I ended up staying in UlanBatar for 10 days, mainly waiting in the Chinese Visa I needed to head on the next step in the journey onto Beijing.
UlanBatar was a nice relief from the constant need to drive and make up miles. But it is still a city in the making. It has essentially a single main road running through the centre, from which everything else spreads out and meanders away.
We managed to find a guest house called the golden gobi which was in the very centre of the city. As with many of the guesthouses if they are full they offer you a place in one of their sister guesthouses (most likely run by a friend of theirs) which is near to them. So we ended up staying with a woman named Betsy, who happened to teach Russian and as she put it she "thought she might as well learn English as it's helpful". She spoke absolutely perfect English, which might sound like we were being judgemental, but after nearly 4 weeks of broken English at best, it came as a complete suprise an somewhat a relief.
We stayed there one night and then the next day we had already booked into another guesthouse when we were back in the UK, so we went searching for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse. I say we went "searching" because this was literally it, the system of addresses in UlanBatar is clearly still in the process of being determined, as it's very much a case of checking quite a few different places before getting a clue as to where you may have to head. Just as we were at the point of giving up we wondered up a staircase and found a sign for the Mongolian Steppe Guesthouse, this landlady, Eiggy, was also very good at English and she had to show us down the road to where we'd booked our bedrooms. As it turned out we had an apartment to ourselves which was awesome. The shower was also a godsend. However, UlanBatar has one centralised hot water system, so when they have to work on a section of the system they shut down entire streets and districts. This meant we had a whole 2 days of hot water, then we quickly our hopes dashed by having the remainder of our stay there with cold water showers, not just cold showers though, it felt like the coldest water any of us had ever been in. It was so cold that your arms and legs would turn blue, and as soon as it hit your body you'd have uncontrolable breathing spasms, so a nice challenge to the cleaning process.
We had fun trying to get a tourist visa for China, the office are only open from 9.30am-12pm on Mondays, Wednesdays & Fridays. So not the most flexible of opening hours.
We got to the office early knowing there are issues with the amount of people all trying to get visas, so we were one of the first there. Then at 9.30am when the door opened to let a set amount of people through, there was a surge as everyone tries to get in. Luckily for some reason westerners such as ourselves were given priority, so that combined that we were at the front anywy ensured we got in with the first lot. After only 20mins of form filling and chatting with the clerk we had all of the paperwork sorted and had to come back on the Wednesday to pick up our visas for the princely sum of $50.
With this in hand we had to then go and book our train tickets. The transiberian railway which runs from Moscow to Beijing runs once a week, and unfortunately was fully booked till September. So our only option rather than flying which was about $270, was to take a Mongolian train to the Chinese border and then take a Chinese train from there.
So we got the train from UB to Jinjing this took about 24 hours, we were all in a sleeper carriage with 4 to a room, it was clean and well designed, if not a little old. All in all it was a good journey, and we all slept pretty well. The next section however was interesting. So the first train actually ended up running earlier than planned. So we got to Jinjing, and we had 5 hours to kill, but it was about 7pm, so we decided to go and grab some food, and even try an Internet cafe afterwards. After some interesting ordering from a menu completely in Cantonese, we got some lovely food including noodles, duck, rice and various meat dishes....and there was way to much to eat, we'd picked up some people from the train by this point as well so there were about 8 of us in the restaurant. All the food and a couple of beers later we came to settle the bill and it all added up to about £5 each, so we were all pretty impressed!
We left the restaurant with full stomachs and still had about 2 hours to kill, so we headed down the road lead by one of the waitresses to an internet cafe tucked away in an alleyway. It's weird as you walk around what is obviously not a tourist haunt, and where westerners are relatively rare, everyone stares at you, but not in an intimidating way just and inquizative way, people going past also like to shout hello as they cycle past etc...
We got to the Internet cafe, and were hit by one annoying realisation, all the computers are in Chinese, and to top it off, China has a huge firewall controlling what the Chinese public see on the Internet, including Facebook, so for the next week or so, I'll have no access to my blog, or facebook or even a variety of other seemingly harmless websites that are considered offensive.
Anyways, after attempting the internet, we headed to the train station to await our train at midnight, we were under the impression this was another sleeper train, but unfortunately it was not. In China there are 2 main classes of seat....hard seats....or soft seats. We luckily had the latter. But that doesn't stop the pain! As it turns out hard seat tickets just mean you dont actually have a seat at all, instead you stand or sit in the aisle for the entire 7 hour journey! So we had very uncomfortable seats, and surrounding us were hundreds of Chinese people all standing and sitting where ever they could purch, this ended up meaning that one Chinese guy crawled under my row of seats and feel asleep, there was no leg room at all because you're in bays of 6 people facing one another, and I was sat in the aisle facing a guy who resembled Buddha! Only he snores worse than anyone I've ever met! So after an entire day on the go, and no sleep the following night we all got to Beijing at 7am, all a little grumpy/hungry & tired.
We then had the fun of trying to find the travellodge-esk place we'd booked ourselves into, only to find that the hotel details were on my phone that had conveniently run out of power on the journey, so we frantically roamed the station looking for a power point, I did managed to find one in the toilet in the station, the only problem being it was above head height so I had to stand holding my phone above my head as people did their business around me. I was there about 1 mins, and a cleaner who obviously though I was trying to recreate a George Michael toilet situation ushered me on.
We managed to get into a taxi and then I used the cigarette adapter to charge the phone as we headed to where we thought the hotel was, and all worked out well, we got to the hotel, and for only £10 a night it was awesome.
Thursday, 10 September 2009
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