Bye bye Mongolia
Trip Start
Aug 10, 2008
1
24
59
Trip End
Ongoing
Ulan Bator,
Mongolia
Friday, October 10, 2008
I did however go to a great Mongolian show which had traditional dancing, instruments and singing - including throat singing. This is a type of singing that I understand is just heard in Mongolia and also the Tuva area of Russia, and it's an amazing sound - very deep but with a second higher, almost whistling sound. I took a short video clip but I'm not sure it really comes across on that very well. Other highlights of the show were the contortionists and the sound of some of the instruments.
On my last night night I also went for a great Indian meal with some people we had to say goodbye to. It's my first curry since England and tasted good - I also hoped that the heat would help my throat!
It seems strange now that I'm leaving the least populous country in the world for the most populous (Not sure how that is really spelt but I mean the least/most people for the area) - I wonder how weird that will be.
I wonder too if I will learn more Chinese than Mongolian - here I can only say hello (Sanbanoo / banoo) and thank you (Byed-la) but although it's embarrassingly poor, I seem to have got by ok on that. I'll miss the wide open spaces here, and the little quirks - like the people that sit with a little table and telephone on the street - It doesn't seem to be connected to anything but you can make cheap calls from them, the other guys with the weighing scales, and all the stray cats, dogs and children around. I brought another CD here to remember the place - on the tours all the drivers seemed to have the same tape so that's the one I brought - it will always make me think of a bumping van through the Gobi!
So..next stop will be Beijing. It worked out that I was leaving on the same train as another girl from the hostel - even in the carriage next to each other so it would be good to share the journey. The two Danish guys also happened to be on the train so it was good to catch up with the rest of their trip.
The border crossings were fairly straight forward, and although still several hours, were shorter than the crossing from Russia. The interesting part was also the changing of the bogies - the tracks in Mongolia and Russia are a different width from those in China (and beyond) so at the border they have to change the wheels of the train to accommodate this. It's a complicated process of lifting each carriage and rolling out the old ones and fixing in the new. We could only watch from inside but we hung out the windows, fascinated with the process. No one seems to understand why they don't just change the trains?
At the Chinese border, around midnight, we also had a chance to get rid of our last Mongolian currency in a platform shop - this was also mt first glimpse at a Chinese supermarket - the foods and drinks looked so different and interesting - it made me excited to see more.
