Mongolia or Bust

Getting tickets to Mongolia wasn't the ordeal that we thought it would be. A Young ticket runner working for an agency was in front of us in line and he explained all our options before we even got to the ticket window.

The train ride although long was fun - mostly because of the other travellers in our train car, certainly not because of the eleven hour wait at the border. We convinced our one bunk mate to swap Places with a young Swiss woman whose own cabin mate had crammed more boxes and bags into his berth than it seemed capable of holding.

The scenery in Mongolia, of rolling hills, flat plains, grazing horses and an occassional ger, was magical and a far cry from the cement and trash we had passed in Russia. The sun played with the shadows as the land slipped past our window and cast a golden glow low in the sky as it sank.

In the morning we arrived in Ulaan Baatar (UB), Mongolia's capital. It was a welcome sight to see guest house owners holding up signs to solicite business. It made finding a place easy. The Bold Guest House was the first to approach me and, because at 6 am I was too tired to shop around, they won. "Five dollars per bed," Choi said, and she took us by taxi to an old apartment building near the center of town.

We marched up the cement steps to apartment number #1. Choi motioned us to creep between the sleeping travellers already there and to squeeze between two beds to another door. I gave John my 'I don't think so' look when Choi showed us two vacant beds. "Do you have anything, er, more private?" I asked.

We had to wait until noon but we eventually settled into a large four bedroom apartment (2 bedrooms, a large living room, kitchen and bath and with a TV). It was double the price (read: all of $20 a night) but three times as big as the 8-bed, one-room apartment #1, and it was all ours.

With the task of getting into and settled in UB behind us, we focused on task number 2, getting out of UB. The Chinese are running the trains this year (each year it rotates between Mongolia, Russia and China). The Chinese do not order extra train cars and consequently getting tickets is hard we were told. We had to get train tickets to China and get geared up within two days. In two days we wanted to be enjoying the Mongolian countryside and leaving city life behind.