FROM SHANGHAI TO LONDON BY TRAIN: Mongolia

Finally at 1.30am, we started moving again and after a surprisingly good nights sleep, woke at 8.30am to exactly the same landscape: nothing as far as you could see part from a low battered fence running by the track. The three other people in my compartment didn’t speak a word of English and Chris was with an Italian guy called Fabio and two Chinese people who could say hello enthusiastically. Fabio was a nice guy, typically Italian in his laidback approach to life and his passion for football, coffee, music and women. He was a governor lawyer assistant who had five months holiday every year and would travel the world in this time. Right now he was slowly coming home from Asia, not looking forward to starting work again in May.
Having sent an email to the “UB (Ulan Bator) Guesthouse”, a representative had Chris’ name displayed at the platform and drove us, Fabio, an Aussie, a Korean and two Irish guys to the obscurely located guesthouse. It was set in a small square with a half rotted children’s play area in the middle and strangely random patches of dust outlined with low metal bars. It seemed to be the type of thing you imagine Russia to be by watching TV. Although a capital city, everything had a derelict feel to it; a bit of a no-man’s land but this part of the city was a little bustling with banks and currency exchange places on every corner, bars, cheap restaurants and odd shops such as one place that only sold flowers and pottery.
Back at the hostel Chris had changed his mind again and said he wanted a five day tour. I hate tours and told him that I only wanted to see a little of the countryside and then move on. Sure it was interesting to visit such an obscure place but our plan was never to spend a week in Mongolia. Over lunch with Fabio I told him my situation and after twenty minutes of consideration, told him that I’d move on with him in a few days time. I thought about how nice and safe it felt to be with Chris who did all the worrying about everything all the time but realised that his style of travelling allowed much less room for fun. That evening I told him my plan and said I’d meet him in Moscow. He didn’t seem surprised and shared a can of Mongolian beer with me. We were going to let each other go and I’m sure it was going to be for the better of us.
After chatting to a nice Aussie guy who was going to go to London to try to make it as a stand-up comedian, I told Fabio I’d go on the next day’s two day tour with him and went to bed feeling oddly liberated.
The two day tour was very simple. We’d be driven to the middle of nowhere and would stay win a small circular tent/house with a stove fire in the middle and a big metal chimney poking through a hole in the roof. We were to stay with a Nomadic family. It surprised me to hear that half of Mongolia’s 2.3 million population are Nomads although most of them don’t own a TV as this family did, which also surprised me. I was with Fabio and two girls, an Aussie and a Brit, who were nice and coincidently had been working in the same English teaching company I had in Japan.
After a lunch of rice, shredded vegetables and beef, we were dressed by the husband of the family in preparation for two hours horse riding. His name was Odka, easy to remember as it rhymed with one of Mongolia’s favourite drinks, and he dressed me and Fabio in three jackets, but didn’t give the girls so much as a hat. I could only guess men take priority in a land where farming is the only thing a populace can do. The horses were small and looked more like donkeys although they were well trained and well tamed. We were given a twenty second lesson as to how to ride one and then off we went on a two hour journey that I’ll always remember as being the coldest two hours of my life. It was already well below freezing but the harsh sharp wind made it doubly cold and after twenty minutes, everything started to hurt, to really hurt. My toes, my hands, and my face in particular. The dry barren rolling landscape, dotted with huge rock formations was amazing but I was simply too cold to appreciate it. My hands and feet started swelling after an hour and I literally couldn’t move any digits on my hands or feet. Neither could I turn my head or walk without limping once I had got off the horse. Our guide shouted “chu!” to get the horses moving and didn’t speak any English at all. He was entirely without sympathy for our cold states of being and out light trots on the way back (our resting point was a frozen lake) ensured sore arses for everyone as well. We all had the same heavenly vision in mind: the warm circular tent and hot tea. When we got back we were immediately served a beef pasta dinner with hot fruity tea. I slowly warmed up but my hands would continue to hurt for the next few days.
With nothing else to do other than sit around and chat, we did just that. Odka came back to explain his sister was having a baby that very night so he had to leave us, communicated mostly with dynamic gestures, like a game of charades. Later out horse-riding guide showed up with a bucket of coal, making gestures to explain we should put it in the fire for the night. We did so and went to bed in a very warm tent.

I woke up at around 5am, freezing. The fore had long gone so I collected as many blankets as I could find and buried myself. I woke again at around 9am and thought we really should get up so I grabbed some toilet paper and broke a few pieces to stuff under some kindling. It went up beautifully and the place warmed up quickly, making getting out of bed for the others much easier than it had been for me. Fabio and I had a train to Russia leaving at 1.50pm so we had to get moving. When we returned to the hostel we quickly changed our remaining Mongolian money into Russian roubles (nowhere in Russia would change them apparently), had a shower and bought some food for the train. The kind manager of the hostel put us into a cab and said farewell. It was truly a great hostel, as all hostels should be but rarely are: warmly welcoming, genuinely helpful and friendly.
Our compartment on the Mongolian train contained me, Fabio, a Mongolian small-business man who was a little overly keen to speak English and a shady looking guy from Kazakhstan who showed no interest in us. The Mongolian guy was a cheery character with a family and a successful business, operating a tour agency. He opened out a load of food and said that we must just help ourselves: what is him is ours, in true communist spirit. One bag contained huge hacks of beef and fat, another sweet bread rolls, another sausage, another dark malty bread and other bits and pieces.
Soon into the journey, someone dumped six large rolled-up felt blankets in our compartment and the Mongolian guy explained that one of the train attendants needed “help” to pass all these blankets through Russian customs and asked us to each claim two blankets on the customs declaration form. Though nervous at the thought of Russian officials asking why I asked two large Mongolian blankets along with everyone else in the carriage, I cast aside scenes from “Midnight Express” and agreed to it.
After eating a packed lunch included in my ticket and chatting to some other Westerners who were on the train for the full five day stretch to Moscow, we stopped just before the boarder. Our passports were checked and an hour later we rode over the boarder and stopped again for scary Russian officials to board to routinely intimidate us all. One of them came to out compartment and greeted us in Russian. I nervously repeated some Russian I had learnt years ago and he seemed to understand. He explained the boarder crossing rules to us in a manner that suggested we were all prisoners of war. He looked at Fabio’s Italian passport and said something to him in Italian.
“Oh your Italian is good” said a nervous Fabio.
“No!” said the official, “No! I do not speak Italian.” He had shouted as if someone had just asked him to stick his head in a toilet. Fabio recoiled and the tense examination of passports continued. The Mongolian guy was almost visibly sweating as his wife had accidentally washed his passport with his clothes only a few days previous and his passport looked consistent with such information. The official took our passport, explaining that he needed ninety to a hundred minutes to examine them. They all returned ninety minutes later stamped and approved. Our Mongolian friend audibly thanked God for passing through with his frazzled documents. The whole process took about four hours and finished around 2am.