26.05.2011 – 26.05.2011  22 °C

When I left the blog yesterday I was just going to sleep and we were waiting for the train to get going again.. We didn’t get through customs and immigration for Mongolia until after 1.30pm!! It ended up taking us 5hrs to cross the border between the two countries. Not that surprisingly I slept through the whole thing and was only woken up when immigration/ passport control needed to see my face to confirm who I was!!

Poor old Tracey (one of my travelling companions) was awake through the whole thing and managed the border crossing for me and another of my buddies Karina because both of us where asleep. We’ve told Tracey that we owe her and we’ll manage the border crossing when we board the next leg of the Trans Mongolian to take us to Lake Baikal in Russia. Apparently (I wouldn’t know because I slept through the whole thing), that Chinese customs searched the whole cabin looking for illegal stuff being smuggled over the border- they even went to the extent of looking in the roof cavity to see if we had hidden anything!!! Needless to say I had no idea any of this was going on as I slept through the whole lot and only heard about the night’s adventures this morning!

During the swap from China to Mongolia we lost our dining car and gained a Mongolian dining car.. The two are chalk and cheese! The Chinese cabin was dreary and reminded me of a hospital cafeteria back in the late 70s and the Mongolian car is covered in intricate wood panelling and plush carpeted seats!!!

Anyway we went down to the dining car with our own breakfast stuff this morning to soak up the ambience and watch the Gobi desert go by! The desert reminds me a lot of the western plains of NSW.. Endless slightly rolling hills that are a yellowy grey colour that just go on and on. We’ve rediscovered blue sky and white fluffy clouds which is a real treat after the endless browny, twilighty smoggy colour of China. The thing I find most interesting about the Gobi is that the whole desert train track has power lines and full mobile coverage… Now I may be a little slow but no kidding there aren’t many people out and about in the Gobi (trust me we would have been lucky to see 20 all morning– until we hit a town) but we had 5 bars of mobile coverage the whole way!! National broadband eat your heart out!

Slowly the terrain began to become more hilly and we slowly started to go up in altitude towards Ulan Bataar. Mongolia is probably the most interesting terrain I’ve seen in quite some time. The landscape is breathtakingly beautiful and the houses are quite run down but colourful.. Its an interesting contrast.

There is no contrast greater than that of Ulan Bataar itself. The city has a Louis Vuitton outlet and every second car is a Landcruiser V8 yet the streets are pot hole filled, half of the buildings are almost falling down and definately soviet vintage.. The contrast is just amazing.. Clearly there is quite a bit of money here in the city but I’m damned if I know where they are spending it!! Some of it has been spent to refurbish the parliament building which has a huge statue of Genghis Khan (pronounced Chengis Khan!!) and some has been spent on this ultra modernistic, out of place architectural building but other than that the town looks quite run down and in bad need of some decent cash spent on it!!

So far I’m really loving Mongolia and can’t wait to get out on the steppes.. Stay tuned cause that’s where we are headed tomorrow!