilet and came back to find our train in the process of rolling away. I can also tell you about the elderly gent in the toilet who took our 5 roubles on the way in and said ‘Welcome to Mongolia’ on the way out. We were warned this might happen during the shunting and re-ordering procedure, and not to worry, etc. I can tell you with confidence that the carriage number was 087 – 10335. But it didn’t seem like there were any other platforms around. And we couldn’t see where our carriage had gone. It went off back towards Russia but it didn’t stop to come back and rejoin the train.
So we waited on the platform. Then we waited a bit more. Then we had a giggle about how this would be ‘the boy who cried wolf.’
Then I ran down to other end of the train to see if our carriage had been attached on the front. It hadn’t.
No one had any mobile signal so we couldn’t call someone on the train to find out where they were (if they knew).
We waited five more minutes. And the train came rolling back down. Back on the carriage we found that Ann had also been to the ladies’ room, and somehow, despite being in more or less the same place at the same time, we missed her running after the carriage and jumping on after thinking she actually was going to get left behind this time.
So.
Just your usual border crossing.
Greg
