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Published: June 13th 2007
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Beijing to the Russian Border
Doug Pickles The Chinese built the Great Wall to keep the invading Mongol hordes out. Ask a Mongolian to rank their Russian, Japanese and Chinese neighbours in order of preference and the Chinese will always come bottom. In short, there is no love lost between the land of Khan and the land of Han.
I arrived at Beijing Central station at 7am in a foul mood, sweating booze. Since landing, 10 hours previously, I'd managed to walk round Tiananmen Square, complete a bar crawl with mixed results and get ripped off by a guy with long fingernails and a haircut resembling Gary Glitter's c. 1978. In the intervening six years since my last visit, I'd forgotten that the Chinese operate two pricing systems - one for locals and one for tourists. My rusty and slurred Mandarin only got me so far in defending myself against a bar bill of West End proportions.
My limited sleep the previous night was, in retrospect, a god send as I spent most of the first day on Train 32 dozing on my top bunk. The Trans-Mongolian service to Ulaan Baatar was clean and comfortable. Each carriage has two 'providnista' assigned to them, who diligently
Rip-off merchants
Don't be taken in by their easy smiles... keep order, marshall you on/off the train at stops, clean the loos and service the carriage's samovars. This ingenious contraption - either coal or wood fired - provide an unlimited supply of hot water for tea and pot noodle style snacks.
My berth companions for the 29 hour journey were two Mongolian students on their way home for the summer and a Polish guy who lived in Paris. The combination of an Eastern European background overlaid with decades living in France and effete mannerisms delivered one of the most grating English accents I could imagine. I therefore limited our conversation, preferring to communicate with the Mongolians even though their language sounded like a variation of Klingon.
I noted that there were three types of passenger on our train. Group one were independent or semi-independent visitors like me, happy to be experiencing the train. The second group, and sadly the smallest, were local people using it as a service to get them from A - B. The last and largest group were the elderly parties of trainspotters, marked out by their continual camera usage and nerdy appearance - try and imagine a trainspotter on holiday. At the Chinese-Mongolian border
Choo-choo!
Let the train take the strain. they got a particular thrill when they had to change the bogies - for those not in the know this was necessary because the two rail systems operate on different gauge widths.
After our late night border formalities had been completed we trundled on - the train rarely gets above about 40 mph - towards Ulaan Baatar. I'd read in the Lonely Planet that UB was a scar on an otherwise beautiful landscape, and as we approached I could understand why. Ugly smokestacks dominated the sky-line, the track either side was strewn with rubbish and years of Soviet decay were evident wherever I looked. In fact, the Russians have practically bankrupt the Mongolians by charging them for all the infrastructure 'instaled' during the Soviet period. But this is only one side to Mongolia, a place where everything, incidently, is name after Genghis Khan. Ulaan Baatar occupies the centre, but in the south there is the Gobi desert, where it snows in winter! In the west there are the Kazakh tribes, who allegedly hunt with golden eagles, and in the north and east, semi-nomadic Mongols living in Ger tents, herding their livestock with motorbikes and drinking salty tea (it wasn't
Look! I'm on a horse!
I named her Smelly Nelly very nice) and fermented mare's milk. To get as close as I could to these people, I soon left UB behind and headed out into the countryside with my guide, Bolor, a charming 23 year old who had spent 4 years working in Sweden. Our Ger camp was clearly geared for toursits, but after the long train ride I wasn't too bothered. That night I think I had the best night's sleep I've had in years.
Mongolian cuisine is heavily dependent on their livestock, particularly sheep and goats with mutton and dairy products providing the bulk of their diet. So, we had mutton stuffed pancakes for breakfast, mutton soup for lunch and, excitingly, mutton kebabs and noodles for dinner. Good luck if you're a veggie. It was all needed though, after a long day on horses and trekking around the surrounding hills.
What struck me most about Mongolia was the abject poverty in the cities. It was interesting to learn that many people, following years of Soviet style industrialisation, are now abandoning towns and cities for the countryside because a better living can be made from the land - a kind of reverse urbanisation. This is in stark
Ger Camp at Sunset
DTU was the inevitable response contrast to neighbouring China where people are flocking to the cities for more money, although not necessarily a better standard of living. But in typical Mongolian style all this is worn with a reassuring smile and postive outlook. In their society negativity of any sort is frowned upon and people celebrate getting older (getting wiser) and always answer "very well" if you ask them how they are, even if they are anything but.
I left UB on a dry, dusty day with the wind rolling around the city throwing the dirt and sand into your face. I wasn't sad to leave, on the contrary I was excited about going to Russia. But I did leave wondering how Mongolia and Mongolians would get on in the 21st century.
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