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We've been on the train for something
like two days now. Tricia composed a poem:
Eat a little
Drink a little
Read a little
Sleep a little
Eat a little
Drink a little
Sleep a little
Dream a little
Drink a little
Eat a little
**BURP**
(And the burp was for real. It might have been coincidental, or maybe she forced it. But I liked how it ended her poem.)
It's seven PM. In an hour, we reach the China-Mongolia border. Tricia read her time-travel-romance novel for most of the day. I typed, and read In Siberia. We hung out in the Basnight's berth, chatting and eating. We had a few ziujhang beers, purchased in the dining car ice-cold for 5 Yuan (that's $1.25, half the price as a can of beer on the Great Wall.)
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The dining car is pretty nice -- we had our worries. We asked for "no meat, no chicken, no fish, no pork," and the waitress knew what we meant. She said "Oh, veggie tables!" Instead of the usual question, which is "rabbit or turtle?" We had stir-fried tomatoes and bell peppers, with a few mushrooms, over a bowl of rice. Filling, hot, and fairly healthy -- a dramatic contrast to the rest of our day.
We are traveling with 5 bags. Each of us has a backpack, which pops in half to a day pack and a large bag, sort of Transformers style. I've got my Kipling
"manpurse" which holds our important papers and the camera. I've also got a plastic shopping bag with my brand-new North Face bootleg coat in it. (It wouldn't fit in the suitcase.)
The fifth bag is brand new. We went to the Silk Market and bought a knockoff Kipling duffel bag to hold our groceries. Much classier than 4 plastic grocery bags, and at less than $3, quite a bargain. Of course, it's only slightly more rugged than a plastic grocery bag. The "Kipling" is just the logo, the rest of the bag is a crappy nylon thing that's bound to fall apart at the seams. But it only has to make it 2 more weeks.
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these schematics before attempting to use the
toilet. Thank you. |
We were worried about the food. We counted the number of potential meals we'd have to provide for ourselves. Twenty-nine, including breakfast, lunch and dinner. Now, 4 of those will be in cities where their might be restaurants. And we usually skip breakfast. And there was always the chance that the dining car would have vegetarian food. But we chose to plan for the worst-case scenario. We're in a country where anything that crawls or flies is considered edible. So we did some serious grocery shopping. Instant ramen. Granola bars. A jar of peanut butter, 5 tubes of Ritz crackers, pringles, peanuts, cashews, Del Monte tropical mix, Chips Ahoys. My "adventurous eating" deal applies only to non-animals, but I love to try weird food. I got some dried jujubes, some persimmons, a few weird things we couldn't even figure out. My favorite is the Orchard Peasant brand dried apricots. They have a photo on the bag of a peasant farmer. An American farmer. This old fellow in Osh Kosh overalls and a True Temper tools meshback cap. There's no way he even knows that he's gracing the cover of a bag of dried apricots in China, let along knows that he's being called a Peasant. I suspect that the bag designer did a Google search for images of farmers, and threw that one on the package.
This would be a great trip for an adventurously-eating carnivore. If you were willing to just point to something on someone's table and say "give me a plate of that" you'd do just fine. Now, a story we heard will summarize the concern we have about Mongolia. Our friend Kathy visited for a couple of weeks a few years ago. Now, I've retold this story enough that I'm sure I get it wrong. Plus I probably added some stuff that I read or saw on TV once. But here goes.
They cook this animal in Mongolia called a Marmot. It's for special occasions, like when you have a foreign guest come stay with you in your tent camp. Like we'll be doing tomorrow night. They catch a marmot in the wild, and then cook it up. Here's the method of cooking: heat some rocks up in the fire. Expand the marmot's mouth with your hunting knife. Drop the hot rocks in, then sew the mouth shut. Wait for the heat and expanding gases to puff the marmot up like mammalian popcorn. Singe the fur with a blowtorch, then scrape the fur off the burned skin with your hunting knife. Cool, slice open, and serve. Ugh!!
So we're hoping for some real food now and then, but if we have to, we can survive on pringles and ramen. Here's a tip for vegetarians who want to take this trip. All ramen in China is animal-flavored. Even the tomato flavor is chicken-based. Mushroom is Beef and Mushroom. The ingredients are all in Chinese, but with my limited memory of Japanese I could spot the character for "cow" on most of the packages. But the beef is all in the soup packet -- not in the noodles themselves. So (had we planned better) we'd have brought vegetable bullion cubes from India and made our ramen with that. Then it doesn't matter what flavor you buy. Walter and Joelle said they found vegetarian ramen, but we looked all over and didn't' see any, so I don't know how they lucked out. They also brought a bunch of REI freeze-dried food, like lasagna, which is weird, but actually tastes pretty good. Probably better for you than pringles and ritz crackers.
It's nearly dark now -- the sun's getting low -- maybe around 7:30 pm. We should arrive at the border in less than an hour. I think it's getting noticeably colder, but Tricia still feels hot. I told her that after today, we won't be hot again until we land in Los Angeles. We've been climbing uphill and moving north; between the two it should hit long-sleeve weather this evening. Maybe I'll be wrong, but the weather in Beijing was a veritable heat wave the last 4 days, and I'm ready for a change.
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July 13
The border crossing was unforgettable. We arrived at the border right on time -- between 7:30 and 8. The bathrooms were locked a half hour beforehand. I guess it's a rule that keeps the station from smelling like pee. They apparently don't mind if 7000 kilometers of countryside are streaked with the toilet's contents, but at stations, it's problematic. The bathrooms don't open up again until a half hour after you leave the border. And the amount of time you're there can be anywhere from 2 to 6 hours. During that time (it was 6 hours for us) you get checked several times by several official people. You can try to sleep if you want (we did, as it kept my mind off the fact that I had to pee) but you get woken up every half hour or so by someone else who needs to check something.
First, there were Chinese officials making sure you were allowed to leave the country. Then a doctor took our temperature to make sure we didn't have SARS or Asian Chicken Flu or anything. Then some official person in a fancy uniform handed out paperwork in Russian Cyrillic. We asked if they had an English version, and they just made dismissive noises. (My fault. I don't speak the language. But still -- when you fly in an airplane, the stewardess asks you what country you're from, what language you speak, and then gives you the right form. ) Then someone else comes around to collect the forms. Then they hand out more forms. Each form takes a while to fill out, but they generally wait in your berth while you fill it out. They could walk down the hall, hand them all out, then come back and collect them. But there's quite a bit of stress on you when it's midnight, you get awakened and handed a piece of paper, then you have to figure out the address of the hotel you'll be staying in and remember your passport number. While a guy with a military uniform and pointy hat is standing over you tapping his shiny black shoes.
Speaking of shiny shoes, the Mongolian officials (around 2AM) were what Tricia described as straight out of an Asian S&M video. Tall Mongolian women with a uniform that looked a LOT like Colonel Klink's, with shiny pointy black high-heeled boots. Full-on makeup, red lipstick, NOT smiling at all. All she was missing was the riding crop. "Passports!" Then she flipped through each of our passports, making a sharp snap with each page. Afterwards, she handed them back to us. Then the woman next to her did the exact same thing. I suspect the second one was a Mongolian border guard in training, and just needed some practice at making the snapping sound with the pages.
I missed the wheel changing ceremony last night. The train pulled into the special hangar-sized where they do it, at which point there's a brief window of opportunity to hop out. I grabbed my camera and manpurse and headed for the door, but missed the chance. They had already locked us in. Walter and Joelle were on the platform watching it. The rest of the car's inhabitants came up behind me, all trying to open the door. It was pretty claustrophobic and scary -- not to mention hot. They turn off the electricity to the car, so it's dark and hot, and the fans quit working. I managed to squeeze back through the people and back to our berth, where I waited with Tricia in the darkness for the 2 hours it took to change the wheels. I couldn't sleep (although Tricia was out cold) and it was too dark to read. I was able to get some photos out from the car windows. It seems to go like this: They take the whole train apart, car by car. Each car goes one at a time back and forth onto a parallel track inside a big warehouse. Workers in hard hats disconnect the car from the carriage (one of the workers was our unsmiling providnik) A giant forklift raises the whole car 5 feet in the air, and the wheels get pulled out, then new wheels somehow get slipped in, then the car lowers onto them. After all the cars have been changed, they all connect back up. To me, it would be easier just to replace the whole track in Mongolia with wider rails. Heck, rather than wait 2 hours, I'd rather pack our bags, get out, go to the bathroom, and board a different train. But this is how it is.
 
With the new wheels on, we pulled into the Mongolian side of the train station and got checked again. Officials made us lift up our beds to make sure no one was stowing away under them. There was a fifteen-minute break where you could go out onto the platform and buy stuff. We got some water bottles (the dining car ran out of water right before dinner). Some people who weren't worried about the pee-free evening bought large bottles of beer. The Mongolian and Chinese passengers bought fresh fruit. Caseloads of it. One guy bought a dozen watermelon. They explained to us later that you can't get fruits or vegetables in Mongolia, so they border crossing is the last chance to pick them up. "Hey, Ghengis -- while you're in China this weekend can you pick me up 6 watermelons?"
I can't blame them -- Chinese watermelons are sweet as candy. They're more compact and efficient than American watermelon, too. Shaped like soccer balls, smaller and more spherical than the big ovoids you get at Albertson's.
The Mongolian countryside is beautiful, in a desolate way. After we crossed, I woke up now and then between 2 and 6 AM, poking my head up and peeking out the window. The sun never really set -- it was dusky blue even at 3 AM. Or maybe it was moonlight, but you could see the sand dunes of the outer Gobi desert. Around 4AM we passed our first Yurt (it's a "Yurt" in Russian, a "Ger" in Mongolian -- either way, it's a portable nomadic tent. Oh, "ger" is spelled like the sound a dog makes ["grrrr"]] but pronounced like a spoked sprocket ["gear."] That didn't stop us from calling them grrrs the whole time.) Tricia slept through the first Ger sighting, but then in the last few hours we've seen plenty more. Gers, wooden houses, bactrian camels, deer (or maybe antelope -- little deer-shaped mammals with white butts) lots of ponies, sheep, and dogs. (Note - our guide later told us they were gazelles. )
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Around 10AM this morning we stopped at Choir, a small village with a train station. They didn't have a big market like the border did. Well, on the border it wasn't a market -- it was more like a bench with a guy sitting on it selling bottled water and melons. But this town didn't even have that. Just a dozen villagers, each with a bottle of water -- or maybe milk -- for sale. Running up to the windows shouting in Mongolian. "Something in a bottle for sale" I imagine. It might have been airag, the fermented horse milk that we'll undoubtedly drink in the next couple of days. I'm looking forward to it. Tricia's worried.
The dining car got swapped at the border. I guess they send the Chinese food car back to China and pick up a new Mongolian car. It's much fancier -- wood carvings and chandeliers. But they don't have any way of keeping drinks cold. The Chinese car had a big bucket of ice with beer and cokes in it. These guys keep the beer and cokes on a shelf behind a fancy wooden carved bar. If you want one, they dust the bottle off with a rag for you. But you have to drink it warm. We're going to stick with water for a while, since we stocked up at the border.
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Malaysia
- Beijing
(pg 1) - Xian -
Beijing
(pg
2) - Train to Mongolia -
In
Mongolia - Irkutsk - Moscow - St.
Petersburg
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