Ulan Bator to Beijing

Bree poses in our cabin. 

Sunrise in the outskirts of Ulan Bator.

Beers in the restaurant car. 

Changing the bogies near the Mongolian-China border. 

The mountainous landscape of Inner-Mongolia. 

The train from Ulan Bator to Beijing gave us the taste of long-haul train travel that we missed out on by making several stops along the trans-Mongolian route. This leg clocked in at around 30 hours. We got on the train as the sun was rising. Once out of Ulan Bator, we passed through hilly, then flat expanses of empty landscape. Then er entered into the even more desolate Gobi Desert, which lasted for hours. At around 7pm we started the almost 5 hour process of crossing the Mongolian-China border, which included changing the 'bogies' (wheels) on all of the train cars (Russia & Mongolia have different tracks  from the rest of the world). When we awoke the next morning we we're gliding through the snow-covered mountains of the Inner Mongolia region of China. The mountains Passed and the land flattened out and quickly the buildings got larger and more condensed as we approached Beijing, Once again impressing ourselves, we navigated the bus and short walk into the hutong (a traditional condensed back-alley neighborhood) to the hostel we are staying at. 

- Matt

Ulan Bator, Days 4 - 6

A ger district in middle of Ulan Bator.

Gandan Khiid Monastery

Bhuddafoot.

Matt enjoys a beer after a long day.

Chinggis (Genghis) Khan monument.

From the base of the monument, an elevator lifts you to Chinggis' crotch.

The aptly-named Turtle Rock.

The time-lapser at work.  

Alice the camel has 2 humps, so go alice go, boom boom boom. (it's a camp song) 

We woke up this morning and saw that is was a comfortable -2 degrees, a great day for hike. Unfortunately we realized the weather app was still set to Fahrenheit. Ah well, -19 Celsius with clear skies and no wind, could be worse. The Chinese visa situation cost us first a 4 night trip, and then even our 2 night trip. We would not have had time to make it to the Gobi, and the closer sand dunes and camel rides were not exactly enticing (although we were told the two hump camels here are possibly easier to ride, and nicer than the one hump dromedaries of the Sahara). We settled on a day trip to the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, known for it's animal-like rock formations, Bhuddist meditation retreat and (unfortunately) encroaching development. A driver picked us up early to take us out of town, he spoke very little english, but was an excellent mime. He also had a impressive nonchalance about driving into opposing traffic in order to miss pot holes, and a dislike for listening to any Mongolian pop songs through to the end. A British journalist working for the local English language paper hitched a ride with us to a hotel, where she was covering the US embassy's morning open house to watch the close of polls/ early results of the election. 

Our tour started in earnest at the giant steel statue of Ghengis (Chinngis) Khan on horseback. He is about 1hr outside of town, and someday will be surrounded by a metropolis of tourist ger camps and parks. His pedestal is a large museum, and since we were the first to arrive that day we had nice young guides falling over each other to explain different parts of the museum. I am still in awe of the mechanical technology the early Mongolian people possessed.

From Chinngis we made our way to the park, again only an hour away, but it seems that most drivers pick their own routes across the steppes to get there. We were actually glad we had not rented our own car.  We are pretty sure a huge number of tourist ger camps have sprung up since our guide book was published, the valley floor was littered with unoccupied gers (it's low season). We hiked from time-lapse location to time-lapse location for a few hours, before meeting our driver back at a ger. We partook in the requisite "have tea in a local's ger". It was black tea that was salty and oily, but not as creamy as the mongolian butter tea we had heard about, or as rancid as the tibetan milk tea. It may actually be the tea that locals drink now, and not the tea they challenge tourists with. Tea with salt and butter/fat is interesting, and palatable if you think of it as life-sustaining soup rather than a cuppa. As we were headed out of the park we saw some camels grazing by the road. Our driver jumped out and started herding them in to poses so we could take pictures. They must have been tourist camels because they were pretty good with the photo ops.

- Bree

Things we learned in Mongolia

Matt eats while being watched over by Jesus and Richard Gere, naturally. 

Food

Mongolia has been good to us, we have been able to eat Mongolian food, made the vegetarian way. We found a few Buddhist veg restaurants and also discovered a world-wide vegan chain restaurant called Loving Hut. Loving Huts are all individually owned and run, so they serve local food. The only down side to these vegetarian restaurants is that they do not serve alcohol and close very early. The Mongolian nomads actually do eat primarily green (vegetables) and white (milk) foods in the spring and summer. Unfortunately right now we are in the red food (meat) season. Yellow (oil) and black (alcohol) are for all seasons. In Genghis Khans Yassas (rules for society) he bans most hunting from May to October. Of course he also bans washing your clothes, ever, sooo...

Language

The Mongolian language is not easy for someone who speaks English. Many of the words sound like Sylvester The Cat. We were only able to really learn 2 words here: hello: sam-an-o; and thank you: bay-arl-a-laa (with that corner-of-the mouth sucking 'shhh' sound added somewhere towards the end of the word). Luckily, pretty much everyone we encountered knew those words, and more in English.

Every car is a taxi

While there are buses and taxis, most people just approach the street and wave a hand and pretty much any car stops. Passengers pay the driver a somewhat standard fee per km. It is bizarre to me, but totally normal here. 

Stopping is optional

Crossing the street is very exciting in Ulan Bator. Yes, there are crosswalks. Yes, there are stoplights. But it barely matters. Cars will simply keep driving, whether a person is in the way or not. It is like being in the later levels of Frogger. 

Phone home

There are vendors on street corners. The term vendor being used generously. It's usually an older woman sitting with a crate in front of her. On display are cigarettes, both in packs and individuals, roasted pine nuts in plastic solo cups, gum, and a telephone. When I witnessed someone approach the vendor, hand her some money and start dialing I was very confused. It was a large, non-cellphone, landline-looking telephone. Maybe it is a kind of old-school mobile phone, but honestly, I am still trying to understand this one. Many of these vendors also have a scale. Not the kind you would weigh pine nuts with, but the bathroom kind. I'm not sure if they will guess your weight, or just weigh you for a fee? 

- Matt & Bree

Having a Wonderful Time, Please Send A Chinese Visa!

Now that our Chinese visas are firmly in our passports, I feel secure enough to complain for a minute about the process that got us here (6 attempts and many wasted days and changes of plans later).

Attempt #1: Tried to apply in New York. I arrived armed with the train confirmation, all our hostel bookings, and a plan for which train to Tibet we would take. I was told a confirmation was not enough, she needs to see actual train tickets in (which were waiting for us in Mongolia) and out (not on sale yet). Also, my hostels were a little too cheap by her standards so she wanted to see our marriage certificate to prove we would be staying together. Also we needed the Tibet permit to get the visa, although the Tibetan guides all say you need a visa to get permission.

Attempt #2: We bought plane tickets in and out of china (fully refundable, just in case), strike Tibet off the itinerary, and firm up a bunch more hostels. Unfortunately, the embassy was closed for some Chinese holidays and we would not get our passports back in time to leave.

Attempt #3: I find an agency in London who will get the visa for us, we ship them our growing stack of support documents overnight when we land in Liverpool. We had asked for a double entry visa so we could make a pass through southern China at the end of the trip. The agency calls us two days later and says they would need the full itinerary for the second trip. Fine, we'll take a single entry, but now we need it rush.

Attempt #4: The Chinese embassy in London doesn't feel like doing a rush visa, even for the extra 20£ each they would get from us. We don't have time for regular processing before the flight to Kiev.

Attempt #5: We change our Trans-Siberian schedule, essentially eliminating our time on Lake Baikal (the only stop many Trans-Sib travelers make) so we can get to Mongolia early, and go to the Chinese embassy in Ulan Bator that is only open Mon, Wed, Fri. We submit our applications and the lady at the desk asks for our Chinese Invitation Letter. We don't have one, we tell her, because we have plane tickets in and out and all our accommodation booked instead, as per all the official embassy websites. Too bad, she wants an invitation, with an official stamp. 

There is only one lady who accepts applications, and according to the people in line and at the hostel, requirements vary widely depending on when you get her. Russia also requires an invitation, but there are scores of companies on the Internet willing to invite you for a fee. This requirement for tourists to China is new, or not widely enforced so that service does not exist. 

We spend the rest of the day emailing and calling hostels we are staying at, hotels we would stay at, companies we could book a tour through, etc. We checked Linkedin and Facebook to see if anyone we knew had moved to China. We were waiting for the west coast to wake up to look into asking my brother's in-laws for a favor (in fact, he has a 4 week old baby so he was probably up). We finally find a tour company who will do it for a fee, and after multiple emails and calls we think we are in business.

The UB Chinese embassy has a reputation for sometimes not doing rush visas, so we are already cutting it close time-wise. They charge an extra $30 for rush, which is significant for all the other nationalities who pay $30 for their visa. For Americans the visa fee is $140.

Attempt #6: Come Monday morning our letter had not yet arrived, and the embassy closes at noon. After yet another call to the tour agency we set off to the other side of town. We ducked into an Internet cafe across the street from the embassy and thankfully found the letter in my email. We rush to the visa office and hand over the (now enormous) application at 11:50. For some reason not only was the lady offering rush processing, but urgent (same day) as well. We could get our visa that afternoon, for a fee. She told us they would be calling our inviter (luckily I didn't let Matt photoshop a letter) and to come back at 4.

Bracing ourselves for denial we came back after having arranged for the payment at a local bank (476000  Mongolian Tugriks). We joked with an American ex-pat and a French couple we knew from the visa line who had been struggling like us and giddily watched as our visa were pasted into our passports! Finally!

As for Tibet, we will see. The Chinese restricted tours to minimum of 5 people of the same nationality (which is why I'm traveling American) last summer, and by September were not letting any foreigners in. The guides we have talked to told us to contact them again after the change of power on the 8th to see if things have changed. A guy from Hong Kong we met gave us instructions on how to sneak in, but considering that 'Matt & Bree's Rules of Travel, rule #2 is: Don't get thrown in jail' we probably won't attempt it.

- Bree

Ulan Bator, Mongolia, Days 1 - 3

Ulaanbataaaaaaaaaaaaar, bitches! (...70,000 Mongolian Tughuriks is only about $50 USD)

Look what we found down a back street in Ulan Bator. 

Sühkbaatar Square

Ghengis or as he's called here Chinngis Khan.

Stature of Damdin Sühkbaatar, leader of the 1921 revolution.

From Liverpool to Mongolia, we cannot escape the Beatles.

The Winter Palace of the Bogd Khan.

Buddha statue.

Overlooking Ulan Bator from the Zaizan Memorial.

Part of the mosaic at the very-Soviet Zaizan Memorial.

Smokestacks and cityscape at sunset.

After the hours spent in a bus through the relatively untouched barren landscape of the Mongolian countryside, Ulan Bator appeared in stark contrast. Although the city is dusty, polluted (ranked #2 in the world) and clearly suffering from growing pains, it is very modern and contains an interesting array of culture. 

The first sort of culture shock we encountered was soon after we arrived. The long day on the bus left us both thirsting for a cold brew. We went into a restaurant and ordered some food and a couple beers. The waitress said "No." Her English was clear and good. I asked again, this time more politely. No. We ate our food, reassuring ourselves that we could pick some up on the way home. Long story short... we coincidentally arrived on the 1st of the month, which in Ulan Bator, is when no sales of alcohol are permitted. 

After walking the streets the past few days I have really started to feel like I am in a modernized wild-west town. I don't mean like Wild Wild West. The city is being built up and expanded as fast as possible. People are coming here from all over the world to try and get their piece. We overhead a British Geologist going over his findings to a couple Mongolian businessmen. "There's loads of uranium in there." he said "of course this is all protected land, so it'd be very hard to mine in these areas, but if you could..." 

- Matt

Goodbye, Mother Russia!

We arrived in Ulan-Ude in the dark, with no reservation for the once-daily bus to Ulan Bator at 7am the next morning. Then we heard that almost all tickets were sold-out hours ago and it was too late to try and get them that night. So we wrote down a back up plan for taking local busses to the border, hitching/hiring a taxi across the Russian-Mongolian border, and then finding local busses to Ulaanbataar. It sounded pretty tricky but we both felt like we could now handle it (a month ago, maybe not).

We woke up very early and headed to where the once-a-day bus was, on the off chance that that hadn't actually filled up yet. Almost to our surprise, we were able to get on the bus.

- Bree

Dawn in southern Siberia.

Our bus featuring The Notebook, dubbed in Russian. 

The last of the snow, as we head into the dry Mongolia steppes.

Mongolian landscape.

Each small village had it's pack of dogs roaming around.

Loading back onto the bus after a short lunch break.

The 12+hr bus ride was interesting. The bus itself was nice, cushy seats and in good condition. After getting out of the city, the bus driver powered up the TV and started playing The Notebook. Dubbed in Russian of course. The scenery very quickly changed from the snowy Siberian taiga to arid hilly steppes. After The Notebook tearfully ended, a Russian comedy/bro-mance film with a lot of yelling interrupted our attempts at napping. The Russian-Mongolian border came up, and aside from a little waiting around, was no problem. Back on a now bumpier road, the final film was Furious Five, again dubbed in Russian. Which, I actually think made the film, or at least the acting seem better. The added benefit of bouncing around on the bus made the action scenes 4D. 

So we are done with Russia. I already kinda miss it. But the intrigue of Mongolia has my full attention now.

- Matt