Snow in the Desert

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I left Beijing on the 8am K23 train to Ulaanbaatar (Улаанбаатар), Mongolia.

I was at the train station very early as I wasn't sure which one it was. Luckily I was right; it was Beijing Main Station. I got on the train and met my cabin comrade, after a brief discussion about panda-cide, food-stalgia, and improving Eurovision by adding a Hunger Game element, we went to have something to eat in the restaurant carriage.

Tomato and scrambled egg was REALLY tasty, which shocked me!

Outside the window, mountains covered with autumn trees passed us by. There were deep cracks going down into the earth, huge dips and wide gullies for the rivers. When the trees disappeared, the mountains were covered in windmills. I did not expect any signs of energy consciousness in China.

At midday, a section of the Great Wall was visible. It shouldn't have surprised me, the Wall is 5,500 odd miles long, but to see something that is connected to something I stood on miles and miles away, really brought home the scale of it all: that Wall is really very long.

The mountains fell down into hours of farmland. Farmers were gathering in their crops by hand, there were no machines in sight. Crops growing inside the ruins of tumbled down buildings. Groups of men hand-laying a railway. These idyllic, out-dated scenes countered by the electricity pylons, gas tankers, silos, and our laptops and iPads.

The farmland dissipated as we reached the edge of the desert, and sand, grass and rocks swollen into dunes. Every so often, we saw shepherds with their flocks on small, rough pastures of grass. It would have been the perfect pastoral scene, where it not for the motorbikes/dirtbikes/etc.

At 9pm we pulled into Erlian, the border-crossing where we changed the bogies, and handed in our passports.

The bogies are the part of the train which houses the wheels, and the carriage sits on top. The width of the tracks is wider in Russia (and by extension many of the former SSRs, including Mongolia) than the tracks in China, which are the same as ours back home. So the train's wheels need to be changed from a 4ft 8½ inches, to 5ft (though it might be 4ft 11 and 27/32 of an inch, Wikipedia is confusing me... that's not much difference, is it?).

There are two ways in which to exchange the bogies. One is to drive the train over a well in the ground and drop the bogies, the other is to uncouple the bogies and lift the train off of them. We were raised up in the air, leaving our bogies behind, and the wheels were pushed out from beneath us by our new bogies. The whole process took several hours, and by the time they had finished, our passports had been processed and we were able to pull out of the station and on to Dzaminude, Mongolia's border-crossing, to process our visas there.

At about 2am we set off into the desert, and I fell asleep.

A few hours later I woke to the awesome scene of the Gobi. A flat expanse of land as far as the eye can see. The Mongolian flag has a blue section in the middle called the 'eternal blue sky', and looking out of that window I could see why. There was only a tiny amount of land, the sky went on forever. A huge dome above us. The clearest blue; pale, but beautiful. My mind provided the perfect score for this, and all I could hear in my head was: BARM b'm-baaaaarm, barm BARM b'm-baaaaarm (Neverending story), which made the whole thing feel very epic!

The sandy ground was covered in small tufts of yellow, green and red grass, that, whilst very separate, gave the illusion of the whole desert being covered in fur. I think there was a road (or at least a furless line) running beside the train track, though it took a long time to see a car on it.

The cars surprised me. I was expecting to see a lot of clapped out old bangers, but the fist one I saw was a Lexus, followed by what to me looked like a pretty new Land Rover. In fact I haven't seen very many old cars at all. It was very strange when we passed Ger camps (nomadic felt houses) that had Hondas, Toyotas, and, again, the occasional Lexus parked outside.

We passed a town maybe about the size of Carnforth called Airag, but mostly we just the occasional camp with a few people guarding their horses, camels, sheep, etc.

The landscape is far from empty, it is littered with technology; pylons and poles are everywhere. Horses running... possibly wild, the occasional group of cows with their motorbiking cowherd, gers surrounded by fences, fences alongside the tracks, and, once in a while, a quadbiker.

Managed to convince the providnits-man (carriage attendant) to lend me a cup, so had a proper brew with my breakfast.

Early in the morning, it began snowing. Tiny, little, white specks flew past our window, and at first I didn't realise they were there. But the snow began to stick, and a light dusting covered the desert. The snow flew thicker and grew deeper and within an hour I was wearing sunglasses against the glare; everything was white. A pure sheet outside our window where nothing could be picked out from the blank. New snow, untouched. Beyond beautiful.

We arrived in Ulaanbaatar at twenty past one, and I got off the train wondering how I was going to find my hostel. Fortunately, there was a man holding a sign with the hostel name on it. Four of us (me, my train-buddy, and the couple from the next cabin) went to talk to him, and in the end, we all ended up at the Golden Gobi, where, as soon as we walked through the door, we were offered a cup of tea. A Mongolian tradition I approve of!

Went to have food (ended up having 'Greek' pizza) and a Mongolian beer, which wasn't that bad.

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Look forward to your blogs enjoyed the journey through the desert. :)