The Escape. 25 July - 28 July
The bus ride back into Ulaanbaatar was uneventful enough, although, at the small rest stop at the halfway point I believe PB managed to accidentally order the flavourless 'barely soup' broth that he'd first experienced on the day we failed to get permits, for possibly the 3rd time. In other respects the rest stop was quite pleasant, save the lime-dusted outdoor pit toilets, which, possibly because you were meant to squat over them in the typical non-European fashion, had only half doors on them for privacy.
Once we got back into the capital, our first stop was our previous hostel. No luck - they were sold out. So we headed to one of the many internet cafes to find a new home for the night (we were hoping to be able to buy tickets back to China the next day). Despite my being distracted by the graphic pornography I could see playing on some screens in the cafe, we managed to find a hostel advertised as 'home-like' and run by a mixed Iraqi-Mongolian couple. After a bit of a struggle actually finding the address, we eventually stumbled upon it. It was indeed home-like, as it was, in fact, the couples home. But it was clean and cheerful and indoors and devoid of guests other than ourselves, so it seemed a marked improvement over our previous situation. Sadly it was also devoid of food, so, entirely famished at this point and with the sky beginning to go dark, we headed out into the streets in search of food.
Normally, this would be a fairly unexciting prospect; most cities that are capable of supporting more than one travellers hostel can generally be counted on to offer a decent array of late-evening food choices. However, we had reached saturation point on Mongolian food, particularly PB, as he had been disappointed so many times by the arrival of the thin, bland, miserly broth he kept unintentionally ordering. He no longer trusted his luck or his memory and was adamantly opposed to heading to anything even resembling traditional Mongolian fare. For myself, although I hadn't had the same repetitive experience as PB had, I, too, was feeling the monotony; the steppes of Mongolia are a wild and beautiful thing, but they do not and cannot grow the vegetables and spices necessary to make the more flavourful and varied dishes of their southern neighbour. Now, due to the political climate, it was unlikely that we would be able to find a Chinese restaurant very easily (although we'd managed to find a good tandoori-mexican fusion restaurant during our previous, longer stay in the capital), so we settled for a fried chicken outlet, Chicken Queen. It was small, it was fluorescent, it was cheap, the menu had pictures, and the food had an abundance of sauces available. It was perfect.
Chicken consumed, we headed back to the hostel and slept soundly on real beds. The next morning we braced ourselves and headed to the train station, girding our loins for the anticipated battle to purchase tickets to the border. To our absolute surprise the process was entirely painless. The line was short, there was no queue-barging, we managed to get cots together on the train that left that night. The whole thing was smooth enough that I wondered whether we might be leaving right when we were starting to get the hang of the country.
We spent the rest of that day checking out of our Mongolian hostel and arranging beds for ourselves back in Beijing, for 3 nights in advance. Remembering that Zamiin Uud, which we again would need to stop in, had had no produce available whatsoever, we went hunting through every grocery store we could find for some fruit for the long journey. After several attempts, we found not only a small basket of sweet plums but a discarded x-ray sheet. We kept, and enjoyed, both.
Once we got on the train that evening, my earlier worries that we were perhaps giving up on Mongolia too soon were dashed. We had to fight for our bunks, even though the number was printed on our tickets; they'd apparently been 'claimed' by a group that decided they wanted to stick together. The only problem was that the seats they were supposed to have been in had also been claimed; in fact, there were no free seats in the house, and it appeared, from the fact that 3 of them didn't even bother to show us, or the conductor, their tickets, that a few of them weren't supposed to be on the train at all. So we were squeezed onto the seats beside them, and crammed together into one single narrow bunk (the floor not being fit to sleep on because the group kept throwing garbage and peanut shells onto it), feet to head. Or, at first we were. After a few hours of lying so precariously, PB gave up and climbed to the upper storage shelf and slept there; although it creaked ominously under even his slight weight, it was at least clean and, he reported in the morning, fairly comfortable.
From the train station in Zamiin Uud we immediately went and caught another jeep ride back into Er Lian, this time with no border complications; now that Nadaam was over, the cross border traffic seemed much decreased. We headed to the train station in Er Lian only to find that no train was leaving that day. However, one of the joys of China is that someone is always willing to sell you something, so we found our from the ticket lady that there was an overnight bus we could take that was leaving tonight for Beijing. We caught a taxi from the train station and, after a miscommunication or two (the driver was wonderfully patient, it must be said), we found ourselves at a large bus station on the outskirts of town.
Tickets were purchased fairly easily thanks to Chinese commercialism and my smattering of mandarin, but we were about 4 hours too early to actually get on the bus. We decided to kill time at what looked like (and was) a nearby restaurant, and ran into a fellow foreigner on the way over. Tentative courtesies were exchanged and we decided to all eat lunch together.
His name was Guillaume; French, obviously, with good English and a self-effacing manner. He had been travelling for some weeks already and regaled us with anecdotes. His English name, he explained, was William the Lucky. He always had tremendous luck when travelling and in life in general, and he was very very grateful for it, as otherwise he would often have been stranded. Unfortunately he was heading in a different direction, on a different bus, so our goodbyes (after a wonderfully Chinese luncheon full of peppers and onion and spices) was the last we ever saw or heard of him.
The type of bus we took from Er Lian to Beijing is often called a Bed Bus, or a Sleeper Bus. Unlike the Greyhound buses of North America which are filled with single seats that partially recline, these buses are have no seats whatsoever. Instead, they have stacks of beds in rows along the sides and down the middle of the bus. The beds are like hospital beds in that the back is capable of raising slightly so the occupant can sit up. It felt a little precarious hurtling down the highway with nothing but a coverlet for protection, but it was wonderfully comfortable. I stayed awake for a little while, wondering at the tight, shiny rows of blue lamp posts on a highway that seemed, like so many Chinese highways, to be almost entirely deserted. But soon enough night fell and I slept soundly, only waking to the bright lights of the city of Beijing sometime in the very, very early morning.
