The smell of coal. Something you don’t often smell in Australia these days, but it is what first hit me on the platform at Beijing Train Station at 7am on Tuesday morning. The train carriages were patiently sitting there in their green and yellow livery. The sign on the side of the carriage translated to Peking – Ulaanbaatar – Moscow. This was it, the start of the greatest rail journey one can embark on.

We found the ‘soft sleeper’ birth with no problems, and lucky for us, we had a 4 berth all to ourselves. It could not have been bigger than 2 x 2 meters, but it was home for the next 30 hours for the trip to Ulaanbaatar.

As Beijing slowly faded into the distance, the landscape began to change. The snarling traffic and huge communities of apartment building started to be replaced by old brick homes, wide open spaces and looming mountain ranges. This is what I had come to see.

At this time of year, everything is either a shade or brown or white. Closer to Beijing, the landscape was fields of brown – waiting for the temperature to rise and spring to begin. The closer we got to Mongolia, the more snow there was covering the ground like a big white blanket. Patchy at first, but more and more uniform as the trip continued.

One book later, at about 10pm we hit the Chinese/Mongolian border. On the timetable in the carriage it had the stop scheduled for 3.5 hours. I realised why about 10 minutes later. After our passports had been collected by the Chinese officials, the train began to move. I feel sorry for the Americans who had gotten off the train at the station – as they had no idea what was happening. The train moved about half a kilometre down the track from the station into a huge shed. Bump! and the carriage moved half a length. Bump! We moved again. Then I realised what was happening – the bogies were being changed. China has a different rail gauge to Mongolia and Russian, so the wheels needed to be changed. Each carriage was disconnected and moved into position within the shed. One by one, each carriage was lifted effortlessly from the bogies and both carriage and passengers still on board were left hovering in the air. The wheels then all moved out from underneath, and the new ones moved into place. After descending back down, the train was reassembled – although this time with a different locomotive and restaurant car. Our passports were all returned and we were on our way thru no-mans-land to Mongolia.

We finally moved on to the Mongolian border town, and spent another hour there waiting for our passports to be returned after being collected once again. At this stage it was 1am in the morning and some sleep was in order.

I woke to the clickity-clack, clickity-clack of the train underneath. It was a nice day outside. I spent most of the morning lying in my bed and watching the scenic landscape of Mongolia our the window.

The train slowed down close to 1pm in the afternoon, with the impending arrival at Ulaanbaatar – the capital on Mongolia. It seems we were not quick enough to get off the train, and we found ourselves battling through the stream of people getting on at Ulaanbaatar. We found out way out of the carriage onto the platform, greeted by some people from our hostel… and -10 degrees! Leg one of my Trans-Siberian rail adventure complete, and I loved it.

This post is tagged Beijing, China, Mongolia, train, Trans-Mongolian, Ulaanbaatar