Train from Ulaanbaatar to Beijing (29th/30th of August)

Train no. 4, which we had expected to be rather plush but wasn’t, left Ulaanbaatar station just after 7:15am. We’d got up at 5:30 and had taken the bus from the hostel at 6.00. We thought we might have the compartment to ourselves but shortly before it left some Mongolian men started loading it up with luggage. There were a lot of suitcases. Two big ones went in the overhead storage, another suitcase and three bags under the bed and then another three bags. Later we learnt they weighed 100kg altogether and that their owners were hoping to add another 20kg with cheap Chinese shopping. One bag contained a carpet from the black market and two of them Mongolian clothes purchases. We thought this might be one of the Mongolian students we’d heard would be filling up the train on the way to China and beyond. It turned out however to be a family of four Mongolians on their way home to London after a two month summer holiday. The man’s parents had worked in Mongolian embassies in Russia and he had grown up in various Russian locations before he left and tried to live in Germany and then England. They had two five year old twins, dressed identically and carrying pink rucksacks with Mini Mouse on them and Tinkerbell cups with a snow globe at the bottom. The family slept most of the day, having had a send-off gathering into the small hours of the morning. The two girls were hoisted on to the top bunk and the parents slept head to toe in the bottom bed. Sleeping arrangements were revised in the evening, with each parent sharing a bed with one of the girls. When they weren't sleeping the girls kept themselves entertained while their father told us of his concerns for their education and his plans to send them to Mongolia for secondary school because of the inferior standard of British education.

We were pretty convinced that we’d arrived in China when we were bombarded with street lights on unused roads and arrays of neon lights. At the station there were flowers in pompous stands, lights and an entrance hall with even more lights. The wheels of the train had to be changed so it pulled into a shed and they raised the carriages up and did something underneath. Someone came in to our compartment, rolled the carpet aside, opened a hole in the floor and banged a peg down. And another came in to 'assassinate' us with his temperature gun, firing it at our foreheads. Fortunately none of us had a temperature and we weren't kicked off the train or forced into buying Chinese medicine.

China was so different from the wild and empty expanses of Mongolia that we’d spent the day passing through. The most noticeable change was a rotten egg smell that filled up our compartment as soon as we crossed the border. We thought it issued from the toilet next door, but no, we soon gathered this was the smell of China- the sulphurous smell of pollution.

In the morning there were houses everywhere, and skyscrapers being built in what seemed like small towns. The power stations were everywhere too, belching out their smoke, as well as the mines with piles of coal next to them. A lot of the land was under cultivation, most of it fields and fields of maize with the odd sunflower in between- a stark difference to Mongolia. The landscape was slightly Californian looking, with rolling hills and later some rocky mountains. In one place people had built their houses into the cliffs/ground. As we progressed through the countryside I felt cold number three coming on and discovered my snot was dark black. Maybe the people that live here are unaware that it’s meant to be clear. It'll be a while until we can breathe freely again.

More reassuring was the number of solar panels on the houses and apartment blocks of some of the towns and villages we passed by. The houses were nice with red tiled roofs and brick walls. As we neared Beijing the air got thicker with pollution and we were in the midst of the smog. We went along a river that had been dammed upstream and didn’t contain a lot of water, but the surrounding valleys were very pretty.

In Beijing it was sweltering and the area around the station was swarming with people. We got money out once I managed to get the pin number right, because the numbers were in different places. There were escalators to get over the road to the bus stop, which saved our backs a bit of extra pain, but was really a bit extravagant. After locating our hostel we roamed around the neighbourhood and some seemingly innocent looking individuals tried to con us in to going to a tea ‘festival’ with them (and most likely would have made us foot their bill). Many of the roads were tree lined and the alleys between houses very pretty. Courgettes were growing along and above the alleys and cucumbers were hanging out in strips to dry. We wanted to go to Tiananmen Square, but Jenny had her penknife in her rucksack and we thought we wouldn’t make it through the security check (which in hindsight we probably would have got through no problem). There seemed to be policemen everywhere in Beijing just frozen in pose on street corners, in the underpasses, squares and anywhere else not already occupied by the Chinese public.

Ulaanbaatar again (28th of August)

Having a day to spend in Ulaanbaatar before our train left for China we thought we’d explore the city's ‘Black Market’. It is about 45 minutes walk from the centre, but being among the largest markets in Asia we thought we really had to go and see it. Continuing, as though we were still on our roadtrip, we woke up at six and tried to kill time till we could eat breakfast at 8:00. Our Lonely Planet informed us that the market opens at 9:00. This however is a Mongolian nine and the market was not exactly open for business. We managed to save the 2.5p entry because the person manning the entrance had not yet arrived, along with lots of the stall holders. We weren’t really sure if we were allowed in. All around us people were pushing large wooden crates with their wares into their stalls where they were busily unpacking. People steered their wooden crates in a similar fashion to their cars, going as fast as possible avoiding potholes and expecting pedestrians to jump out the way. As we came in we walked past a row of what would be stalls of jeans. After a wander we came to the rucksacks and since I really needed a rucksack we had a long look. The choice was wide, so it took a while. The fake North Face bag got more expensive when we came back a second time, so I opted for a less fake Jack Wolfskin one. At least there weren’t spelling mistakes on the label.

Soon the market had become alive and people were streaming in. Everything you could need (and a lot more stuff you never would need) was for sale. There were carpets, tablecloths, sweets, bottles and bottles of coca cola, crockery, cutlery, chainsaws, knives, shoes and clothes galore, sofas, materials, other furniture, traditional boots, ger components and a lot more. You could buy photovoltaic panels and satellite dishes for your ger, the nice orange furniture for inside it, the stoves and chimneys, the insulation and the canvas coverings. The furniture was still arriving. The circle for the top of a ger did arrive, but we were very tempted by one of the orange stools we’d been sitting on for the last few weeks. At £3.50 it was quite a bargain, but even though we can take up to 100kg on the freighter the practicalities of taking it through China and South Korea put us off. Alongside rows and rows of Nike and Adidas trainers were the traditional boots, some having very pretty embroidered patterns on them. There were t-shirts with English slogans, some that didn’t make much sense or misspelt – such as “Nestle Chocolete Malk”. Walking back to what we’d seen first of all, the scene had changed, almost everyone was set up and there were a lot more stalls. There were exercise books, pens, the tea flasks that we’d got our hot water from in the gers, rice cookers, and many cheap bowls, mugs, and plates. Most were chipped or faded and probably not fit for the European market, including the stripy mugs from tesco. On our way out we heard the exact same Mongolian music that Gana (the driver) had played on our tour. We pointed to the loudspeakers and hope we got the message across and are now the proud owners of a Mongolian music tape. The masses were descending upon the market as we left. In the street there was a van where there were lots of bodiless sheep's heads with all their teeth glaring out at me.

Next to the university was a large shopping centre with floors named after fruit where the students were flooding in to buy some new clothes or electronic devices. On the orange floor we found ourselves a supermarket where a man with rather a large video camera was taking close up shots of packets of rice and biscuits.

In the afternoon we went on a mad dash around the Natural History Museum where we saw some of the animals and plants we’d seen on the tour and thankfully some we didn’t. The dinosaur skeletons were huge, and there were only the front legs of one of them and these were massive. It’s incredible to think how big it would have been.

Afterwards a search ensued for a felt shop and workshop run by an NGO. The map on the advertisement in the street did not actually resemble anything in reality and we couldn’t find it, even with the help of a Mongolian tv journalist. Jenny narrowly avoided being pushed into the sewer by a homeless child and then we had a mad rush to the post office to send our purchases home. I forgot the postcards in the hostel and we only just managed to get our parcel sent off before they closed.

Visas, visas and more visas

Approximately six weeks before our estimated day of departure we realised it was high time we started thinking seriously about the visas we needed. We’d glanced at the embassy websites before, but now we really had to fill in those forms. At a quick glance we thought we needed visas for Belarus, Russia, Mongolia and China. We were pretty sure we’d left enough time.

In trying to sort out our freighter travel from Asia to North America we unfortunately discovered there weren’t any direct ships to Canada, the last having stopped running in April. There also weren’t any freighters we could board in China, since we’re not planning on doing business there. This meant we’d have to add the additional country of South Korea to our itinerary. Thankfully the South Koreans are a generous bunch and no visa is required (as far as we can work out!). Freighters run from South Korea to Mexico or the US.

What really set us worrying though was an email we received from a freighter agent in Germany stating that we needed a B2 tourist visa for the US, instead of the normal visa waiver since freighters are unauthorised carriers. We then attempted to disprove this by looking into the list of authorised carriers on the US government website. With great triumph we discovered ‘NSB Niederelbe Schiffahrt Gesellschraft MBH & Co.’ on the list. Presumably this was the freighter company we were planning on going with, despite the spelling mistake. Our excitement was short-lived as Outi from NSB told us that the visa waiver does apply to freighter passengers, but only those arriving on the East Coast. Clearly we’d planned this trip the wrong way round.

We did briefly consider going across the Atlantic instead, but we’d really set our hearts on the Trans-Siberian and we couldn’t bail out now. Arriving in Mexico was another option and Ensenada did look like a pretty nice place. If we arrived into Mexico we could just toodle across the border on the visa waiver. Sadly, that shipping service finishes on the 30th of June. Flying to South Korea to catch that freighter clearly wasn’t an option. So it looked like we’d just have to face this head on and get the visa.

The US visa would involve a trip to London and an additional week without our passports. We put together a spreadsheet to see how we could squeeze all the visa applications in. Transiting on the night train through Belarus was not going to happen, the visa wouldn’t get here in time. Instead we decided we’d amble leisurely through the Baltics, going up through the visa-less nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Now we needed to get four visas, but even then that was pushing it a bit. Getting the Chinese visa was like a dream, sent off and came back in five working days as planned. Next up was the US visa, but that deserves a post of its own... When our passports come back tomorrow we’ll send off the Russian application and the Mongolian one will have to wait till we get to Berlin, or somewhere else along the tracks. And if the worst comes to the worst we’ll just have to go to Vladivostok instead.