Goodbye Mongolia, Hello China


Advertisement
China's flag
Asia » China » Beijing
August 19th 2009
Published: September 1st 2009
Edit Blog Post

Total Distance: 0 miles / 0 kmMouse: 0,0

Trans-Mongolian


So after a few days of pottering around UB, doing the last of the sightseeing; taking in the history museum, an amazing English fry up, Tony getting very drunk and being found on the sofa in the hostel in just his boxers, seeing the cultural show including Mongolian throat singers and contortionists, it was finally time to say a very sad goodbye to Mongolia and an exciting hello to China.

Our train to Beijing was 3o hours, in our cabin were Ben and Sandi so all was good, in fact from what we saw we reckoned there wasn’t a single local on this train, it was full of tour groups, in particular what looked like saga tours, visions of them getting stuck while on the squat loos haunted us!!!!

We settled in to our cabin nicely and enjoyed many beers and games of cards, drafts and scrabble. The train went through a bit of the Gobi we hadn’t seen before and it was nice to see the vast landscapes one last time.

After 7 hours we arrived at the boarder and after having our temperature taken twice for swine flu, second time with the windows of the train open we were let into China and taken straight to the bogie shed. Here is where it all happens, the Russian/Mongolian gauges are different to those of China so the bogies as they are called had to be changed, it was actually quite interesting seeing how it was done, us being raise up high with the old ones taken off and new ones being rolled in.

After 4 hours of not being able to go to the loo (not good when all you’ve done is drink beer all day) we finally roll onto Chinese soil.

The next morning we awoke to a completely different landscape, we were definitely in China, we even saw a very old amazing bit of the great wall.

So at 3pm we arrived in the madness of Beijing, first thoughts totally love it!!!!



Additional photos below
Photos: 14, Displayed: 14


Advertisement



Tot: 0.106s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 61; dbt: 0.0766s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.2mb