Advertisement
Published: August 11th 2005
Edit Blog Post
Hi all,
After three months in China I am about to leave this country. I am leaving with mixed feelings. This country is amazing - amazing scenery, amazing different groups of people, amazing architecture, amazing culture. But this country is also very hard for traveling - the language barrier, the thinking that is always "inside the box" and the common answer of "no" instead of trying to solve the problem or even understand it, the constant need to be on your toes and make sure you are not taken advantage of because you are a tourist. This all made my stay in China very tiring, and I feel I need a break from the country. I do know that I'll be back here in a month or so, because there are some places in China that I haven't seen yet and I don't want to miss them, despite all the trouble. I guess that means that after all China has more good than bad, at least in my view, and I'll be back...
The direct train to Mongolia is pre-booked for weeks in advance, probably because of the summer vacation season, and the Nadaam Festival that is coming up soon in
Mongolia. In order to get there I had to take a bus to the border town, Erlian. Once again I bought a ticket from an agency that promised an air-conditioned bus with toilet inside (never saw that in China...), and when I arrived to the station there was a regular sleeper bus, and the only available seats (they didn't bother reserving seats for the tourists even though we ordered the tickets almost a week in advance) were at the back, where five sleepers were connected together to a big, tight, bed. To make things worst it was raining through the ride, and the roof was leaking at the back, and my blanket, my bed, and even me got soaked. Great!
Except for five tourists the bus was full of Mongolian. China is very cheap to them, so they bought tons of things here, and each one of them had many huge bags full of just about anything. There was no room in the luggage storage of the bus for all of it, so the rest was in the ails of the bus. In order to get to our back seats we had to walk over the bags, some of them
And now even closer
Look at the size of the house! almost a meter high. Just imagine how the bus looked like (I was too angry and didn't take a picture of it).
About two hours after leaving Beijing we passed near the Great Wall at Badaling. I could see the wall (again) from the bus, and it was just like the pictures (well, this is where most of the pictures are taken...).
About fifteen hours later we arrived to Erlian, after almost no sleep at all, and I felt I am about to get sick. Erlian itself is a funny little border town - signs in many languages, a big market for buying just about anything, truck loaded with goods - looks like a big duty free shop.
The border crossing was funny as well. We took a car across the border. Nobody even looked at our bags - we could have brought anything with us across the border. The Mongolian officer looked for a visa in my passport, even though I don't need one to enter Mongolia. She asked me where is my visa, and I explained that I don't need one. She started to ask around, and nobody knew it. Only about twenty minutes later they found somebody
who could approve that I can enter the country without a visa. Don't they have a course before they start working at the border check?
On the other side of the border there is a Mongolian border town, Zamen Uud. We went to buy a train ticket to Ulan Bataar, and discovered that all the sleepers are full. We had to buy a seat on the train, and we thought that since we have a number of seat on the ticket we will also have a seat on the train.
We went to eat lunch, and for the first time in months I ate with a fork and not with chopsticks. t was funny, and we looked around to make sure that the locals eat like that as well, and it's not only because we are tourists that we got the forks.
The train was even worse than the bus. After they sold all the seats they sold tickets with no seat numbers, so on a bench of three there were five people. The packages and bags of the Mongolians were on the train as well, so free floor space was not available as well. We just couldn't move, and
Another Mongolian kid
Hard to see how it lookes in there... I didn't think I would survive a seventeen hour ride like that.
To make things even worse, while we crossed the Gobi Desert the locals started to shut down the windows. I didn't understand why and it was very hot inside. I looked out the window and saw a huge sand storm just in front of us. When I say huge I mean more than 50 meters high and more than 15 km long. When the train entered it, the sun disappeared. Everything around looked dark and yellow. Everything was full of sand and dust, even though the windows were closed. We had to breath through our shirts to filter the air a little bit. We drove through it for almost an hour. After that the train was so dirty, and I was covered with sand that looked more like mud. I lost it completely. I just wanted to go home.
I believe that if I had a Chinese visa at that time I would have just turned back to China and board a plane home. Lucky me that I had to issue a new visa in Ulan Bataar, so I had to move forward.
When we arrived to Ulan Bataar I just followed a Swiss couple that was with me on the train to the guesthouse they were going to. I just didn't mind where I was going. After two nights with almost no sleep, and all of the experiences on the way, I just felt like a zombie. I was really afraid I would get sick because of the weakness I felt. Only a day before the bus ride I finally recovered from my previous illness, and I really didn't want to go through another. Took a long shower and went to bed.
Rested in UB for a few days, while meeting many people and learning what there is to do in Mongolia. I came to this country without a guide book and without any knowledge of the things to do and to see.
Another thing was that I discovered that there is a middle eastern restaurant here (actually an Israeli restaurant, but who will come to an Israeli restaurant?). I even met the manager and the owner, and had a Friday night dinner with them, but that's another story. Went there to try their Humus. It was the first Humus in three months, and even though it wasn't that good (what do you expect?) it was nice. They also had a very good falafel...
The rest of my Mongolian experiences will be told later,
R.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.117s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 10; qc: 28; dbt: 0.0473s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb