Beijing to UB

Tuesday is the train to Mongolia. Passengers are a mix of Chinese and westerners, including Europeans with backpacks, a Swiss architect from Singapore, one guy from New York. I have carriage #6, berth #9 to myself even thought it is a double. I am happy. The scenery has been beautiful. Mountains followed by lush green hills & valleys, followed by grassland. All punctuated by an amazing variety of towns, villages & cities - some quite ancient and literally eroding away, some modern and growing. All along the way there has been a continuous stream of construction projects - roads, bridges, railway improvements. I'm quite stunned. Dining car is supplemented by vendors with carts at the stations when we stop. The young waiter at the dining car gets quite grouchy when you give him a large bill - 100 yuan for a 32 yuan meal of stir fry pork & mushrooms / rice / coke - about $5.50. Pretty reasonable, but that was offset by the 120 yuan pot of tea at my hotel. I think the new market economy in China means that prices are all over the place, depending on who you are. We enter the Gobi at about 6:30 pm. We will reach the border at 8:37 according to the conductor. No reason to doubt him because the train left Beijing exactly on time - 7:45 am. Train is scheduled to get into Ulaan Baater at 1:20 pm tomorrow. Long stopover at the border while they jack up the cars to change out the wheel assembly things - China and Mongolia have different gauge railways.

Wednesday morning sunrise and we are still in the Gobi - very flat, very brown. It slowly turns to green grassland as we climb in altitude a bit. The train magically replaced the Chinese dining car with a Mongolia dining car during the wheel switching. The car is a wild Mongolian art festival on wheels - carvings, musical instruments, tapestry seat covers, etc.



We reach Ulaan Baatar (UB) exactly one minute late - I am very impressed. Met by Molar, my guide from Boojum Expeditions - she gets me checked into the hotel.

I will be happy to leave the city quickly tomorrow and get back to the countryside - The whole place suffers from too many years under Russian domination. Now the city is starting a building boom, so it's the worst of two worlds.