This next leg of my Trans-Mongolian trip was probably the most crazy. We had to go through two border crossings. The first was on the Russian border. This was the part where they bring on the dogs, check under seats, look under the train, etc. They’re looking for everything from smuggled Russian dolls filled with drugs to border jumpers. The process takes at least an hour. They come around to the cabins, collect your passport which you won’t see again till the
process is over and kick you out of your cabin while they check every
nook and cranny including removing the roof tiles allowing all the dust
and debris cover your bed sheets. Its a fun stop. Oh, and you had
better not snap any photos at the border or you can say goodbye
to your camera.
Arriving at the first station…
After this stop, the train ran for maybe another 15-30 minutes until
we arrived at the official border. This stop was definitely the most
confusing. Our train stopped at the station and of course we were all
wondering how much time we had before the train was off again as even
ten minutes would give us time to get off the train, maybe buy some
food and run around a bit. Well, we asked the attendants and in their
broken English, they kept telling us ‘six… six’ making the numbers
on their hands. So… OK… we had six minutes. Definitely not enough
time to do too much off the train. The last thing you wanted was to be left bag-less on the Russian-Mongolian border. So we sat… and sat and continually
thought the train was going to leave at any moment, we never thought
to even get off. Close to an hour later, we went looking for the
attendants to figure out what was going on. Well, they were nowhere to
be found… and neither was the rest of our train! Our one train car
was the only thing on the track! There was no locomotive, no other
train cars, nothing. Just us sitting there…
Ahh, so this is the train that is supposed to deliver us to Mongolia….. Are we supposed to push it over the border???
We soon realized that ‘six…six’ meant 6 hours not 6
minutes! So we got off and went exploring. The whole experience was
very confusing and the attendants never let us know anything before they left. Were we supposed to walk to Mongolia? Were we getting hooked up to
another train? Are we meant to just push our train carriage into Mongolia??? We
had no idea but we decided to just walk into the edge of town to get some sun
and some train supplies (a.k.a. more instant noodles, weird Russian
cookies, fruit and anything else that seemed edible). When we got back
onto the train with no other train cars around in such a weird situation, we quickly got to know our cabin mates.
I call this the instant noodle maker… and you’ll get very used to using this hot water dispenser after a week on the train. It works great until it either runs out of coal or starts smoking up the cabin
Even though there’s not a lot you can do while sitting on a train, somehow it’s ten times worse sitting on one that’s not in motion for six hours. Eventually we hooked up with another train and later got moving again.
Up next… the Mongolian border…. another hour long border crossing.
Now I know why it takes two days to get from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator. We
went through another round of dogs and border officials but shortly
thereafter, we were in Mongolia and the scenery was quickly changing.
We had about three hours of daylight before the sun was setting over the deserted landscape.
First Mongolian sunset…taken quickly through a dirty train window…
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