Coming to you live from a Ger at Houstai on the Mongolian Steppe. Today, is day one of our roughly 4 week adventure through a bit of China, Mongolia, Siberia and finally Russia.
Even though China is now a free market economic powerhouse, they can still make the trains run on time…….well at least leave on time, we left precisely at 7:47am, it seems some vestiges of Communism still remain.
About 3 hours into the journey I was getting pretty worried, sure, we were traveling through an amazing landscape of high limestone cliffs and rock formations, watching ancient Chinese villages with ancient Chinese stone houses whizzing past our windows, but nothing funny or noteworthy had happened to us. It seemed that we were stuck on one side of a massive sarchasm. The trip pretty much went along this way, for the next 12 or so hours.
We did go to the dining car, and we did have a meal of “serviceable” Chinese food (sweet and sour pork, crispy chicken and rice), the Hienekens were cold, the table cloth was dirty, someone had left a filthy jar of tea on our table and even though we were only one of two people eating, they still managed to forget our order. But I’m used to such high levels of service and pride in ones work in China. Towards the end of our meal the chef, the chief conductor and one of the waiters in said dining car decided to light up, in clear view of Tan’s, who is very clearly up the duff.
Merely blogging about the ineptitude of a couple of China Railways employees is not enough for the epic journey, that is the Trans Siberian. When we stopped at Erlian, I was not going to be disappointed.
At Erlian, they have to have a bogey exchange, and no this is not a common form of Chinese greeting, that involves your nostril being probed by a strangers finger. The trains wheels are changed from the Chinese gauge to the Mongolian / Russian gauge, which involves being shunted into a large shed, having your train carriage jacked up, lifted off of it’s old wheels and having new wheels attached. A pretty interesting thing to watch. Based on the excited talking, numerous picture taking and lots of gesticulating the German anoraks in our carriage were getting a lot more out of it than we were.
This is where things get really interesting. A couple of Chinese guys get on the train. One is carrying a couple of sheaves of wheat, the other about 5 or 6 massive sacks of god only knows what, both smell like the armpits of hell. They set up in the compartment next to ours. We have to close our door to keep out the smell, but it is so strong it still manages to faintly permeat our compartment.
Now I’ve traveled to many parts of the world and nearly all of Asia and I’ve never smelt something like this. I would dry reach, every time I had to go past their compartment. Their mates also liked to spend lots of time smoking and dropping lit cigarettes next to the sheaves of wheat and standing around in the corridor, not getting out of peoples way, even when spoken to in comprehensible Chinese.
To top all of this off, we’ve basically been going nowhere fast since about 8:30pm, when we arrived into Erlian. We had to go through Chinese border formalities, the bogey exchange and Mongolian border formalities. The whole process took around 6 hours, for most of this time the train toilets are locked, the train isn’t moving fast enough to get rid of the stench and we can’t really open our windows because the cabin fills with a fog of fine desert dust when we do. Strangely enough the armpits of hell next door keeps opening the windows to look out into the darkened night, even when the conductor in our carriage is running around shutting them.
After having my passport collected and returned by a Mongolian woman with gold eyeshadow and gold nail polish, you may laugh, but she was totally pulling it off, we fell into a fitful, sweaty and grimy sleep.
