travel diary — day 190

In rants, travel on 9 October 2009 tagged beer, beijing, black market, china, city, czech restaurant, group, horse riding, hostel, hotel, immigration, interpol, ipod, korea, lunch, meals, mongolia, movie, northface, passport, pickpocket, poker, police, police report, policewoman, railway, shopping, spanish, taxi, terelj national park, theft, tour, tourists, train, trans-mongolian, travel, trek, ulaan bataar, wifi, wolverine with no comments

day 186 — i got an early start today. i got a cab to the train sta­tion and began the trip to ulaan bataar. i shared a com­part­ment with two guys (nick and van) and we chat­ted a lot to pass the time. the first two meals on the train were free, which was cool, and i star­ted read­ing chinese whis­pers by hsiao hung pai. dur­ing the trip, i real­ised that i was actu­ally on the first leg of the trans-mongolian rail­way, which was cool.

it was dif­fi­cult to sleep on the train because we knew at mid­night there’d be china and mon­go­lian immig­ra­tion duties. at the bor­der, the chinese immig­ra­tion offi­cial took pass­ports and while we were wait­ing i headed to the shop to buy some snacks for the remainder of the jour­ney. when i got back on the train it was shunted off to have the wheels changed. at the bor­der between china and mon­go­lia the train gauge has to be changed. yep, that’s right, china and mon­go­lia have dif­fer­ent train wheel widths. i was allowed to stay on the train dur­ing the change, which was actu­ally fun. the rail work­ers used hydraul­ics to lift the car­riages clean off the tracks. the wheels were shunted along and moved out, to be replaced with wheels for the mon­go­lian system.

day 187 — it was after 2am by the time the train got going again. after hav­ing the gauge changed, the train shunted back to the chinese sta­tion and we all received our pass­ports. then we moved up to the mon­go­lian bor­der and repeated the mon­go­lian visa pro­cess. fol­lowed by much needed sleep.

in the morn­ing, our cabin of cool people killed time by eat­ing, chat­ting and tak­ing pho­tos out of the train win­dows. we arrived in ulaan bataar after lunch. the city looked cool from the train, because ulaan bataar is a spread out city, low and flat. ulaan bataar is not an overly developed city. most of the build­ings are 2–3 stor­ies, which means that much of the city is vis­ible from the train station.

i found my hotel and went for a walk around town. van (one of my cabin bud­dies) con­tin­ued on to moscow, but nick and i were get­ting off in ulaan. nick and i met up in the after­noon to check out tour pro­grams and prices. while we were look­ing around i noticed that my bag was open. while i was walk­ing along, some­how a pick­pocket had opened my bag and lif­ted out my ipod. while i was angry as all hell, i couldn’t help but think­ing that i was lucky not to lose my pass­port which was next to the ipod.

i had to go to the police sta­tion, where i met the sex­i­est police woman on earth. she was gor­geous, tall, a detect­ive and worked for inter­pol. hot damn! i almost for­got about the ipod. then i remembered again and filed a police report. the officer (a dif­fer­ent officer, not the hot­tie, from the pick­pocket bur­eau) told me to wait a week so they could try and reclaim my ipod. so, i agreed to wait, and headed back to my hostel. that night i went out with a few friends from the train and we had din­ner together.

day 188 — i met nick again for cof­fee and bought a plane ticket to korea. i had lunch with friends from the train and then nick and i headed down to the infam­ous black mar­ket. des­pite the con­stant fear of being robbed, the mar­ket was fun. i bought a genu­ine rep­lica north­face jacket for my planned trek around mon­go­lia. i had din­ner at a czech res­taur­ant, fol­lowed by beer, and ended up play­ing poker until 2am with some people from my hostel. that was a bunch of fun. we hid in the kit­chen, drank beer, and played poker. the organ­isers, a couple of swedes, even had poker chips. we all paid in and played texas hold-em. i played pretty well the first game but even­tu­ally lost when the ante got too high. how­ever, we had time for a second round and this time i won. i made about enough to cover my losses for the first round and buy a beer or two.

day 189 — i really needed to sleep in after the poker and beer. nick and i decided to plan dif­fer­ent trips (he wanted to go west, i was gonna go east) so  we said our good­byes and i headed for lunch at a nice french bakery. then i booked a horse rid­ing trek, chat­ted online and watched wol­ver­ine: ori­gins on tv. the movie was good, but it was pretty funny because the movie had been ripped from the inter­net and actu­ally showed moments in the film which hadn’t been com­pleted. parts had incom­plete cgi and a few times we could see hugh jackman’s stunt ropes. but the movie was good … des­pite laugh­ing con­stantly at the incom­plete graphics.

i packed for the trip (leav­ing the next morn­ing) and had din­ner at the czech res­taur­ant again (they have free wifi).

day 190 - i woke up and was ready on time, but the driver wasn’t ready, so i had to wait a while. how­ever, we even­tu­ally got going and i ended up in terelj national park. when i arrived i waited a little longer for other tour­ists to arrive (who were also late). it turns out the group i was join­ing were a group of four span­ish tourists.

while wait­ing for lunch, we walked over a few hills and checked out the local scenery. after that we all went horse­back rid­ing. the rid­ing was a bunch of fun. most of our group had never riden before, so it was hil­ari­ous watch­ing them hold on when the guide made the horses pick up to a trot. the two span­ish girls were hold­ing on for dear life.

i had an after­noon sleep, din­ner, and enjoyed some amaz­ing night time stargazing.

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