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Continued from last night....
After 4 and a half hours of being shunted backwards and forwards to have the bogeys for each carriage changed over, and our passports returned, we finally entered Mongolia and began our trip across the plains and the Gobi Desert.
There really isn’t too much to see here; apart from the occasional donkey, sheep, horse or cow. There are 60 million domestic animals in Mongolia compared with a population of only 3 million, half of that living in UB. We did watch the snow on the hills and valleys accumulate, as well as monitor the weather for the next couple of days. We walked down to the buffet car for breakfast and found that the Chinese carriage had been replaced and we had a much nicer Mongolian one in its place, complete with wooden carvings throughout. We sat down, much to the utter astonishment of the staff; I don’t think that they were expecting anyone to arrive. A plastic container was plonked on our table with tea, coffee and sugar in it. Once we had made our selection she came back with a thermos of hot water and filled up our cups. No milk available. While we were appreciating the caffeine she came back with 7 pieces of bread and some butter and jam. We thanked her and finished this off and she came back with an omelette for each of us. We still hadn’t even seen a menu!!! A group of Chinese came in and a menu appeared for them. After they had finished with it. I grabbed it and had a look; it was a fixed breakfast and was quoted as $14.88. A lot more than the Chinese version. We asked if we could pay in Yuan, and she said yes, 400¥, so we counted all of our leftover Yuan and came up with 390¥. She at least accepted it and we fled the carriage. At least we had gotten rid of all of our leftover Chinese money.
The rest of the morning was spent looking out of the window, talking, reading or dozing, and we arrived at UB on time at 2:40pm. We did get to see an outside rail museum of old locos from the Mongolian line, and a couple of old WWII Bren Gun Carriers which had been converted into snow plows.
After being picked up by our driver, the drive through UB took about an hour and we needed to get ready as we were being picked up again at 5pm for our Mongolian Cultural Evening. This was a very enjoyable evening filled with dancing, contortionist, music and throat singing. Another 45 minutes drive back to our hotel just in time for dinner. Quite enjoyable with some live music thrown in. A real steal at 198,000 Tugriks!
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