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We had originally planned on leaving Beijing a few days earlier but several things, mainly our laziness and a missed bus, meant we were on a slightly tighter schedule, ie if we didn't get this next bus then we're stuffed!
After already buying the tickets in the morning, we headed back to the Bus station again at about 3pm, and finally got on our Bus to Erlian (on the China Mongolia Border) at about 5pm. We were just getting comfortable, peering out the window at Beijing's streets when the bus pulled into what appeared to be a carpark but was now full of several buses. We were then instructed in stern chinese to get OFF our bus and onto another bus. There wasn't really any explanation for this but after several months of similar strange and unexplained decisions, we've stopped wondering why these things happen.
So now on our significantly more cramped second bus, we headed off towards Mongolia. The drive was actually quite interesting once we got out of Beijing as we passed by several absolutely massive semi-trailers carrying what appeared to be wind turbine propellers and even tunneled under the great wall of China, all lit up in the dark.
After about 5 hours driving we stopped at a large restaurant in the middle of nowhere, one of those places where all the buses stop for a break and all the prices are really inflated. The bus stopped in a large grael yard surrounded by a brick wall and a nuclear power plant across the road and one of the most disgusting toilets we've seen in the whole trip. This was beyond anything seen in Thailand, Vietnam or even the middle of Cambodia. The square cement building was little more than 4 walls, a roof, a wall in the middle to divide male and female, and then several strategically placed concrete slides in the floor where one must deposit their business. There were no dividers, no doors, no windows, no toilet paper, no water, just a big concrete ditch. I still have a very strong image in my head of a fellow bus passenger squatting next to me, smoking quite nonchalantly whilst doing his thing. At the very cold and quite prolonged stop nobody was allowed to stay on the bus so we all shivered in the cold for 40minutes looking longingly at the bus doors. It was here that we met Tsorgo, a Mongolian businessman who had been in Beijing for a couple days and was now returning to UlaanBator (capitol of Mongolia) with several boxes of what appeared to be socks and books. He spoke very good english and offered to help us with getting a lift over the China-Mongolia border. We were of course a bit suspicious at first, but we didn't really have much of a choice and he turned out to be a really nice guy! The bus arrived in Erlian at about 3am (Again why can't they just leave 3 hours later!?) and we were all immediatelly surrounded by dozens of mongolian jeep drivers offering us hotels and transport over the border. We stuck with Tsorgo and got a lift with him and the drivers two relatives to the drivers humble hotel on the main street. With nobody soeaking any english except for us and tsorgo, Tsorgo arranged us a room and we managed to sleep there for sevceral hours before being woken up by a strange mongolian women knocking on our door saying "jeep dzamyn uud, jeep". We had arranged to meet tsorgo 10am so we were a bit confused as to what this was about. We eventually found tsorgo, also looking rather confused, and headed off to find some food instead with Tsorgo and the hotelier's two relatives. Although Erlian is in China, it's in the "Inner Mongolia" part of China so the whole town was practically made up of Mongolians and the restaurant we went to for breakfast was comprehensively Mongolian style! With no idea what anything on the menu was, and wary of warnings about the blandness and excessive mutton found in all Mongolian food, Tsorgo translated some of the menu and we both ordered a pasta dish. The Mongolians all had steak, for breakfast! To our surprise, our strange Mongolian pasta dish turned out to be Spaghetti Bolognese, and a very good one at that! After brekky we returned to the hotel to find that the jeep that was meant to be taking us to Dzammyn Uud (in Mongolia) had already left. With our bags! Looking rather unworried, our three Mongolian fellow passengers assured us it was quite common and was ok. We jumped in another van and headed for the border. At the border we all paid the "police tax" of 5 yuan and stood around for a while waiting for our Jeep and luggage to turn up. The Chinese border guards were all sporting rather impressive fur hats.
Once the jeep arrived, we began the strange process of crossing the border, With about 7 people and several boxes plus everyones bags, the small russian jeep became quite crowded. Miriam and I were stationed in the front passenger seat and had trouble keep our door closed as the lock seemed to have died quite some time ago. First we drove through to the Chinese customs, boring boring boring, stamp stamp stamp... DUTY FREE STORE! It was rather strange to see this duty free store in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by the gobi desert, but it turned out to be one of the cheapest we'd seen so far. 2 Litre bottles of Absolut Vodka for $10.
With the Chinese-side formalities completed, we drove on through the large Chinese rainbow arch and toward the Mongolian border post. The Mongolian border officials were taking the Swine flu threat very seriously, all of them covered head to toe in plastic protective gear as if they were decontaminating radioactive waste or something. Once we were through all the passport control and everything we had to wait around for a while whilst the customs people inspected all of Tsorgo's boxes and our Jeep. Once back in the jeep it was a quick drive along to the Dzamyn Uud Train station where we left our bags with the bag-minders Tsorgo had hired to look after his boxes and luggage, and then bought our tickets for the 10pm train to UlaanBator.
After this we headed across the town square and had lunch with Tsorgo at another traditional Mongolian restaurant, a very quaint little shop, very cosy and warm on the inside with lots of people sitting around chatting and eating and drinking Mongolian tea (i think with goats milk?) We all had some type of Gulash with nice potatoes, salad and copious amounts of what I assume was mutton fat!
After our meal it was just a matter of waiting for our 10pm train. We sat in the nicely heated waiting room of the very modern station building which looked rather out of place next to its 19th century counterpart. After several hours of watching a strange Mongolian hairdressing show and an episode of Fear-Factor it was finally time to get onboard! The Mongolian train was rather nice, and very warm. We shared a room with two young Mongolian guys who kept buying us food and we felt bad as we had nothing to give back to them except for Chinese jelly beans. We awoke in the morning surrounded by the vast Mongolian steppes, all beautifully covered with a light layer of snow and the occasionally pack of horses striding around. At about 11am we arrived at UlaanBator's pleasant old station and having opted against the $5usd pickup offered by the hostel, we began the walk towards our hostel on the main street.
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