When we arrived in the border town of Erlian (Chinese name)/Erenhot (Mongolian name) at 06:51, we still weren't sure whether the border would be open that day (it was a Monday before the Chinese Labour Day holiday and many Chinese had the day off to make for an extra long weekend.)
I tried to divine this by asking a number of people around the station exit, but got a rather muddled response as, at varying points in my questioning, I confused the words for "open" and "closed" as well as the words "today" and "tomorrow."
After a while we finally got the picture and arranged a ride in a minibus across the border for the exorbitant price of 80RMB (NZ$18) for a 3km journey. But no one is permitted to walk across the border, so they have a captive market.
We spent about 2.5 hours waiting around for more passengers and goods to bring with us. We got to have a tiny explore of Erlian while waiting, but really the only interesting things about the place were the dinosaur topiary (Erlian is China's premiere dinosaur fossil location) and signs in Chinese, traditional Mongolian script (used in Inner Mongolia) and Cyrillic Mongolian (used in Mongolia). We finally got going just after 10:00.
Crossing the border was actually quite straightforward and by 11:30 we were in Zamyn Uud, Mongolia.
Our first order of business was to buy tickets for the overnight train to Mongolia's capital Ulanbataar, which turned out to be no trouble once we'd found the ticket counter and cost a mere NZ$16 (for some reason the direct international train from Beijing costs about $300pp, while the journey the way we made it was about $100.)
We did a bit of exploration of Zamyn Uud. We'd spotted a really odd looking section of long parallel roads in the north part of town which, on visiting, we discovered were the "ger district" where families simply set up their ger (yurt) and call it home. We also met a very scary mother dog (thankfully tied up) and her very cute puppies during this walk.
Back in the centre of town the time eventually came for us to board the train. And what a trip it was! The carriages seemed like Soviet era ones, complete with the paisely mattresses, 1970s colour scheme and the coal-fired hot water urn at the end of the carriage. But they had been retrofitted with USB charging ports and flat screen TVs showing Mongolian programming and comfy clean sheets. And this was in "hard sleeper" (i.e. second) class!
We had about 2.5 hours before sunset to enjoy the view out into the Gobi. We even saw a large (18-20) herd of (domesticated) Bactrian camels!
Next morning, the terrain outside was slightly greener (really not saying much) and hillier as we'd left the Gobi and carried on through the steppes to Ulanbataar.
This was a bit of a shock. Zamyn-Üüd was a small town. The stops along the way were even smaller, with many of the towns being quite a bit shorter than the train. And aside from the occasional mine or small group of gers, that's all there was.
Ulanbataar, meanwhile, was a sprawling city of 1.4 million, with modern mirrored glass skyscrapers and even a sizeable amusement park visible from the train on our way in.
On exiting the station we had a bit of a shock when a group of people mobbed along after us clutching at, of all things, the mostly empty plastic water bottle in my hand. One old lady grabbed on tight and pulled such that my fingers were getting squashed by the handle. I was about to give them another empty bottle, but realized that it was actually the water they wanted. So I handed it over. If they're really that desperate for drinking water then by all means, let them have it, ai thought.
I'm still a bit confused by this, because everything else we saw in central Ulanbataar made it look like quite a prosperous and cosmopolitan city (though no doubt things are different out in the ger districts to the north and west of the city centre.)
We spent a total of four more days in UB. During this time we wandered around the central-ish area and saw some of the city's modest but still pretty neat sights.
The historical sites, Choijin Temple and the Bogdan Khan's winter palace weren't huge, but were surprisingly engaging.
The Choijin Temple, was the site wherein Mongolian Buddhism's highest Lama would channel the deities he'd chosen as his own to protect and provide for the country. This place was memorable for two reasons:
First, the quality and detail of the artwork displayed therin. There were dozens of intricate and lively papier mache masks. Hugely detailed bronze statues and wooden mansions that represented the Pure Land of the Buddha. And life sized statues of the founder of the temple and his religious teacher. And this last is a nice segue into the other way in which it was memorable. The place was really very dark and grim. E.g. the first of those two statues had the cremation ashes of the monk mixed into the clay of the figure and the second was built around the seated mummified corpse of the teacher.
The walls were adorned with paintings of men hung upside down by their feet, having been castrated, beheaded or otherwise mutilated. Many of the statues wore strings of skills or heads. Some of the finely detailed artworks pictured people being disemboweled while burning alive or being sodomized with spears. Some of these were due to the high Lama happening to have "wrathful" patron gods. And others were representations of Buddhist hells. But both were much more graphic and darker than the representations I'd seen elsewhere in the Buddhist world.
The Bogd Khan's palace was the home of the spiritual (and briefly, between the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and the rise of the Communists in 1924, temporal) leader of Mongolia. The artworks there were just as beautiful as those in the temple, and the architecture probably a bit nicer in its un-(recently)-restored grandeur. But the wildest bit was the Winter Palace. A medium sized two story building it was gifted to the 8th Bogd Khan by Russia, so was constructed in a European style. And it contained such marvels as a waistcoat decorated with (I estimated) 30,000 micro-pearls, a ger made from 150 leopard skins (including Indian and African leopards.) And most oddly of all, a section showing off the 8th Bogd Khan's zoological collection which numbered dozens of stuffed animals including numerous sloths, a pukeko(!) and a kakapo(!!!)
(These two sites had quite reasonable $5 admission fees and not at all reasonable $30 camera fees, so the photos of them aren't mine.)
We also visited the Zaisan memorial, on a hill south of the city, which commemorated the friendship between the Mongolian and Soviet people. And where I played a baloon-popping dart game, surprising myself by winning a prize which I then had had to give away to one of the kids hanging around there.
And we walked to the main "black" market west of town. I love markets. Asian markets in particular. And we had a good explore of this one as we searched for a sleeping mat and mittens for Sarah and socks and pants for me. It had all of the usual market stuff, but also uniquely Mongolian sections devoted to ger building supplies, Mongolian Buddhist religious goods and saddlery (featuring brightly painted Mongolian wooden saddles.)
Let's see... We also managed to visit the museum of Mongolian contemporary art (had a great collection of works from the 1950s to the present. The stuff from the communist era looked like they were rather more forgiving of "backward" (i.e. traditional) or bourgeois (e.g. non-representational) art than their communist neighbours to the north and south.
And we visited a Mongolian craft brewery pub (nice venue, one beer that had some unpleasant yeast issues, another that was very good if you could get over the diacetyl.)
We ate some surprisingly good vegan food (Mongolians love their meat and the climate, especially in spring, doesn't lend itself to a ready supply of domestic vegetables.)
We ate some Korean food (the Mongolians seem not just into, but obsessed by all things Korean. Such that evey fourth restaurant in a city with many is Korean and one of the main streets is called Seoul Street.
And we ate some Mongolian food. Which was... Not too bad. Think starch and meat heavy, flavoured with salt and not too much more. Lots of hand cut noodles. Soups with big chunks of meat. Steamed dumplings filled with meat. Deep fried pastries filled with meat. Indeed, I don't think I've ever been anywhere where you can get so much meat for your money. Pretty much a whole fried chicken in a restaurant cost less than a single cucumber at the supermarket (about NZ$3.50).
And finally, after a day spent in bed trying to shake a cold I acquired while on the train, we met our tour-mates in person. We'd contacted Ben and Kathryn on a travel website and the four of us had planned to take a private tour of northern and central Mongolia together. This isn't really Sarah and I's normal style, but Mongolia is quite low on public transportation except between UB and provincial capitals, the distances are big and most of the sights are a ways out in the countryside.
Which is where we'll be headed next!
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