Matthew & Jen's World Trip: On the train to Mongolia

The alarm goes off at 5am and we’re up, showering, packing etc and heading to the train station. After a hearty breakfast of KFC chinese porridge (it’s actually really good and authentic chinese fare!) we boarded the train from Beijing to Ulanbaatar.

The train had a great feeling about it - looking just like the archetypical passenger train from the movies on the outside with a distinctively modern feeling on the inside. The train had a total of some 12 or so carriages plus the engine and a dining car, each carriage has 9 compartments (for a maximum of 36 passengers) and compartments for the carriage attendants plus hot water and a toilet at each end. Each carriage seemed to have 2 carriage attendants who took turns fulfilling the duties of maintaining the cleanliness of the common areas of the carriage.

The Typical 4-Berth Cabin (this one was empty)

The attendants were all female (presumably a condition for the job?), and our attendants did a fantastic job of keeping everything impeccably clean. They worked tirelessly over the whole trip but always maintained their smiles and friendly personalities.

As it is currently the low season, the train was relatively empty (some carriages had almost no people in them) and we were lucky enough to get our cabin to ourselves, allowing us to spread out. The rest of our carriage appeared to be occupied by locals (either Chinese or Mongolian) who seemed to be regulars of the trip. The Mongolian travellers had a great time conversing amongst themselves and the carriage attendants.

Our new Australian friends, Michelle and Dee

We were lucky enough to bump in to some other travellers on the train, including a couple of retired Canadian gentlemen who had clearly spent years looking forward to the trip and had done considerably more research than us, including handwritten notes outlining details of stops, distances and times between stops, and sites on the journey (so helpful that I made a copy!). We also bumped into a couple of Australian women, who worked together in a hospital in Australia and had decided to take about 8 weeks off to travel around the world leaving their husbands at home. Between enjoying the company of our new found friends, taking in the sites, enjoying the amenities of our carriage and the Chinese / Mongolian border crossing, the time seemed to fly past.

The view shortly after leaving Beijing

The change in the landscape outside was both hypnotic and addictive. Beginning with the urban and industrial Beijing, initially the landscape enjoyed rapid change as we ascended some 1000m in a couple of hours snaking our way through canyons, alongside frozen rivers and at the bottom of sheer cliffs. The journey was punctuated with a number of tunnels (up to about 2km in length). After the original dramatic change in scenery, the land flattened out and we passed through mostly agricultural terrain. Gradually we could sense an increasing change towards a desert terrain.

Man at the side of the road in China

The Gobi Desert is only some 150km outside of Beijing, and moving towards Beijing at the rate of about 2km / yr as forests have been cut down. The encroaching Gobi Desert is also responsible for the dust storms that can cover Beijing. During our first two days in China a dust storm limited visibility to some 300 metres of so. The encroachment of the desert has also led many villagers to abandon their homes and relocate (presumably to the cities). We certainly saw evidence along the track of what appeared to be entire villages that had been abandoned and left to nature.

The dining car and what appeared to be a security guard

Heading into the Gobi Desert

Sunset in China (windfarms in the background)

A large portion of the evening was consumed with the border crossing and bogey changing exercise taking place between China and Mongolia. Supposedly the Russians adopted a different gauge to restrict the ability for Russia’s enemies to come in. Arriving at the Chinese border town at about 8.30pm, it was not until about 1.45am that the train was totally cleared for entrance to Mongolia. Fortunately, most of this is done in the comfort of the train and requires very little of us but to sit patiently and wait.

We woke up in the inhospitable and sparsely populated desert of Mongolia. It was about -5 degrees outside, cold in the absence of wind quite bearable. It wasn’t until mid-morning where we felt we had cleared the Gobi desert, snow began to appear on the ground, and mountains and rivers once again appeared. During our journey the rivers were all frozen solid, which was made even more impressive given that many of these rivers had a visible gradient to them. Water had simply frozen as it was travelling downhill.

View from back of train in Mongolia. The track went to a single lane on the border

Mongolia

Around the corner and into Ulaanbaatar

Signs of human habitation in Mongolia were substantially lower than China, and when we did see signs of habitation, it was generally very small villages of not many more than 100 houses and / or gers. Livestock could also be seen from time to time. Accordingly, the arrival into Ulaanbaatar is a little surprising - a bustling metropolis seemed to appear literally out of nowhere.