Lee and Clare, The road home

Goobered in Mongolia

17^th October 2003

We are pretty stuffed and want to make use of the cable TV we have in our room here so we'll try to make this a quicky.

We were very happy to get out of Irkutsk. It was the first place in Russia that we'd kind of had a bad feeling that things/people were a bit dodgy. We guess this isn't too bad considering all the bad stories we heard before we got to Russia. Did we mention the guy who we met on the train who told us to be careful in Irkutsk as this is where lots of prisoners were exiled to and that he felt "bad spirits in the air" there. Strange. Don't believe that all the people who were exiled to Siberia were necessarily bad criminals though, maybe it was just the cold he felt in the air??

Anyways, we got on the train to Ulaan Baatar at 8.30 in the evening. When we bought our ticket we had the unusual, first time experience of having it sold to us by someone who spoke English. They actually have separate office for International tickets. Maybe because of this our carriage was pretty much filled up with foreigners. It was very strange for us to hear English being spoken. In fact it was quite alien and we had to shut the door to our compartment at first to drown out the loud Australian drawls we heard.

It was a loooong journey. The train stopped at every single station along the way. The more popular train takes 24 hours on this route but ours took 35. We had to take it though as the days the other trains went didn't suit us. The main problem was that we spent 10 hours at border towns. Our compartment was very hot and we were happy to find that for the first time on this trip we could open the window. It was kind of weird when we got to the border as since our carriage was the only one going to Ulaan Baater the other ones detached along the way and left ours as the only one sitting on the track. There wasn't even an engine attached to it for hours. The problem was that they don't actually tell you how long you're going to be there for so you can't get off. You needed to have a lot of guts to go far away from the train. The toilets on the train are locked when you are in a station (yes Lisa you are right and of course you ALWAYS need to go right then). But even when the carriage doesn't have an engine attached it's still pretty scary to get off to go to the toilet. Always make a run for it, you never know how long it'll take them to get the engine on and go without you. Not that you'd want to spend long in the toilets at borders. Squatters from hell.

So we passed time playing ludo and reading. We had our own compartment for most of the journey but a Mongolian guy got on just to go over the border. The Provdinitsas (ladies who look after your carriage) had a lot of contraband, cigarettes and English language teaching books and they got him to hide some of it for them in his luggage.

Once we got through the Russian side of things and over to the Mongolian bit things started to get a bit rowdy on the train as all the foreigners started drinking vodka with two of the Russian passengers, we'll call them gold teeth and silver teeth. There were quite a few of us piled into one of the compartments all toasting each other in various languages and pretending to understand every drunken word that gold and silver teeth said to us. They were pretty cool and one of them became quite enamoured with my freckles. Maybe he hadn't seen any before??

Then got through to the Mongolian side okay. We were in our compartment having just eaten the first thing since breakfast almost - some gourmet noodles and porridge. It's the provdinitsas job to keep hot water on all the time but obviously they were too busy hiding contraband on this trip. They also kept one of the toilets locked for their personal use.

Back to our compartment - we were in their finishing our noodles talking to an Australian guy when a guy in Uniform came in and asked to see passports (we'd already gone over the border). Lee and the other dude gave them theirs. He wasn't interested in mine. He put them into his pocket and walked off down the carriage. He went and asked to see some more passports and also took one off Gold Teeth. Then he went to disappear to another carriage. Lee and Aussie dude followed him and asked for their passports back. He came to the compartment and showed his police badge (he didn't speak any English). Then he pointed to a 5000 Tog Rog (Mongolian currency) note he had. We were like PISS OFF. Lee and Aussie dude said NO in no uncertain terms. He was a dirty corrupt bastard who wanted money (about $5 US) to give the passports back. He took off again and we followed him down the carriage saying the Russian word for Embassy and asked for his police ID and had a pen ready to write in down. He got scared (Lee hasn't shaved for a while and looks like a bit of an animal so don't blame him, and the other guy was an Aussie, need I say more) and came back into our compartment and asked us if we had any vodka. We said no and he gave back the passports. So that was a bit of excitement for the evening anyway. Unfortunately Gold Teeth wasn't so lucky and didn't get his passport back till the morning when he paid the bastard $3. Bit of a shame, he was a pretty cool guy and that put a dampener on things for all of us.

The others we were hanging with were a girl from England, a girl from Scotland and guy from Ireland (sounds like a bad joke) who had just been doing VSO in Eritrea (by Ethiopia) and were an interesting lot.

So today we arrived in Ulaan Baatar. We were very happy to be met at the train by someone we'd organised a room at a guesthouse with. We went back there and had a sleep for a while before heading out for a feed. Nice sunny day so we ate outside. Very very sad to have a couple of street kids right outside the restaurant. They were probably about 8 and one of them was holding a baby, not more than a few months old. Might've been older but it was really skinny so it's hard to say. One of them was singing for money and the other was kicking a ball around like a normal kid. They were really dirty and snotty but such cute kids. Have read a bit about street kids here in Ulaan Baatar. They have no parents and sleep in the sewers. To tell you the truth it's pretty heart rending to see them. Lots of people stopped and gave them some money though. How must it be for Mongolian people to see something like that? It's unfathomable for us to see that happen to Kiwi children. Awful.

There was also an old man sleeping in the stairwell of our building with one shoe on. Surely the old and young in society are the ones that need to be looked after the most??

Manic driving! No-one stops for pedestrians. Even if you're halfway across a pedestrian crossing, they'll go up onto the pavement to get around you before they'll stop.

Anyway, we sorted out our trip out into the Gobi Desert and surrounds. We are going early tomorrow morning, hence no MSN with you dad (boo hoo!). We will see the Gobi Desert, sand dunes, place where loads of dinosaur fossils were found, hot springs, camels (called Alice (2 humps!)) etc etc. It's just us and a driver and a cook/translator going in a jeep. Would have been cheaper for us if we could've found some extra people, but there's not many people crazy enough to be going at this time of the year. We'll be staying each night in a ger with a nomad family. Lee's looking forward to drinking airag (fermented mare's milk) and eating yak balls (made that up). Also have a chance to go fishing somewhere (aint it supposed to be the desert?). So should be cool. We'll be back in Ulaan Baatar on Thursday night and will definitely arrange some kind of correspondence with families at that time. We'll make some more phonecalls. (It's 150 Toe Rags a minute, and 1160 is $1US so pretty cheap really, even if it is a bad line).

We're off to watch cable TV in our room. Lee's been more excited about this than anything else on the trip so far so we better go watch it or I'll be in trouble. Most of it's in Japanese or some other such language though.

By the way, did we mention that they had The Crocodile Hunter in Russia, but dubbed in Russian, now how can that work???