Not sure how much I slept, I estimate between 30 minutes and 2 hours. The bed just wasn’t long enough for this large lumbering Western giant to get comfy on, like many things, the sleeper bus is good in theory, not so good in practice.
We were deposited at the Erlian (二连) bus station at 3:00am. From our extensive research (about 1 hour of Googling) we figured there would be at least a cosy cafe, or Chinese restaurant open offering up breakfast and sustinance to weary travelers from the sleepr bus, but no.
Instead, we spent the next 30 minutes running around and around the bus trying to avoid people who flat out refused to understand my Chinese and who’s Enligh only consisted of “Hello, Taxi?”.
Giving these guys the slip was no mean feat. I had to fight through a scrum of people offloading massive sacks of food, electric kettles, steam irons and tractor parts that were destined for sale in Mongolia to get my pack, whilst using the other hand to swat away the grasp of about 3 or 4 taxi touts.
After getting out of that mess and out of the bus station, we wandered around the streets of Erlian, followed by an armada of Taxi’s. It took around 20 minutes of the now ubiqitous “hello, Taxi?”, flashing of lights, slow following, driving around in circles on the road and horn tooting for all the taxi’s in Erlian to realise that we were quite happy walking…….not that we knew where we were going.
Road to Nowhere
It was 4am, -7 degrees, pitch black and looked like the opening scenes of An American Werewolf in London, so we decided to go for a walk to keep warm and to find somewhere warm to wait until the border opened at 8am. We actually walked almost to the border before the cold, and boredom sent us back to the only hotel we had seen, near the bus station, the Xin Tian Hotel.
Not so clean......or secure........but warm
Happily the salubrious Xin Tian hotel’s doors were unlocked, the heat on, and all of the staff fast asleep. After consulting the room rates, we decided the O’Clock room would be far to noisy and expensive, so took the tight arse option of the common room.
Right price for a Tight Arse visa run.....zip!
We were able to get a wee bit of kip on this very regal-esque lounge suite, all for a price that kept us within our tight arse budget.
$0....a happy tightarse!!
After taking our morning ablutions in the ultra clean facilities, we were pretty glad we had opted for the common room, as it was only slightly cleaner than the common toilet.
Hmmm.......yummy
At around 7am, we breakfasted on leftover, partially frozen baguette with a still frozen Snickers chaser for desert.
Incidentally the staff did wake up, looked us up and down, decided it was all to hard and went back to bed. It was obviously way to early, to figure out how and why two foreigners are sleeping in your hotel lobby.
After this we left and walked to the border
