Today is the day we cross the border and finally enter Mongolia, Thank Goodness as our Chinese Visa expires tonight at 12am (we run on a very tight schedule).
We leave our hotel in Erlian at 8.45am, shoulder our packs & walk through the town to the city centre where the jeeps wait to take passengers and good's across the border. This is the only way to go across the border on weekend's, during the week you can buy a bus ticket or if you are on the Trans-siberian railway it will include your border crossing. The border between China and Mongolia can not be walked across. We find a man who agrees to take us across the border for 75Yuan, in his old, dark blue, Toyota Land cruiser, a car that has made this journey many many times! We fit Tom, Jordan & myself, plus our luggage, another man who looks Mongolian & a whole boot load of box's and packages into the car & set off for the border. It only takes us 10 minutes to get to the Chinese border, our passports are checked by armed guards who are particularly interested in Toms passport and ask him where he is from. We then drive through the gates & hop out of the car to walk into immigration, the car and its cargo drive through immigration and meet us on the other side. The Chinese immigration was very easy & quick only taking a couple of minutes to get our Visa's stamped & walk through to the other side. We get back into the car and drive another 5 minutes thorough 'no mans land' before arriving at the Mongolian immigration, again we make our way through immigration by foot. The Mongolian immigration took about 30 minutes and then we had to exchange our Chinese YUAN for Mongolian MNT. On our way out of the border crossing at the last gate, the guards once again took a particular interest in Tom's passport, but let us through with no problems.
That's all the hard stuff done on this leg of the journey! We make our way to the train station and buy a ticket for the overnight train from Zamiin Uud to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. We then try to make ourselves busy, we have a 5 hour wait before we board our train. As I am still feeling terrible from a cold, this time is spent sleeping on a chair in the station while Tom watches Netflix & Jordan does some exploring of the little town.
Our train pulls up to the station at 5pm, an old train, very different to the ones we have caught in China, this one is coal powered and is spewing lots of horrible black smoke onto it's eager passengers waiting to board. We hop on the train and easily find our bunks, we are in carriage 9 and are beds 1, 3 & 4. The carriage is a lot bigger, cleaner and more comfortable than the trains we took in china, I am thrilled to see that there is a women's & a men's toilet and that the women's toilet is a normal sitting toilet, immaculately clean! I was also very happy when we all received a cup of hot water and some sachets for coffee, green tea and milk tea.
We settled in for the night. I was able to stay awake for a few hours, the sun is now starting to set closer to 8pm allowing sunset views of the vast, dry Gobi desert, still unaware that it was technically spring. The landscape seems so eternal & just keeps going on & on until your eyes can't seem to focus anymore. Once the sun had set, a beautiful crescent moon could be seen in the sky, casting silver on the landscape. It was very beautiful.
- Alli
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