One Year Away

Joseph

We woke up but did not particularly look forward to a full day in the Chinese/Mongolian border town of Erenhot (also know as Erlian, depending on what sign you read).

As we went through the town it became obvious that two Westerners walking about were a bit of a novelty in Erlian.  For the first time since arriving in China, we had a lot of people staring and pointing at us.  One mother even lifted her young daughter over a hedge so she could see us walk by.

To kill some time we wandered over to the Erlian Dinosaur Museum.  Mongolia
(the country) and Inner Mongolia (the Chinese state) have both had dinosaur fossil discoveries.  Since this is the part of the world where some of the great dinosaur finds have been made we figured it had to be worth a shot going to the museum  It turned out to be quite small and disappointing, with only one small room and two recreated dinosaur skeletons.  We asked another visitor to take a photo of us with the skeletons. He did and then gestured to us.  I figured that he wanted us to take a picture of him with the dinosaur.  But in fact he wanted to have his photo taken with us.  Maybe he thought we were visiting paleontologists, I don’t know.

For dinner we went to a nice looking restaurant on the main street.  They had no English menu so we pulled out our Chinese dictionary and pointed to the words for “chicken”, “vegetable” and “rice”.  After several attempts we got everything we wanted and it turned out to be a delicious meal.

The next day the train station was a chaotic collection of people traveling to Mongolia.  Most of the Mongolian passengers were transporting several boxes of fruit across the border; fresh fruit are more expensive and harder to get in Mongolia.  This made for a  packed train as every available storage space was crammed with boxes.

Since it was an overnight train we had a sleeper cabin with 4 beds.  We lucked out and ended up with  two great roommates. Bold, a Mongolian multimedia programmer who works for the second largest multimedia studio in Mongolia,
taught us some Mongolian words and gave us some valuable tips.  Ian, a friendly and well-traveled backpacker from Australia, ended up staying at the same hostel as us and will be joining us on a tour to the Gobi desert.   

The rest of the journey was thankfully without incident and the train arrived into Ulaanbaatar at 11 AM on Tuesday.  Total time from Beijing to UB: 68.5 hours.  We’re going to see if we can catch a flight back.