The train to Ulaanbaatar

I woke up at 5.30am to make sure that I would be in time to catch the 7.45am train, K23, to Ulaanbaatar.

This was to be an interesting trip for several reasons. The first was that I shared the cabin with two lovely ladies from Oregon. One was a retired nurse, Mary. And the other, Karen, was thinking of retiring. They had spent a week in Beijing and were on their way to Mongolia as volunteers for a charity called earthwatch. They did not know what exactly they would do for two weeks, but they said they could end up counting wild life. This was their fourth volunteering trip. I guess we all agreed that we had restless spirits. It was very interesting talking to them on all sorts of things like healthcare in America and stone carvings of the Native American Indians. I had the privilege of advising them on how to prepare their first bowl of instant noodles.

I also met a Singaporean couple on an overland journey from Hanoi to London. I had a blog post about them. It was surprising and delightful to meet other Singaporeans on the same path, more or less.

And although it was tiring, the border crossing from China into Mongolia turned out to be a technical treat. The train gauges in China and Mongolia are different. So the Chinese engineers had to unhitch all the carriages, lift them up using hydraulic lifts and change the wheels and put the whole train back together again.

They also changed the Chinese food carriage for a Mongolian food carriage. For the first time I was happy to not have a Chinese food carriage. I do not know why, but the food in the Chinese carriage was very very salty. On the Mongolian carriage, I had my first taste of Mongolian food for breakfast, rice and beef wrapped up in a thin pancake.

And all this was just inside the train. On the outside the landscape was turning into rolling planes and the vegetation was becoming sparse. We went through at least a couple of sandstorms and one in the evening, while we were sleeping, and brought in quite a lot of sand into the cabin. The carriage attendant, I suspect was allergic to dust. He wore a mask and kept on closing any open windows. The passengers the other hand, were feeling hot and kept trying to open the windows. The skies in Mongolia were blue as advertised, and the clouds looked like water colour paintings.

I was met at Ulaanbaatar station by the tour guide for my tour which starts tomorrow, Sunday. It was nice to be picked up and sent to the hotel for a change. Although I have a few pictures of Ulaanbaatar on the day I arrived, I will write a separate post on it.