Day 45

June 4 2013

The Bogie men

Beijing- Erlian (Mongolian Border)

Although a lot has happened today I feel there is not much to tell when I sit down and write this down. By 6 am I had left the hostel and travelled to Beijing's main railway station. Al went smooth as there were not that many people about. The square in front of the main railway station is massive. I had the feeling that many people had camped outside to get onto early domestic trains. As with all subway and regular stations everyone is checked as if you were on a airport. The train I boarded today travels all the way to Moscow as it says on the side in three languages. I left Beijing with mixed feelings, I liked the place. At exactly 8.05 the train pulled out of the station and rambled through the suburbs. This time I was travelling straight north through an area I had not been yet and again I passed many hundreds of high rise flat with no one in them. I was told that they are built in case of a natural disaster, this way they could house an entire city elsewhere. Well it makes sense but whether this is the case I don’t know.

The train is obviously Russian as all signs inside are in Russian. I am glad the I master the Russian Cyrillic alphabet so at least I am able to read the words although many would not make sense.

I am leaving a country of over 1.3 billion people. It sounds a hell of a lot but still a few hours outside Beijing I travel through area void of any people at all. South of the border with Mongolia the first desert is evident. Inner Mongolia it is called. This dessert consist not of a Sahara like area but empty grassy steppes with no one in it except one lonely camel which was standing about 50 meter from the tracks just grazing away. Around nine pm we arrived at the border. Passport were taken away and the opportunity was there to get off the train for a while. I spent my last Chinese money on some food items and went back on the train again as I had read that the carriages would be taken away and the Chinese boogies would be replace by Russian size bogies which are the same as the rest of Europe. Glad I decided to stay on board as I am the only person in the carriage to do so. In a shed the carriages where disconnected from each other, then lifted in the air and the boogies replaced. As the train was split in two I was able to observe right next to me how things were done. I don’t know if the area has any historical back ground of not, (I remember that Chinese -Russian relationships collapsed during the cold war years and that there were several clashes between the Soviet and Chinese military along this border) I found something interesting when viewing my photographs later. Some pictures were taken with flash and others were not. The pictures without flash recorded just the object in view, however the pictures with the flash shown a lot of Orbs around. All these pictures were taken in quick succession and the Orbs show up in different locations ruling out dust spot on the lens. I have my own thoughts about these Orbs and don’t want to go into details of what they are or could be. Anyone interested just apply Google search for possible explanations.

After the carriages were re assembled passports were handed back; the train started moving and crossed the border into Mongolia. It was 12.30 AM and time to go to sleep.