The train ride to Mongolia
The best part of the trip, easily, was the train ride between Beijing and Mongolia. I decided to upgrade to a first-class cabin - the second-class berth had four beds and that's it, while the first-class berth had two beds, a comfy chair and an attached shower/toilet you share with the next cabin - and I'm glad I did. I've mentioned it in the past, but I'm getting a little old for hostels (though I still will do them occasionally) and crowded train berths. I got lucky with my berth companion, a 70-ish Canadian widow who's lived overseas pretty much her whole adult life and has spent the last few decades in Egypt.
So lots of good conversation on the way up on the 30-hour trip. Leave at 7:30 am from Beijing, land in Ulaan Baatar around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday. Halfway into the trip, the train stops at the border for 3 hours so they can change the wheels (the gauges are different between the two countries) and dining cars. (The Chinese one has about 12 stir-fried dishes listed on a single page; the Mongolian one has about 9 pages of menus, with lots of variety.) You stop in the train station to load up on snacks (they have a store with groceries of all types inside, and they opened up the bar upstairs so the expats on our train could clear them out of beer to pass the time.) At midnight, you pull into Mongolia for an hour as they check your passport, then you roll through the Gobi in the night, only occasionally waiting up in the train jerks to a stop.
I talked with a few people who had done the train ride before I went up, and they raved about it as the best thing about traveling in Mongolia, and they were right. It was quite comfy, clean as a 5-star hotel (30 minutes into the start, the workes were straightening out the rugs lining the hallways, and they washed the windows every 6 hours or so, including the outside if they could during stops) and offered unparalleled opportunities for sightseeing. In China, within an hour of leaving, you are going through mountainous valleys. A few hours after that, you're going through plateaus, then desertlike plains as the sun goes down. You wake up to the sun coming up over the Gobi.
You look out the window all the time, and think, "Holy crap, is that beautiful," again and again. And that's all you can ask for on a train ride.
About an hour into the trip, you do your first double-take to make sure it's what you think it is outside.
And yes, it is the Great Wall.
But it's not the only ruins you see on the way up. I'm pretty sure this used to be an aqueduct in China, but was not sure.
It's easy tho think that Beijing is like all of China, but it's not. Much of the country is still small villages where people get by on $1 or $2 US a day.
They're not pretty, but they're home, for some.
My berth-mate was surprised at some of the crops we saw. There was corn being grown everywhere on the ride up. It is eaten in the north and is on a lot of menus from northern Chinese cuisine, but my guess is a lot of this is for feed for pigs, which are on the menu everwhere in China.
And lots of dairy cows showing up, too. At this point, I was 6 hours into my 7 days without Internet or access to English-language news, so I had no idea bout the latest food scare in China, this time about tainted milk.
In an area as flat and desolate as Inner Mongolia (in China) and Mongolia, and with China having pollution problems as bad as it does, we were surprised that there weren't solar power panels everywhere and wind turbines. As soon as we started talking about it, we came across a few in northern China, just before sunset. And in Mongolia, my guide said, a lot of the nomad herders have solar panels for their gers to power their TVs and electric stoves and other appliances.
I wasn't the only person lining up for pictures at sunset. Our neighbors were Dutch.
Typical scenery in the north.
Not much pollution up north, thank god.
My favorite sunset picture.
Right as it goes down.
Where I slept, on the top. They even had a small tv screen and headphones so you could watch dvds they were playing. It was comfortable enough, though it would not be if I was 6 inches taller.
And this is what you wake up to.
One of the tiny stations that the train stopped at in Mongolia.
And in Mongolia, in the Gobi, it's flat. Real flat.
And it doesn't take long before you see the first of many herds of horses, or other animals.
Besides agriculture, the main economic engine in Mongolia right now is mining, mostly coal, gold and copper.
Going around the corner.
In Mongolia, the brick houses all had a vestibule on the end of the house. Gers and houses are almost always a dull beige in color in Mongolia, but had touches of brilliant color in the details, such as the vestibule or the door into the ger.
So lots of good conversation on the way up on the 30-hour trip. Leave at 7:30 am from Beijing, land in Ulaan Baatar around 2 in the afternoon on Sunday. Halfway into the trip, the train stops at the border for 3 hours so they can change the wheels (the gauges are different between the two countries) and dining cars. (The Chinese one has about 12 stir-fried dishes listed on a single page; the Mongolian one has about 9 pages of menus, with lots of variety.) You stop in the train station to load up on snacks (they have a store with groceries of all types inside, and they opened up the bar upstairs so the expats on our train could clear them out of beer to pass the time.) At midnight, you pull into Mongolia for an hour as they check your passport, then you roll through the Gobi in the night, only occasionally waiting up in the train jerks to a stop.
I talked with a few people who had done the train ride before I went up, and they raved about it as the best thing about traveling in Mongolia, and they were right. It was quite comfy, clean as a 5-star hotel (30 minutes into the start, the workes were straightening out the rugs lining the hallways, and they washed the windows every 6 hours or so, including the outside if they could during stops) and offered unparalleled opportunities for sightseeing. In China, within an hour of leaving, you are going through mountainous valleys. A few hours after that, you're going through plateaus, then desertlike plains as the sun goes down. You wake up to the sun coming up over the Gobi.
You look out the window all the time, and think, "Holy crap, is that beautiful," again and again. And that's all you can ask for on a train ride.
About an hour into the trip, you do your first double-take to make sure it's what you think it is outside.
And yes, it is the Great Wall.
But it's not the only ruins you see on the way up. I'm pretty sure this used to be an aqueduct in China, but was not sure.
It's easy tho think that Beijing is like all of China, but it's not. Much of the country is still small villages where people get by on $1 or $2 US a day.
They're not pretty, but they're home, for some.
My berth-mate was surprised at some of the crops we saw. There was corn being grown everywhere on the ride up. It is eaten in the north and is on a lot of menus from northern Chinese cuisine, but my guess is a lot of this is for feed for pigs, which are on the menu everwhere in China.
And lots of dairy cows showing up, too. At this point, I was 6 hours into my 7 days without Internet or access to English-language news, so I had no idea bout the latest food scare in China, this time about tainted milk.
In an area as flat and desolate as Inner Mongolia (in China) and Mongolia, and with China having pollution problems as bad as it does, we were surprised that there weren't solar power panels everywhere and wind turbines. As soon as we started talking about it, we came across a few in northern China, just before sunset. And in Mongolia, my guide said, a lot of the nomad herders have solar panels for their gers to power their TVs and electric stoves and other appliances.
I wasn't the only person lining up for pictures at sunset. Our neighbors were Dutch.
Typical scenery in the north.
Not much pollution up north, thank god.
My favorite sunset picture.
Right as it goes down.
Where I slept, on the top. They even had a small tv screen and headphones so you could watch dvds they were playing. It was comfortable enough, though it would not be if I was 6 inches taller.
And this is what you wake up to.
One of the tiny stations that the train stopped at in Mongolia.
And in Mongolia, in the Gobi, it's flat. Real flat.
And it doesn't take long before you see the first of many herds of horses, or other animals.
Besides agriculture, the main economic engine in Mongolia right now is mining, mostly coal, gold and copper.
Going around the corner.
In Mongolia, the brick houses all had a vestibule on the end of the house. Gers and houses are almost always a dull beige in color in Mongolia, but had touches of brilliant color in the details, such as the vestibule or the door into the ger.
posted by throm at 10:55 AM
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