Trans-Siberian: crossing the border

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Leaving Irkutsk, Siberia, meant leaving our last stop in Russia, next stop Ulaan Bataar, in Mongolia. But first, a fair few hours spent at border crossings! Hence why I have plenty of time on my hands to write this entry.

Strictly speaking, the train journey we're on is more specifically known as the Trans-Mongolian. The Trans-Siberian is a general term used for any of the journeys that crazy people like us take to cross Russia to get to the other side, to either Vladivostok (Russia), Harbin or Beijing (China). The fastest journey across without getting off is 7 days. See what happens when you spend endless days on a train reading a guide book, all these really useful bits of information!

Because we've now joined the Trans-Mongolian route from Irkutsk, there are a lot of Mongolian traders on the train, all having picked up their stock in Moscow and taking it back to sell in Mongolia. This used to be the main tea trading route but now the trade includes (but is certainly not limited to) towels, cotton sheets, jeans, fruit, you name it, we prob have it on this train right now, and you could buy it for a lot less than Western world prices! Even a tyre just got rolled through! (I wonder if that means a whole car in pieces is lying scattered through this train) At each stop along the way, they all get off and ply their wares to the locals who are all eagerly awaiting their antipicated arrival. Even our carriage attendant was getting off and selling some towels, earning her bit of cash on the side. Like a very entertaining travelling market, really.

And now the fun begins, a delicate juggling act before the border. The customs officials will focus on the traders through the border stop, not us foreigners. Apparently, you can only have certain limits of each type of good, so they spend their time on the train moving all the goods sharing them out back and forth between traders compartments, consolidating and dividing up their stock, so none of them will be over the limit. There is a constant stream of people going past our cabin door carrying all sorts of things under their arms! And hiding them in all sorts of nooks and crannies of the train.

Which is why our border crossing is anticipated to take more than 4 hours. We stop on the Russian side, so that the Russian officials can do their thing, then the same thing happens a few hours later, on the Mongolian side!

After some form filling on our part, a form-stamping frenzy on their part and some serious cabin searching by the very official looking guys who you don't want to mess with, we're through the Russian border in a record time of 4 hours. (sometimes it can take 6 hours or more)

The Mongolian one is an anticlimax where they didn't even search the cabins and merely stamped our customs declaration forms though this somehow still took us 2 hours. They definitely had the smartest uniforms. I wanted to tell them so and they definitely looked better than their Russian counterparts but there's no joking with these guys. They may take you off the train and never let you leave this isolated remote border town, or worse, send you back to Russia, where they'd probably shoot you, cos apparently, that's just what they do! (as per our guide book, I really have read it cover to cover a few times over now)

Fast forward 3 days and we have left Mongolia bound for China. This means the whole border process repeated again on the Mongolian side and then the Chinese side but this time we also have the added bonus of the Bogie Change.

Nothing to do with sticking our fingers up our noses, the Bogie Change refers to the change of rail wheels our train is using. Russia and China do not have the same rail track width so as a result, the trains get lifted up, with us in them, the "wheels" or bogies, to use the technical term, rolled out from underneath the carriages and replaced with new ones designed to fit the narrower Chinese track. Apparently, the reason for this rather convuluted process dates back to the days when Russia was trying to prevent China from invading their country (or maybe China was preventing Russia, I'm not sure) but in any case, I feel all the more enriched for having witnessed my first ever bogie change, and am thankful to both countries for adding on a further 3 hours to my journey for this process to happen.

Stay tuned, next up our wonderful time in Mongolia and mixing with my countrymen in China.

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Comments

[Curry]

HARD OUT!
all i can say is - HARD OUT!! those border patrols sound scary! how's the gong tong wah going? leh sik mm-sik gong aah? leh hai sik hoo dor meen ar... leh hoo bao aah?? to get by, speak the basics - chee sor hay ben dor ar? hehehe