Goodby China, Hello Mongolia

Mum and I are travelling in our own compartment which comes with a chair and a bathroom shared with next door- who seem to be constantly in it. The attendants are all Mongolians and I am a teeny bit scared of them. They are all very muscled, which their skirts and make-up fail to hide. The whole effect is a tad trans-sexual. They don’t speak much and just glare and their main preoccupation is bagsiing a compartment for themselves which resulted in us being placed in a different one to our ticket which meant that everyone else has had to be shunted around too. They spend their time cooking dinner which I wouldn’t mind, except it smells a lot better than what I’ve got. Namely pot noodle and gently staling bread.

As we travelled away from Beijing the skies cleared and gradually the familiar Chinese landscape of skyscrapers and maize fields turned into wide valleys and then steppe. Steppe! Very exciting. This meant we were in Inner Mongolia, which is a province of China much like Tibet. As we journeyed we saw horses, cattle, sheep and even two dinosaurs standing near a road. The sunset was fantastic- deep pink and red. My last in China. At around 8:30 we arrived at Erlian, the border town. This is where they had to change the train’s bogies so it can run on the different tracks of Mongolia. This involved a lot of banging and bumping of the train that was quite violent at times. Each carriage was detached and raised before the bogies were slid out from underneath and new ones added. It took a while.

We are now in the Republic of Mongolia and travelling over endless steppes. Occasionally there are gers (gers!) and herds of ponies or sheep. There is also the odd brick or wood building and we even passed a collection of about 15 that must pass for a town around here. Mongolia has the lowest population density in the world- barely 2 people per square kilometre. Of a total population of 2.8 million, 1 million live in the capital Ulaan Baatar, with a sizeable proportion in other cities. 30%  continue life as nomads, although I suspect with the addition of motorcycles and mobile phones.

At the border, guards came and took our passports, stamped them and then gave them back. With a jolt we rolled on and my year in China came to an end at roughly midnight on 25^th July, 10 months and 23 days after I first landed in Qingdao on a humid summer’s day.