Irkutsk to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Text written in: English
Here's a quick lesson in Russian bureaucracy: When you buy something like, say, a train ticket, don't throw anything they give you away, even the seemingly useless folded piece of paper they put it in. Why you ask? Because this apparently crucial scrap of pulp can keep you off of a train you're supposed to be getting on in Russia. Here's how it works: On each sleeper car is a sort of conductor, but they actually have a little sleeping compartment and they are in charge of that particular car on overnight journeys. They check tickets, let people on and off the train, keep the bathrooms clean and make hot water for tea among other things. This is not a particularly glamorous job, and we're guessing they fully exert what inkling of power they have over their little domain while the train is moving. When a conductor asks you for tickets and passports, give them everything you have and sit quietly and smile. They look at you, frown, look again, frown again, give you your passport, grumble something and walk away. We have learned it's not so good to be on bad terms with your conductor, and it isn't a good way to start a 36 hour trip by ticking off your own personal Stalin. Now we prefer to consider ourselves pretty alert travelers, and we're not likely to absentmindedly discard something that might be important. If we remembered correctly, there wasn't anything actually on the paper we so carelessly tossed, but that, apparently, is not what's important. We must have thrown away this thing, which created what we like to call a situation among the conductors. So after many exasperated hand gestures and a few tense moments we weren't thrown off the train, which is good, because it had begun moving by the time all of the conductors had finished freaking out. Our best guess for this whole thing is that it has something to do with the Soviet days where people ended up in a gulag for such an infraction, and hopefully nobody got thrown in jail for letting us board without it.
We were lucky once again in that we had only one other person in our four bed compartment. He was a 27 year-old German named Christian who was planning to travel solo for a couple of years, and he had started traveling about the same time we had, coming from Berlin through Moscow and across Russia, so we had plenty to talk about. His English was excellent, and best of all, he described himself as a heavy sleeper, which is pretty nice when three people are sandwiched into a 6 foot by 6 foot box for anything longer than an elevator ride.
Also in some of the other compartments in our car were a few other Germans, a Mongolian woman traveling with her mother and 3-year old daughter, and a bunch of Japanese Boy Scouts. We didn't even know they had Boy Scouts in Japan, and when we first saw a full grown guy wearing the same uniform the kids wear in the States, we thought it was some sort of bizarre fashion statement, but when a few more boarded the train we figured unless this was the filming of a really bad reality show, they were for real.
This train was not like the train from Vladivostok, most noticeably because it never seemed to get going for more than 10 minutes or so before stopping. One of the other Germans in the car eventually figured out that we had all bought tickets on the slowest train out of Russia, the one that indeed, actually stops at every station as well as random fields, marshes and train yards to pull over for other trains to steam merrily by. After a quick check of our rations, we concluded that we indeed had enough food for the entire car, thanks to Andrea's constant preparation for a nuclear attack, and we settled in for our first night, and no, the trains didn't get any bigger since our last ride, and I am still taller than the compartment is long.
At some point during the night we stopped at a city named Ulan Ude, a city of minimal historical significance other than the fact that it is home to the earths largest bust of Vladimir Lenin, past leader of the glorious former Soviet Union. Since the train was scheduled to stop for 40 minutes in this particular town, I had the notion to make a break for it to see if I could get a photo of this monstrosity, reportedly 25 or 30 feet tall. My rational was that if we could pull off the highway in Blue Earth, Minnesota to see a 60 foot statue of the Jolly Green Giant, I could sure as heck take some time to see the worlds biggest Lenin head. But Andrea's vision of ending up in Mongolia sans husband inspired her to threaten me with divorce due to stupidity if I should choose to depart the train, so I sulked off to my little cot, which was 16 inches from her little cot, thereby not exactly leaving the impression I had hoped.
We had heard that you can get some good photos from the end of the train, so early in the morning we went walking back a few cars to find out. The back of the train is nice because no one comes back to the boarding area at the back of the car, and you can see not only out a window on each side, out the back of the train as well. On this occasion, one of the conductors had not locked one of the side doors as well, so we opened the door and hung out the side of the train for a while taking pictures and enjoying the fresh air and the beautiful sunny morning. Later, while lounging about in our spacious compartment, we were entertaining the 3-year old Mongolian girl from the next compartment who had come to visit. She would stick her head in the compartment, say something in English like "Hello", giggle, and run away. Overcome by this cuteness, Christian procured a balloon which he blew up and gave to her which she happily accepted, wandered a few feet, came back, said "F*** you," and toddled off. So much for improving Euro-Mongolian relations.
It took us a solid 17 hours to reach the border, which was about 100 miles from Irkutsk which left us wondering why we didn't just walk, but at 1:00pm the next day we were told to get off the train and come back at 4:00. Since there was absolutely nothing but dust and air past the train platform, everybody just sat there and stared at the train for three hours until they let us back on, wondering what that was all about since absolutely nothing happened to the train while we were off it. We were sure of it, because we were all there watching. When they finally let us on it took another two hours until some very important looking border guards came through the train to check our passports and visas and ruffle unenthusiastically through our bags before letting the train move on. A mile or two later, the train stopped once again at the actual border with barbed wire, watchtowers and guard dogs, and after the train was surrounded by armed soldiers while some more important stuff went on that we couldn't see, they eventually let us through. Note to the Russian Government: It's ok for people to leave now. This kind of thing does not encourage tourism.
We stopped on the Mongolian side of the border for about as long as it took for some guy to check the train driver's license, and off we went, everyone in our car breathing a collective sigh of relief that we actually made it to Mongolia. About a half hour later we pulled into Sukhbataar, the first Mongolia city over the border where we were told it would be about an hour before we moved on, so we took the opportunity to look around. The difference in the air from Russia was palpable, there were scores of people around this bustling station, and the feeling was both relaxed and excited as family members both met and saw each other off, merchants unloaded carts of goods, and people prepared to board the train. One thing we saw that we had not seen in Russia were little boys, no more than five or six years old who would come up the the westerners and ask for money. Another thing we noticed was that there seemed to be piles of trash strewn everywhere. Eventually, there were a few regular commuter cars added to our train, and by the time we boarded once again it was almost dark.
At some point during the night we were awakened as we came to a station, and decided to look out the window outside of our compartment. As we did, several young boys ran up the the window and began to beg for money. They finally left when we turned off the light, only because they couldn't see us. While we continued looking out, one of the conductors opened the train door and walked a few feet from the train before dumping a large bag of trash out on the ground. The irony of this moment was that she gingerly stepped through all the other trash left from previous trains on her way back to the car, wiping her high heels off before she boarded. The little boys immediately rifled through it for any returnable bottles, and as we stared at it for a few minutes, a dog eventually sauntered up and perused it as well, finding nothing substantial. We were naively hoping that this may have been a not too common practice, but the evidence around the train suggested otherwise. Later, on another train we would witness a conductor throwing trash out between cars while the train was moving. So we guess that explains part of the littering problem.
We finally arrived in Ulaan Bataar at about 6:00 am and hung around the station for a while before we dared call the guest house we were going to stay at. We managed to make the call an hour or so later and were picked up by the owner, a woman named Zaya who came highly recommended and has run a guest house in Ulaan Bataar since the late 80's. She brought us to our apartment where we prepared to spend our first day in Mongolia fast asleep in a real bed. As we blearily unpacked our bags, the important little folded piece of paper from the Russian train ticket that almost kept us from traveling popped out of one of our bags and fell onto the floor.
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(13) (Scott B.)
After visiting the Buddist datsuns in Siberia I was looking forward to comparing them...
Entry 9 of 39 
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