"A five hour border crossing"

After the attack the previous night I spent a lot of time to catch up on my writing. My train for Beijing was leaving early in the morning, and I wanted to sleep a lot on the train. I slept about one and a half hour before the manager of the hostel woke me up. She of course wanted to hear the whole story while I got dressed, packed and ready to leave for the train station. Ulaanbaatar is known for this kind of attacks, and she told me about a French guest that stayed in the hostel, that was attacked like this in the middle of the day, in the middle of the main city square. That time, with many spectators. She said I was lucky that nothing worse happened to me. I am too. She was going to report this to the police and asked me for all I could remember from the attack. She was surprised when I told her what time it had happened at. (Right around 22:30). She would have guessed it was later.

The hostel arranged for a taxi to take us down there for $1 per person, so five minutes after waking up, I was on my way to Beijing. In the same taxi as me was a Finnish couple. They helped me carry my backpack, and were very kind, making sure I got situated in my bunk right after the train arrived to the station. Before the Swedish guys arrived, I got time to talk to the Australian couple in our room. This time we had 2nd class tickets, which were in a 4 bed, enclosed room. They were the most annoying people I had met on a train so far. And that just because they were so annoyed by everyone else. They were nice, and offered me a lower bed, even before I explained to them about the attack, and my injured back. But other than that, they were a pain. They did not want to talk to anyone. Whenever someone was standing outside our room (like a random Chinese guy stretching his legs) they got annoyed. They did of course not like it when the two Swedes who slept in another cabin came visiting. But they did not say anything, which made us even more annoyed. That, combined with the fact that the women in their cabin were sleeping and reading Chinese newspapers with Swedish and German porn in them, made the Swedes want to stay with us even more.

Adam, Victor and Victor arrived just before the train left, as usual. One of the Victors stayed in my cabin. I was in a little pain, and tried to sleep as much as possible. Victor helped me clean the wound on my back, which by several people in the hostel, was determined to be caused by stabbing with a screwdriver. (This makes sense too. On the street people always tried to sell us things when we walked buy, but there was just one thing we did not understand why people tried to sell us. That was big and long, really heavy-duty screwdrivers. Now I get what those are for!) It also turned out that they had scratched me quite deep on the outside of my left thigh with the screwdriver. I had not taken off my pants before, and assumed this was only a soar area after them kneeing me in the thigh to throw me off balance. I guess it was not their knee then. But I also made sure to clean this out; it did not look too bad.

During the first 14 hours of the train ride south, we passed enormous plains, as flat as (and a lot larger than) Denmark. We saw many small settlements with people shepherding horses and camels. But they were all small, and far apart. The Gobi dessert is home to some interesting animal life, and except for birds and camels, they have some kind of funny looking antelopes. Only two feet tall, and kind of fat. We saw many of these, some alone, some in larger herds. Not many people live in Mongolia, so outside the capital we did not see many. This we knew would change when we left the country with Genghis Khan on every money note, for the country with Mao Zedong on every money note.

The border crossing was a mess. It took about five hours total. This mainly due to Mao's disputes with The Soviet Union. All rail lines in China are at a different width than the surrounding countries. Mao was afraid that the Soviet would use the train lines to attack China, and therefore they were built differently. Nowadays, this is a huge problem. What they do is to take the train into a garage, lift one the train cars one by one and change the set of wheels they stand on, so that they fit the Chinese rails. While doing this, the train moved back and forth on about a one kilometer stretch, probably more than 20 times. My guess to why they did this is that they disconnected all the cars, then reattached them again, after shifting wheels in different garages. But who knows, maybe it was just for fun.

When it comes to the passport checks here, it was not one I liked in particular. They collected everyone's passport to go have them stamped, before they came back to us with them about 30 minutes later. But they did not check our bags (probably since we were tourists). The biggest issue with this 5 hour border crossing was that we could not use the bathroom for the first four and a half hours.

The next day I woke up around 11:30, about three hours from Beijing, and true was it; there is a lot more people in China. There were people everywhere, many fishing on frozen lakes, in an entirely different landscape than the one I saw the day before, while still in Mongolia. Northern China is full of mountains, and they are gorgeous. The train drove through long canyons where the water was almost gone, due to hydropower plants. The people of course knew how to take advantage of this, and grew food on the new land that was made accessible now that the water was gone. The soil is probably very fertile there too. Hydropower is only one of the clean energies China is now putting a lot of money into. They passed a law in 2005, which said that in 2020, 10% of all energy production in China has to be from a renewable source. You can really see this happening while traveling through the country. The sun powers streetlights, even in many small towns. So is the warm water, which is circling through some pipe systems on the roofs. China is putting USD 200 billion into making this happen during the 15 years between 2005 and 2020. This is far more than any other country. On the way through northern china we could also see countless windmills. Renewable energy is now turned into big business here in China. And as they spend a lot of money on wind, sun and water, they also spend a lot of money on closing down power plants fueled by coal, and on projects trying to make clean coal power.

I am looking very much forward to see the rest of china!