A quick breakfast … this time rice soup … we headed back to UB amid the heavy rain … too wet for any sightseeing. So went went for an early dinner at the same BBQ place, but it was full …apparently graudation time plus a wedding. So instead, we opted to try the local franchise of US Mongolian BBQ chain … it was very disappointing … and amazingly, its failures were aspects where the US is normally very good … choice, décor, atmosphere, service and even price.
All in all, another night with too little sleep and too much alcohol … especially for a 5:30am start to catch our train to China.
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| climbing to the Gobi |
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| Gobi station master |
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| coloured roofs |
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| isolated living |
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| Lost |
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| arriving at Beijing train station |
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| gobi ger |
The train ride was again spectacular … if you call the vast dry wastelands of the Gobi desert … lots of wild camels … occasion remote train stations with properly erect well dressed station masters in attendance even when we didn’t stop. Much of it was similar to central Australia except that we were at a considerable altitude for much of it … as high as 1700 metres.
Having had a light in-cabin dinner … crackers and the smoothest cream cheese you’ve ever seen … washed down with a very questionable Georgian red wine … our new chum, Lord Waverley, invited us to join him for dinner in the dining car.
Lord Waverley’s card gives his address as House of Lords, London, SW1A 0PW … now, that’s what I call an easy to remember address (apart from the postcode of course. He prefers to be called John Desmond (his first names) and is a really nice chap and we had lots of laughs enroute. He was returning from a Government mission in Ulaan Baatar and having flown out, decided to take the train back to Beijing for his flight to London.
Our new non-chums were some very drunk Mongolians in the next compartment, the one that shares a loo with ours. These drunk Mongolians were amusing and friendly at first, but after they puked into our shared bathroom for a 2nd time, close to midnight, our sense of humour deserted us.
The final event for the evening was the changing of the bogies so that the Mongolian train could run on Chinese tracks. This is a 4 hours stop of which passport and customs is one hour (very officious but friendly and efficient) and the rest is the bogie changing. We’re not allowed off the train … so after much violent bumping and bashing, all carriages are separated and shunted into the biggest garage that I have ever seen.
This garage has 15 or 20 four-post hydraulic lifts … just like the ones you see in a car garage … but each of these are designed to lift an entire carriage (including all of the luggage and passengers inside) off the undercarriage. Then the bogies (the chassis and wheels) are pushed out from under …. And another set, 10 cm wider, or is it narrower, are pushed in … before the carriages are lowered back down.
At another half-hour of violent crashing, the carriages are all rejoined, along with the engine and Chinese dining car … and off we go. Well, off we go while waiting for the carriage attendant to mop up the vomit from the bathroom
……………. More photos of shunting ………….
So, yet another short night … but this time with very little alcohol … so it’s better.
After that it was more hours watching the Gobi desert … and wondering how these people survived out there … before trundling among some gorges and then entering Beijing. The end of the Trans-Siberian, or more accurate the Trans-Mongolian.
