a Cacotopic Cat. Asia 2011

The Train North 06/July - 07/July

On the seventh of July, 2011, I sat on one of four mattresses in a room where 5 people were staying, my back to the wall, my feet hanging over the side of one of the 4 beds, and wrote the following disgruntled entry in my journal:

"7 July:
So, we’re in Zamiin-Uud. It is a podunk border town with neither charm nor utility.
Here’s what happened after I last wrote.

At around 9pm we arrived in Er Lian. We got off the train in the hopes of buying a ticket to continue on. As we walked out, though, it occurred to us to maybe ask the train attendants whether we could just stay on for a fee and we turned back. As we did we saw another Westerner, a woman of about 5’ 1’’ with freckles and brown-red hair tied back in a ponytail. We decided to ask her if she knew whether we could buy tickets on the train, but it turns out she was going to stay the night there and continue on to Zamiin-Uud by jeep in the morning. We asked if she’d like to share a jeep, as this seemed a good cost-saving idea. We agreed, and left the station.

We’d thought there would be taxis in the station parking lot, and perhaps some hotels, but there was nothing. Instead we decided to double check whether we could buy train tickets and started wandering in search of a ticket counter at the same time a bunch of Isrealis who we’d met on the train, and a bunch of other Westerners, poured out the station doors as well. It turns out that the train we were on was the trans-siberian, and they ditch the hard-sleeper cars when they hit the border; if you want to stay on till Ulaanbataar, you have to pay luxury prices, about 1000 yuan. So we all went into the international ticket hall, and then had to come back out and leave our bags, then go back in through a scanner, to try and buy tickets.

Except none of the ticket counters were open. In fact, nothing was open, and after a flurry of activity caused by the baggage scanner turning back on and us having to scan all our baggage, nothing at all happened for the next 15 minutes except discussion. 'T', the girl we’d met earlier, who turned out to be from San Francisco, and PB & I inspected ticket prices and times and weighed our options. We eventually decided to stick to T’s original plan of staying overnight & taking a jeep in the morning, and left to find a hotel.

The first place we found was something with a sign on the doors which read “The Meat of the Hotel”, which turned out to be not a hotel at all, but a restaurant. One of the ladies there, though, quoted us a price for rooms and then took us around trying to find a hotel. First one we went to was full, but the second one had a common room with 30 yuan beds, which we were happy to take. T had a hurt foot, so we went up to deposit all our bags right away. It turned out to be 2 rooms; the man who showed us up very clearly indicated that PB was to stay in the room (maybe 10 or 12 beds) while T & I stayed in the smaller room (maybe 4 or 5 beds) found through a connecting door. We also had a bathroom, complete with shower. We were the only ones in the rooms.

We unpacked and rested a little before deciding to go in search of groceries for the next day. The plan was to leave bright and early the next day, get a jeep to Zamiin-Uud, and there buy a train ticket to Ulaanbataar for that evening. The train, we’d heard, was something like 15 hours long, so we decided to stock up on food and vegetables and beverages while we could.

[EDIT: Apparently my formatting earlier managed to cut off the majority of this entry. The other half of it is below.]

We went out into Er Lian and found a decent-sized convenience store that we'd passed earlier while hotel-hunting. T looked around for bread, as she didn't eat meat, and PB & I stocked up on noodles, drinks, & snack food. We were greatly helped by a 10 or 11 year-old boy in the shop who helped translate Chinese and Mongolian into English. Right before we left we noticed a felt drinking flask with ink detailing. The front of it had a small holster for chopsticks and a flap which snapped over the rim of a small drinking cup. Paul bought it for the ludicrously low sum of 25 yuan, and we were informed it was full of some sort of strange alcohol. Exciting!

Again we trekked back to our room to deposit our new riches. This time T stayed there and PB & I went out in search of dinner. We found a small restaurant and were shown which were the 'good' dishes on the menu by the pregnant waitress. These turned out to be mutton stewed on the bone with some zucchini and green peppers in a dark peppery sauce, and another dish that consisted of very thin strips of mutton almost lost in a huge mound of lightly fried onions. Both were very tasty and accompanied by small bowls of cold rice and a tea which tasted rather like bland soup stock and was drunk from small bowls (significantly larger and of a different size than the usual Chinese teacup). It was very good, as I said, and we finished nearly all of it. We paid, thanked the waitress, and returned to our room.

T, it turns out, had been travelling for 6 weeks now and will keep travelling for the next year, to a year and a half. She told us stories of some of the things she's seen in China so far, and we told her our story. I showered in the sparse bathroom, and we went to bed on mattresses that were hard and slightly too short, with Chinese (bean or sand filled [Editor's Note: possibly buckwheat]) pillows.

T & I were woken early the next morning by construction going on in the room behind us. The day dawned bright, cool, and windswept; without even stopping for breakfast, we went off at 7 am in search of a jeep across the border, armed with directions given to us by our hotel staff, who communicated with us via a web translator and a swivelling computer monitor.

The cab we got dropped us off in front of a building which was, ostensibly, the town's market, where we were immediately accosted by a local woman acting as a money changer. I changed 100 yuan into Tugriks (MNT), just to be sure to have some local money, and the lady thenceforth appointed herself our negotiator with the jeep drivers. The starting price was 120 yuan each, which we all laughed at and walked away from. It eventually made it down to 80 yuan, but then a different man came up and seemed to want to charge extra money for our bags. The price our "helper" was asking correspondingly shot up again to 100 yuan; we could not get her down past 90 after that. We had just about decided on taking the offered 90 yuan ride when a new man came up and suddenly offered 80 yuan for us and our bags included. We all jumped at it and quickly had our bags stowed in the back and T and I in the front passenger seat, whose previous occupant was relegated to the back storage area. PB got squeezed in the middle and everyone was happy, except for our "helper" who was pitching a fit at being undersold and was yelling at our driver, even walking along beside the jeep so he couldn't close his door as he tried to drive away. He eventually handed her 10 yuan and she left. We were on our way.

About 15 minutes drive later we got to the border, a very soviet structure with a huge artificial rainbow arcing over it for some unknown damn reason. Here it seemed everything was going well until the young Chinese border guard looked in our vehicle and managed to mix both youthful outrage and practiced vindictiveness in denying our driver permission to continue on (it should perhaps be mentioned that, including the driver, we had about 9 people packed into a vehicle meant for 5, and that we'd also had 2 boxes of oranges placed on the hood of the car as freight). He continued his vehemence even in the face of offered bribery from our driver, and, at shift change some minutes later, pointed out to his replacement ourselves and another car that he'd sentenced to the same fate, to be sure that our punishment continued.

Which it did, for some time. As the minutes passed I mostly stayed outside, though there was a brisk wind that tossed sand around. We saw an Irishman on a bike (he'd been on a bike for about 2 years, he told us afterwards) get refused entry because he wasn't in a car. We later saw him holding a jeep door closed against his knees, his bike on the hood of the jeep. We saw a Chinese army higher-up have a photo shoot as he waved cars by. A girl in a yellow shirt who was fuming in our car about the wait eventually got off and into another vehicle. A while after another girl followed suit.

I have to say I had a certain amount of passivity about the situation, but T was obviously getting frustrated and PB eventually got out of the car to go "speak foreign" [Editor's Note: This is a term PB and I came up with to describe the mix of simple nouns, facial expressions, and hand gestures used to communicate with someone with whom you have no language in common. There's a real knack to it!] to the driver, who'd been standing outside smiling and chatting on the cellphone for some time, to ask when, if ever, we were going to get through. We were in the car, T and I, so we couldn't hear what was being said, but at one point it looked as though PB did gangsta-gun-hands and offered to shoot the border guard. So there was some levity to the situation, at least.

Eventually we got waved through; by that time we had only 7 people and the fruit crates had disappeared from the hood of the car. With the exception of a guy with a dirt stash and a sweet scorpion tattoo in front of us at customs, the rest of the ride to Zamiin-Uud passed uneventfully, albeit with T on my lap.

[Journal entry continued on 2011/July/10]

We were dropped off in the town square, right by the train station, and decided to forego food in lieu of buying tickets for that day's train. We saw a group of people outside the station who told us that hard seats were still available, and that the ticket counter was on the second floor. There was an ATM on the first floor that wouldn't recognise PB's card; I went to the bank next door to change my thousand-odd yuan into tugriks. That done, we three headed upstairs to buy tickets.

Okay, honestly, I am in pain from my neck to my ankles right now from a 7-hour, 40 km horse ride we did yesterday. I'm bored writing about Zamiin-Uud. Here's the high lights:

-The ticket lady was a toxic mixture between Dixon the apathetic US border guard and Nurse Ratchett. What a treasure.
-We stood in line from 11:30 to 1 pm with no food or sign of hope (despite an evil line switch perpetrated by the ticket lady)
-Tickets for that day sold out, purportedly. We gave up and sat around, as apparently tickets for the next day would only be sold at some as-yet-undetermined time later that afternoon.
-In the line we met a large American named Eric, a lithe Spanish woman named Mariella and her unendingly patient husband, and a young Brit named Doug
-We were observed by an inquisitive Mongolian in a blue jacket while we played Dou Di Zout with 3 crazy-haired Isrealis, who were also waiting for tickets.
-PB, T, and I went to 5 different hotels in the area; all were booked full or asking 45 000 tugrik, an astronomical amount.
-We were saved by Doug, whose friend of a friend in Ulaan Bataar had a friend in town who got he and Eric (who'd attached himself to Doug as a kindly uncle-type) a room for 5 people for the night for 19 000 tugrik, train ticket for the next day included.
-Doug turns out to be hilarious and VERY upper class but super cool
-Eric is nice but Overly American
-Zamiin-Uud is a hole because:
10: There is no such thing as being helpful.
9: No one understands the concept of waiting in a line.
8: The internet managed to be down for 22 of the 30 hours we were there.
7: The train station announcer is an obnoxious sadist.
6: The statues in its park are ridiculous.
5: Plants cannot grow in the sand and constant wind.
4: There is broken glass booze bottles everywhere, except where there is sand. And under the sand is more glass.
3: The houses look like they belong on one of the more terrible reserves, except the government was never racist against Zamiin-Uud.
2: There are 20 different concenience stores for a "city" of about 1000 people, and none of them sell fruit. Only candy and booze.
1: Because it's Zamiin-Uud.

Anyway, the next day - the 7th of July - we got on the 15-hour train out, and after a bit of fanagling managed to get seats all together. We met a dude name Dorj who played Dou Di Zou with us and zoomed through PB's photos. He also flipped through PB's deck of cards that had all the different Emperor's of China on them, and pointed out the Mongolians in the bunch.

PB and I slept on our air mattresses on the floor between bunks, but drew a small crowd of observers when we shared a bowl of vodka before turning in. We got into Ulaan Bataar around 9:30ish the next morning, exhausted, dirty, baffled, but still essentially on time. We said goodbye to Eric and Doug, and, as is often the way of acquaintances made while travelling, have never yet seen either of them again.