Beijing->Mongolia->Moscow
What can we say, 7865km’s, 5 nights, 40 stops and two missing passengers? This journey is often confused with the true Trans-Siberian railway journey which runs entirely within Russia from Vladivostok on the Pacific coast of Russia to Moscow, our journey travels from Beijing up through Mongolia into the Siberian wilderness of Eastern Russia before heading West to Moscow.
The train line was first laid down in Moscow in 1891 to link to the Russian Far East, from there it eventually connected to China. The Russian’s finished the electrification of their entire section of the line in 2002, an impressive feat. It’s an epic train journey, particularly in one as we decided to take the direct route from Beijing to Moscow and go a little more upmarket and travel 1st Class Deluxe, how good is that! Images of the opulence of the Orient Express spring to mind, sipping cocktails with the aristocratic elite, etc. Sadly that part was just a dream, our Chinese train was certainly comfortable though it didn’t live up to our imagined luxury.
Our journey began in Beijing on Wednesday morning, where we took a 6am taxi ride to the Beijing train station, the station is so big it doesn’t have or need a street address. As soon as you step out of the taxi, baggage handlers are fighting over who will carry your bags in. Considering how much luggage we still had, it’s a great service, as always you just have to settle on a price before heading off, they went YN100, and I went YN20, they went YN80 and I went YN20, then YN50, and so on. So in the end we did settle on my original price, YN20, which in my opinion was a fair price. Inside the station, the Chinese were very helpful and had a nice sign in English for Western travellers to direct them to the correct platform. Our guys dropped off our bags and I was a bit shocked when he gave me change from the YN50 I gave him, they honoured their agreements.
If you look in the gallery you’ll see a few pics of the cabin, it was a perfect size for two people to share, a little squeezey for three, and once we setup Isabella’s portable cot on the floor we had no floor space left at all. But we all fitted in somewhere to sleep each night, in the morning we would move Isabella’s cot onto Kane’s top bunk to free up space.
On the train in we meet four other Aussie’s, one Danish guy doing his 7th trip, one Irishmen called Shamus (James in English), a German guy and a married couple from Chile. There were lots of Mongolians and later on Russian that got off and on along the way at the various stops, but with our language “mastery” of Russian and Mongolian it was all polite smiles between us. It was a mixed bunch… although the high number of Aussie’s surprised us, there was a German tour group that linked onto the train but they had their own carriage, which we couldn’t enter. Funny enough Kane lost his voice about 3 hours into the train journey much to the amusement of Lisa and Emma.
As you travel North out of Beijing you pass through the mountains that holds the Great Wall before moving into farmland with vast cornfields, by evening the landscape was quite arid with the endless trains passing in the other direction carrying wood south from Siberia into China.
You think border crossing would be easy, even for a train journey, but this is not so. The border crossings are a little different, as they have to change the Bogey’s on the train (wheels) for the different rail gauge North of the border, they also change the engine to a Diesel powered engine as the Mongolia section isn’t electrified yet. So we roll into the border town/station and disembark to the sound of eighties pop music playing throughout the station and go queue up for immigration. We get in line with a few Westerners and a couple of Russians in front of us which in the end turned into the “Brady bunch”, theRussian family in front of us grew to over ten people as we stood there. In the end we moved to another line and we still beat them through to the other side.
Border crossings on the journey are notoriously slow, at the Chinese side we waited 3 hours before you got back on the train to the Mongolian side and another 2.5 hours while they checked all passports and search the train, as you never know who might want to sneak into Mongolia, so at 2am in the morning we could go to bed. Isabella, the lucky girl got to sleep through it all but she’ll still be up at 6am in the morning to the delight of her parents.
We wake in the morning to the Mongolian Steppes or endless grasslands, dotted with “Ger’s” or traditional houses (round tents) and you can watch them as they go about their business, tending to their horses, goats, cows and sometimes two hump camels with birds of Prey watching from power poles, as there where no trees on the plains. It’s a wonderful landscape to enjoy from the train before we reached the capital city, Ulaan Baatar, really no bigger than a country town, for those back home about the size of Bunbury (Western Australian town). Along the way the train stops at certain stations. Quite a few people got on/off. Emma’s Mongolian roommate got off and in turned gained a Russian one.
The longest stop is about 20 minutes and the train will just leave if you’re not back on, the tricky part is they sometimes leave early if the train is behind schedule (which they tried to makeup time by speeding at night making the train feel like a rollercoaster). At this particular stop one young German and Chilean went for a short walk that turned out to be much longer than expected and were left behind. The wife of the Chilean guy was still on the train, she had the passports but he had all the money! It didn’t take long for the news to get around the other Westerner’s on the train.
So what happened to them? Well, the boys got lucky, after running after the train and being restrained from jumping back on by the police, they found a local who spoke some English and owned a car. The Mongolian then drove them 2 ½ hours across the country to try and catch the train at the next stop…As it turned out it was a happy ending, though if the train had a couch the married Chilean guy probably be on it.
Across Mongolian we travelled, we would have liked to get off in Mongolia, but the local conditions would have made it problematic if Isabella needed some urgent attention, so another visit one day. Our next border crossing, from Mongolian into Russia once again was at night. We didn’t have to get off the train but they locked all the toilets for the entire proceedings, which took over 6 hours, so if you didn’t go before or drank a lot while waiting, you would need to get quite inventive in your cabin.
We rolled into the Russian border crossing about 8pm, they came onboard took your passports for checking. The train moves forward over the border to the next border checkpoint and the passports are returned. The Russian lady sharing with Emma was a pro at this; she slept through the whole thing and simply left her passport on the table beside her bed!! We stayed up to make sure everything went smoothly; the Siberian border of Russia is not a nice place to be stuck. Very thorough in their search, a polite Russian border guard (always petite ladies!!) comes to your cabin, asks for your passports and then directs you to exit the cabin for searching by her large male counterpart. So about 2am we go off to bed again and wake to the endless forests of Siberia. After entering Russia the train quickly starts to empty at each stop as the local Russians get off, now there was only us and one other cabin occupied on the entire carriage, very quite indeed.
One of the highlights was passing along the edge of Lake Baikel, the largest fresh water lake in the world and also the deepest lake in the world (divers can get vertigo here as they swim over the underwater cliffs), 600km long, 80km wide and 1.6km deep, it holds almost 1/5 of the world’s fresh water and freezes in Winter and it is a UNSECO world heritage site.
We passed the time playing games, taking photographs out the window, reading and chatting with other travelers in the cabins. Unfortunately the dining cars are only for eating, most of the westerners including us thought we would be able to sit in there and socialise, unfortunately once you have finished your meal they like the space for other patrons, even when there are none.
As for food, well Isabella ate really well, much better than we did, lucky for her we were still carrying tins and jars of baby food from home. While we were living it up on noodles.. noodles and more noodles, she was eating steak and vegetables, pumpkin and couscous, fruit salad, Lamb Shepard’s Pie, Chicken and Vegetables and so on. We did managed to buy some snacks and fruit from vendors on different stations along the way to break up the noodles, with the occasional meal in the dining car, though the other four Aussies managed to get a bad reaction to one of their meals in the Russian dining car. We all expected more vendors selling food along the way to vary our diet, the Danish chap on his 7th trip said it was the least amount of vendors he had ever seen on the platforms, I guess the timing of our train was just in between seasons for them? I do have to say that the conductors know how to eat (but then they do the trip all the time), whenever we passed their cabins at meal times, they had the most amazing food smells wafting out of them, and yes they loved Isabella ☺
As we traveled deeper into Russia for the next three nights, we watched the landscape change from forests to farmland till we cross the Ural Mountains (the continental divide between Asia and Europe). Along the way small villages dot the rail line. Most being small timber homes no larger than a double garage back home, with a small vegetable garden surrounding it. The majority of Russians outside the cities still live a lifestyle that hasn’t really changed since the time of the Tsars. The line is also littered with the industrial collapse that took place after the fall of Communism, numerous factories and warehouses stand abandoned along side the tracks. In our journey you can see that the rail system is the lifeblood of Russian transport. Just about everything is moved by rail beyond the Ural Mountains.
It was a great journey on one of the worlds best train rides……something everyone should do as it was truly a unigue and memorable experience.