Train Transit to Erlian
Text written in: English
I didnt really do a whole lot this day I had one last meal at the ubiquitous Berlın Berger fast food joint. Fast food ıs kind of like the ınternational term for cheaper restraunts wıth western food and after my tıme away from civilizatıon ın the Mongolian country side I wanted nothing more than burger and fries type meals. I spent some time in an internet cafe and passed by some hair stylists and it was tempting to go in because my hair was getting into that unruly and annoying stage but I passed up on the mongolian haircut.
When it was time to leave for my early evening train the guesthouse owner Bolad offered me a ride so I didn't end up taking one last mongolian gypsy cab. For the 15 minute ride we somehow got started talking about politics and he had a very interesting take on the value of communism in civilizing mongolia and told me how they introduced medical care and hygiene standards in the country side that largely remain instituted and really I didnt notice any smelly Mongolians but I am sure the standards of medical care could use improvement. He also told me that stalinist purges of buddhist monks were largely exagerated and that the monestaries werent systematically destroyed so much as neglected and the reason for all this was that monks had become decadent and consituted something like 20% of the population. It was an interesting take on history and it made me realize that so much of history is from perspective at the same time I have no doubts about the ruthlessness of the Stalin installed leadership of the country during the purges. At the train station I gave him about 30% more than I would have a regular taxi and it was still very cheap by any standards for a taxi ride.
I felt like it was certainly time to leave mongolia to get back on schedule but I was a little sad that I didn't have a chance to spend time in the Gobi desert but with the depth of the experience and my like of Mongolian culture I certainly believe that I will have a chance to go back to the country in search of a pure travel experience.
The train station was a bit odd in the sense that it didnt have any arrival or departure board or anything in the way of a posted time table anywhere. But really it was a small place and their werent very many trains going through and really there were only a few destinations that you could get to in Mongolia via the train. So after wandering around a bit and talking to a nice duo of traveling girls I found out that they just have extensive clear loudspeaker announcements in Mongolian and English with more information than you could ever need to catch a train. Smaller countries and with 2 million people Mongolia is small are very practical with everything being dual language. So despite all the cyrillic letters in transliterations that make no sense and a language that has at least a few sounds that you can only make by caughing like a dead cat it was really a pretty friendly place for the traveler despite being isolated and at the end of the world.
My 12 hour train ride was 25 dollars and that afforded me a birth in a 4 person compartment that I shared with two mongolian men who were pretty friendly. The compartment had carpets and curtains and a fake floral arrangement and they served a small dinner complete with wet naps and it was equally as bad as anything an airline would serve. I walked a couple of cars to say hello to the traveler girls and got stuck behind the ticket checkers. Strangely in a period of about an hour on a train with no stops my ticket was checked by 3 different people. I was a little sad that it was a night train and it caused me to miss some of the more desolate scenery.
In the morning when I woke up we well into the Gobi Desert which is one of the more marginal places in the world that people try to live. Its very hot in the summer reaching 40C and often -40C in the winter with incredible winds. The lively hood is animal grazing and in a good year a rain or two comes and grass sprouts in sparse little tufts and in a bad year all the vegatation just burns under the dry heat and the animals tend to die. The sheer distance that the sheep and cows had to graze to find enough grass to eat was mind boggling and the gers were quite spread out from each other many many kilometers between neighbors. I had heard that this was the wetter more prosperous part of the desert.
A few hours later still pretty early in the morning we arrived at the boarder and I was feeling pretty patient expecting it to take a few hours. It took about one and a half and I didnt even realize that the Chinese officials had put the entry stamp in my passport when they gave it back the third time. I wasnt paying attention I was sitting their reading a copy of my lonely planet china. I should have known at the time but it didnt occur to me that this is probably the best way to get your thirty dollar book confiscated. Sometimes you know something but still dont think about it.
So thats it... I was in China a far reaching land with over a billion people and 4000 thousand years of history. I was very excited and already had a few Mongolian friends who were also headed towards Beijing.
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(11) (megan eaves)
someone needs to give the mongolians a class in
border control. i...
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Entry 62 of 396 
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