Get thee to a Ger

Our Trans Siberian, or more accurately Trans Mongolian experience started very early on Saturday morning. Somewhat bleary, not really at our most alert, we were outside Beijing Main Railway Station at 6.20am with a year’s worth of luggage to lug. Clasped gratefully in our mits were our visa-laden passports, received with joyous relief just over 12 hours before.

We were far from alone at the station and as they opened another line through the x-ray machine there was a big surge and we were pushed and shoved. Joe more so than most … he was getting quite angry at two men who were relentless in their attempt to push into the crowd/queue from the side. He was trying to fend them off while herding kids and swinging the big packs into the machine. Alas when we made it through into the station itself, we discovered these two (loosely called) gentlemen had quite another agenda.

Joe’s wallet was gone. We were due on the train in 20 minutes. No time, and pretty little point, in going to the police. We had no choice – we just had to get on the phone and start cancelling everything while we simultaneously dealt with all the admin of tickets, meeting our little group of travellers. It was a bit stressed to say the least, trying to persuade the bank to courier bank cards out to Moscow while trying to be sociable with the people we would be neighbours on the train with for the next 36 hours. The credit card company insisted on cancelling my card as well, so we were now high and dry without plastic for the foreseeable future. We didn’t care about the cash – it was the credit card that really screwed us up.

The beginning of our long-awaited long train journey was, therefore, less than enjoyable. The phone marathon continued until we were well underway, but eventually we had som resolution, had spoken to all the banks concerned and we just had to let it go. The kids meanwhile, as is their wont, had been busy making friends. When we finally emerged from the admin and annoyance zone we found out how lucky we were in our travelling companions. Steff, John, Dennis and a lovely Kiwi couple were in adjacent carriages and we had a bit of a carriage party going on – when the provodnitsa let us. The provodnitsa is a matronly lady who looks after the carriage and, reputedly, the customers, but like an old-fashioned matron you get the feeling she thinks looking after the train would be much easier without those terribly annoying passengers. She tutted and bossed, shooed and shushed as she frenetically cleaned the toilet and floors over and over. More than once I found myself marooned in an island amidst the foam, waiting for the muttering mistress to move me.

Journey wise, we backtracked to darling Datong and passed – oh so conveniently in the dead of night – the China-Mongolia border to country number sixteen. This takes HOURS. Of course the Chinese couldn’t have anything standard, so their railway tracks are a completely different size from the Mongolian and Russian, and you have to change the wheels of every carriage in the railway equivalent of no man’s land. It’s an intriguing process, even this late at night. Every carriage has to be lifted up and the bogies changed. We planned on sleeping through most of it but not a chance – you can’t sleep through several hours of clunks, jolts, shudders and other disconcerting metallic crunches. But we were lucky: Dennis had already been hauled off the train by the Chinese for looking nothing like his passport photo. He was thankfully allowed back on a mere four hours later, just in time for the Mongolian process to start, oh joys. By this point we had managed to get three kids asleep having zonked them with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban on the DVD player (VERY spooky when you’re on a train at night!) We had most of our new-found friends also watching surreptitiously around the door. We eventually persuaded them there was no shame in enjoying it and to come on in.

Mongolian customs and immigration wore stupidly large hats and authority attitudes. The harried provodnitsa bustled before them, forcing open carriages, switching on incredibly bright lights and shouting at us to wake up. We had to bodily haul the kids into sitting positions so they could be compared to passport photos. They slept blissfully through the indignity and I almost did. Joe held the fort, form filling and smiling for officials until we were released into Mongolia at 2.30am, a mere 6 hours after we’d stopped at the Chinese border.