UB to Datong
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
121
228
Trip End
Jul 15, 2008
Datong,
China
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
Ulan Bataar, Mongolia
Now that we have seen a little bit of Mongolia on our short tour, we are ready to return to China. We want to take the train again, so we head off to find the ticket office. We have been told that international tickets cannot be bought at the train station, but rather across the street from the train station in a yellow building. On our walk to the train station we see another building, much closer, with a sign saying it has an international train ticket office. There is no one in that office but the other clerks tell us the woman has gone to lunch, however it is already 1 PM. Some other tourists are waiting also. We wait for about an hour then give up and head off to our original destination which was the "yellow building across from the train station." By now it has started to rain. This is good for the country which has been having a drought, but we are getting soaked
31-01
. Irina is still on her world-wide taxi boycott (she boycotted K-Mart for 20 years over a roll of defective film and they went bankrupt) so we must keep walking. The directions we were given turn out to be ambiguous when applied on the ground. The train station is a rather long affair if you include the fright terminals. So we start stopping at any building that is yellow and across from the train terminal. The term yellow, in the directions, becomes a point of concern for us. Did they mean real yellow like lemon-yellow, or could it be a cream-yellow? The people in every yellowish building pointed us further along. About 100 meters past the passenger terminal parking lot is a sort of yellow building: inside we were led to a man behind a desk who spoke English. He told us to continue down the road past the next apartment block and turn right. When we did this we found ourselves in the court yard of a soviet era apartment block. Hidden away here was a white building with a sign saying something about International Train Tickets. This building is neither yellow, nor in sight of any part of the train station. The fun only begins when you find the building. We want to go to the city of Datong in China so we ask at the front desk where we buy those tickets. We are directed up stairs to room 212. It is a very large room with a VIP lounge and bar attached. We wait in comfortable over stuffed couches until the clerk is ready for us. We explain what we want and there is a lot of discussion until a second clerk arrives and says we must see the supervisor, back down stairs. The supervisor is at lunch. We try to go to lunch too, but all we do is get wet again and return having found nowhere to eat within rain-running distance. Finally, the supervisor returns and invites us into her office. She checks her computer and gives us a slip of paper which we have to take back upstairs to the clerks in room 212, who finally sell us our tickets to Datong. Together they cost 221,480 tugrik for a deluxe soft sleeper compartment
31-02
. 1100 tugrik equal one dollar.August 4, 2007
Mongolia/China border
We are on our way back to China on the trans-Mongolian railroad. This time the train is the Mongolian version. Both the Chinese and Mongolian trains are quite comfortable. When we reach the border we have to go through the same wheel changing procedure as before, except in reverse. The workers replace the narrower Mongolian gage axles with those to fit the wider Chinese tracks. Again it takes four hours to cross the border. But this time we can only leave the train for 15 minutes on the Mongolian side and not at all on the Chinese side. We had expected to be able to get off at the border to change tugrik into yuan. Now we will have to wait until we get to Datong.
