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Mongolia is one of those countries that most people have heard of yet know nothing of.

Mongolia

Raphaelk
2004-02-02 20:29:15

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Mongolia is one of those countries that most people have heard of yet know nothing of. Some may know of the Mongol Hordes that conquered massive amounts of the world, all the way to Europe in the west and the Indian frontiers in the south.

When the Soviet regime came to an end Mongolia lost its main benefactor ad in effect gained independence. The government actually considered turning the whole country into a natural reserve. In the end it settled on about thirty percent which is still a very large proportion.

The country is beautiful, although often featureless, sometimes referred to as the land without fences for obvious reasons many of the people still live a nomadic life with their horses, goats, sheep, etc.

I got the train from Beijing to Ulan Bator (the capital) through the southern Gobi desert. The journey was fun because I met some good people in my carriage (whom I have remained in contact with). One of the more interesting bits of this journey through generally featureless barren landscape was at the Chinese - Mongolian border, where we arrived in the middle of the night. Firstly the train is take into a massive shed where the whole thing is jacked up and the bogies changed over as Russia and Mongolia are on a different rail gauge to China. We managed to stay on the train whilst this happened and actually jumped off in the shed to see close up what was going on. We then went on to the border itself where the Chinese duty free shop attendant refused to serve anyone as she was lazy. I did manage to get hold of a case of beer from a Chinese woman with a box of grapes, who also changed my remaining Renminbi (Chinese currency) back to dollars (an odd story difficult to describe effectively). As we moved onto the Mongolian part there were a couple of excellent Mongol border guards who we managed to communicate with in a mixture of broken Russian, phrasebook Mongolian and sign language. The people ...