Day Fourteen - Jun 9, 2013
Trans-Mongolian Train
Daily Didactic
We woke up after a great night's sleep just an hour or two outside of Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia. At the Ulan Bator station, Brian found a Bank-O-Mat in the station and withdrew what sounded like an impressive 20,000 Mongolian Tugriks. Turns out to be $14 US. It was however, plenty enough to gather some staples at the platform grocery stores. With our new largess, we hit the extraordinarily hand carved Mongolian dining car (they swap them out per country) for breakfast. We don't know much about Mongolia, but they do a dining car right. Better, they take rubles, so we were able to unload what we had left. In the early afternoon we stopped in Saynshand, where Theresa managed to score some awesome homemade butter soaked meat dumplings from a lady on the platform and Brian scored a couple of beverages from the dining car. We spent the remainder of the afternoon having an enjoyable chat with Omar and Karen, our English and Swiss friends two compartments down. We joined them for dinner a little before six, in anticipation of an evening of bureaucracy and train maintenance. Shortly after 7:00 we hit Chinese passport control at Dzamyn Ude. It was a much shorter (and seemingly simpler) process than Mongolia. After an hour, we moved on across the Mongolian-Chinese border to Erlian. In Erlian, we had a customs check and then we had the opportunity to stay on or get off the train while they changed the bogeys, which is a pretty incredible process. Because of the differences in track width between Chinese tracks and Russian/Mongolian tracks, they literally raise the train into the air (cars separated) and swap out the entire running gear underneath. The process took a little more than an hour and then we tooled on down the tracks toward Beijing. After getting out of the station a bit before midnight we hit the hay, our excitement peaked by vouchers for a free Chinese breakfast in the morning.
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