On the morning of the 25th of September I awoke with somewhat of a sore head, any many happy memories of going dancing in what started as a totally deserted Mongolian nightclub and quickly became party central when people started arriving at, of course, midnight on a Wednesday.
A good time was by all and if Alice hadn’t gone back to the hotel after dinner there was no way whatsoever I would have woken up in time to catch the train to Beijing. (Alice: In fact I have never had so much fun hitting Greg and telling him to keep his eyes open “No don’t lay down again… sit up and drink this”.) If Adam had been successful in his attempts to buy one of the two-litre, insulated, screw-top plastic beer tankards from the BBQ restaurant the night before, further problems may have ensued. They weren’t selling them. And they weren’t slow in coming to clear them off the table when we finished either.
Not so much to mention with regard to this part of the train trip. We got on the train at 7.45am, went to sleep, and woke up in the desert mid-morning.
Alice: The landscape was spectacular (I actually got to see it). The grassland stretched on and on, under an amazingly blue sky. Mostly the land was pretty flat, but in sections there were hills gently rolling past. It would be amazing to do this train ride in July when the grass is green and the wild flowers are out. I took quite a bit of video. So here is a small sample.
Back to Greg: Suffice to say the trains got more comfortable with each section, which made us feel very sorry indeed for the Intrepid group we met in the nightclub in Mongolia who were going the other way, from Beijing to St. Petersburg.
On this train each carriage had it’s own powerpoint; we could finally import our photos from the camera and clear the memory cards. And charge our phones. And they came with a proper set of headphones for each passenger. Quite frankly it was paradise.
Something had to ruin it (actually someone). I spilled some soup which we thought was soup but which was actually vegetable stock all over the seat. That was fine except that we got one of the tea towels quite dirty in cleaning it up. I thought that would be an ideal opportunity to a. dispose of some the useless packets of vegetable stock and b. the half loaf of bread, which we’d been carrying in our food bag, and also re-hydrate a bit without drinking all the water. But I spilled most of the soup, and the bread was mouldy.
Hurrah!
Plan B was to sit quietly and look out the window for a bit, then go through some photos, and once again daydream about catching up on our travel journals while also being overawed by the swollen scale of the task at hand.
The only thing to put a dampener on our rolling paradise was the rail gauges.
First we had to stop and clear Mongolian outbound and Chinese inbound customs. Which took about 15 minutes.
In Mongolia (and Russia) they use 4’9.5″ rails. In China they use 5′ rails. To alleviate problems one must pull the train into a big set of sheds, line up all the carriages, lift them off the ground, and roll new wheels underneath. The shunting around of all the carriages takes longer than the process of changing wheels. But with the options limited to a. get off the train after immigration and wait on the platform with the toilets locked, or b. wait on the train with the toilets locked and take photos of the wheel changing procedure, we all stayed on the train.
Customs and Bogie-changing, combined, was supposed to take from 7pm until 1am. We arrived a bit late – maybe 7.30pm – for Customs, and were rolling through China again sometime around 12.30am. Not sure when; most people went to sleep after the bogie-changing finished. Luan tried to go to sleep before; but the joining of two carriages together results in a surprisingly solid jolt. She woke up every time, and cursed more and more each time.
And in the morning – Beijing.
Greg
