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Published: August 19th 2011
Boarding the Ulaanbaatar-Beijing Train
Boarding the final train of the Trans Mongolian journey from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing Train at 6:30amWoke up early and made our way to Ulaanbaatar station to board the 06:30 train for Beijing. The train was the cleanest and most modern so far. It was formed only of around six carriages. The attendants were Chinese – the language was completely different to Mongolian.
After getting comfortable, we spent some time chatting to our cabin mate, a 20 year old Swedish girl called Amanda. She was travelling with friends in the cabin next to us and planned to head south east from Beijing, towards Tibet. We then decided to check out the restaurant cart. Upon walking there, we realised that the majority of passengers were Europeans, generally aged 50 and upwards, a lot of whom were in large tour groups. This really killed the sense of being so far from home. In addition to this, the restaurant car was more modern than what you would expect in a brand new Deutsch Bahnn or Eurostar train, and the waiting time for a seat was about four hours!!! The food was Mongolian, but looked very plain and overpriced, so instead we decided to spend the morning at the bar drinking Mongolian beer and reading though our Lonely Planet China
Changing the wheels on every carriage
This is a lengthy process... The carriages are separated and each carriage is lifted into the air while the wheels are changed due to the track widths differing in China book, plotting our route in China.
By around 6pm it was dark and we were resting in our cabin when the train pulled up at the Mongolian Chinese border. It was at that point that we realised the toilets had been locked (you can never use them at stations) and would remain locked until we were across the border and the wheels on all carriage had been changed (required as the Chinese railway line is a different width from Mongolian/Russian lines)... We could not leave the train... so, eight hours without the toilet... with no warning at all!!!!!
After handing our passports to Mongolian border control and filling countless immigration and export declaration forms we waited for several hours before crossing the border into a very large indoor station area. The train was then slammed forwards and backwards every few minutes for the next hour or so. It felt like another train was crashing into it and was loud enough to not only wake any sleeping passenger on board but almost knock them out of the top bunk in their cabin! We soon realised that the carriages were being separated as we could see that the carriage that
Next stop... China :)
No route plotted for China yet...all we know is we have a flight out of Hanoi (Vietnam) in six weeks... used to be joined directly to ours was right next to us, had been lifted about 20 feet in the air, and had the wheels completely removed. It was quite an impressive sight!
Hours later, all carriages had had their wheels changed, our passports had been returned, our forms collected and the train was moving through China. At about 3am the train stopped at a station in China where passengers who were awake could get off and stretch their legs. I jumped off and instantly noticed lit up Chinese signs everywhere and announcements being made over the speakers at the station. Relaxing music was quietly being played over the station speakers, which was... different. I also noticed that the train was now about three times its original length! We must have gained a dozen or more carriages during the wheel change process (maybe someone made a seriously bad mix up)!. For half an hour or so, I chatted to a Dutch couple who I had met previously on the Irkutsk-Ulaanbaatar train a week before. I also chatted to Swiss man, who had travelled all the way from Switzerland by train (no flights at all – I was jealous!).
We are now in China!
It was an amazingly dramatic change of scenery that we woke up to in China having traveled through hot, flat, dry Mongolia The following morning we woke to a completely different change of scenery. The dry, hot Mongolian grasslands had disappeared and instead we were travelling through valleys with large mountains either side – most of which the tops were in the clouds. There were frequently rivers running parallel to the train, and the weather was now humid and misty. The dramatic change of scenery instantly made the thought of exploring China very exciting. We couldn't wait to arrive!!
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