China Border

The next day was an early train to Beijing. For the first time on the trip we had all been booked onto separate cabins on the train. I was sharing with a Chilean couple, Raphael and Carolina and a crazy Japanese guy, (he was seen throughout the trip having long very physically expresionate conversations with himself). After some quick introductions I explained to our Japanese friend the situation and he kindly swapped places with Lauren.

The train pulled away from UlaanBaatar and headed out of the city past the ger camp suburbs. The hilly lands slowly turned to flat plains that gave good competition to the Netherlands for the lack of an incline.

The Gobi desert is often referred to as not being a proper desert and you could clear see why in this section. There was plenty of grass to be found growing on the sand. There were nomads to be seen every few minutes herding there cattle to new pastures.

The desert slowly became more barren with little grass to be seen but even in what seemed to be the driest parts oasis would spring up every hour or two as the train passed through.

Further on the sand turned to a deep red colour with large red rocks protruding from the barren landscape, suggesting maybe iron ore in the ground?

The train was better than the previous one we had taken , much cleaner and had the best dining car we had yet seen, unfortunately we did not get to eat here as it was packed the whole time.

The train pulled into Uud at 2am the following day, this is the border stop on the Mongolian side. The usual passport and customs shenanigans started again. Luckily this was all completed relatively quickly and we passed on through to China.

A few minutes later we arrived in Erlyan. This was a very surreal event, there were lots of lights welcoming you to the country and as we pulled up alongside the platform speakers were blasting out the Vienna Waltz and several Beatle's tracks.

Once all the paperwork had been complete on this side the most interesting thing went on.

We reversed into a huge train shed and then the train was shunted back and forth until all of the carriages had been separated. Next each individual carriage was lifted about 2m from the ground using massive hydraulic jacks. The bogies were then rolled out from beneath and new ones rolled in. This is because the track gauge is slightly different on each side of the border. It crossed my mind that it would be quicker and more efficient to have two trains arrive at the border at the same time and all the passengers just swap trains, but it seems I was clearly wrong. The engine then shunted all of the carriages together again and we were ready to move on to Beijing.

We stayed on the train throughout this and were even allowed to take photos, this had been strickly prohibited until fairly recently. I was pretty impressed with the speed with which all of this was carried out but still think whoever felt this was the best way to solve the track gauge problem was completely bonkers.

After a long stop at Erlyan platform again where I managed to spend my final Tugrugs on a bottle of beer we were off to Beijing.