Found the train. . . .Beam Time!

Day One, 5/27:

Well. Long story short, I found the train. Just to make me feel better, virtually everybody else that I talked to had the same confusion. . . including the Korean ambassador to Mongolia, who ended up in the compartment next to me.

So. . . I celebrated, opened the second bottle of Beam, found my way to the restaraunt car, got totally messed with some crazy Russian mom, son, a few cousins, borscht, vodka, and more. Somehow I was so pleased and so out of it then when all was done I paid his bill too! Oh well, that just meant I had to eat more food from the platform or cup noodle sort of stuff, which was OK. We stopped about every six to eight hours, stretched for a bit, bought some sausage or roast chicken or beer or pirogis from the babushkas on the platform, and continued our way. Pint 'o beer (can): $1.75; two litre bottle of beer: $3.00; roast breast of chicken: $5.00; coffee: $1.00.

After all of the scare about tickets all sold out, etc. the train was only about 40% occupied. . . my first-class, two-berth compartment had just the me in it. So it was very comfortable the whole way, just eating and drinking and sleeping and reading (Genghis Khan: The Making of the Modern World), a great read. . . we are all Mongols in the end, and he owned the entire known world. Ah!

Day 2: Just sleeping, a beer at a station stop, back to the bed, read, sleep.

Day 3: Getting it down. . . more of the same. Standing in the corridor and watching scenery roll by. Meeting the usual crowd (besides the Korean ambassador and family and servants) of travelers. . . a couple from Chile out for about six months, twin brothers from Finland about three months, Swedish couple about the same (she is a professional musician and salsa teacher, and after being cooped up for a few days they got out their MP3 player and rocked the platform at one stop). Most folks are doing about the same route as me, Europe to Russia to Mongolia to China, and then variously continuing on down into Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam) and beyond. The folks from Chile are going *overland by bus* from China to India! Gawd, I couldn't imagine doing that again.

Day 4: Unremitting scenery of birch tree stands and flat lands and scrub. . . today is bath day! Cold shower in the little wash area between berths (ah, first class!), so I filled up the hot water pot from the supply at the end of the car and did the old cup-sponge bath thing. It's been a while, but it still works.

and HAPPY ANNIVERSARY MAKI! She is in Tokyo and I am somewhere, and it is twenty-eight years of wonderful times, and of course even longer if you count the courting era. The great friends and wonderful times are making me smile. . .

Day 5: Passport Control! OK, I gotta relate this in some detail because it was too serious/comical. . . a five-hour+ stop, the soldiers come on the train and take our passports, all very stern and tough. . . and then dissapear! The train moves about two-hundred yards, we all get out and wander off into the dust-bowl of a nowhere frontier town and drink beer (and salsa dance) for a few hours. Ordered back on the train, we wait. Of course, during stops they lock the bathrooms because they just empty out onto the tracks. . . well, hours of beer drinking and no toilets made for some comical situations that I won't detail. . . they come back. I am ordered out of my compartment. A tough, no-nonsense school-teacher nazi-in-panyhose officer comrade olive drabs (w/ colonel-like epulets and all) with a holstered pistol and some sort of automatic rifle over her shouldr, starts directing a younger soldier on how to search. She was obviuosly in training. . . she made her pull up my Persian carpets, search the drain, and then. . . climb up on my bunk, straddling with one foot on the bunk and the other on the door-knob to the washroom, open the light fixture, take the fan off and search behind it, pull the bedding apart, take the light-switch covers off, and more! Apparantly there is a big smuggling problem with Mongolians bringing stuff into China (not the American taking stuff out), and this soldier was being trained.

Well. Unlike the officer soldier, the searcher soldier, in olive-green fatigues, was a chubby blond about 24 years old, hair in a pony-tail, climbing all over the place while me and stern-woman (hair in bun, the whole mean thing) sat in the doorway watching. I wished I had my camera when she was straddling the bunk and doorknob, bending over, fatigues spread oh-so-tight across her ghetto-booty ass-- about six inches from our faces. Then she turned around to search something else and her crotch was splayed in our face (a "wide-on," as Ed would put it) and her blouse was about to burst! I had to smile (if not cheer), and I think her nazi-mommie boss even wanted to but just couldn't. . . oh, for a picture of that! After my compartment they did a quick search of everything else and left. 90 minutes later the train took off. . . and we all got to take a piss. Ahhhhhhh!

Day 6: The scenery has changed. . . mountains and grasslands. . . pastures, wooden corrals. . . we passed Lake Baikal at midnight Moscow time (the train schedule ran on Moscow time until Mongolia). . . which I suddenly realized would be about 6:00 am Ulaan Baatar time. . . train-time lag is different from jet lag, I suddenly realized. I went to bed.
Well, so that is it in a long nut-shell. I got into the station and had a pleasant surprise when somebody from the university/Center for Mongolian Studies was waiting for me at the station with a driver! That *never* happens, right?

So I have been wandering the city-- a truly bleak, concret-and-garbage-and-dust sort of place. There are ten million bars and "pubs," and Sunday AM I was already accosted by several dodgy drunks! I am told that the Mongolians make the Russians look like beginners.

Japanese and Koreans everywhere (Japanese works better at my hotel than English). . . Mongolia is selling mineral rights like crazy and trying to build, build, build. But more of that later, and hopefully some pics as well.

So I just treated myself to the Japanese bath at my hotel and a massage. . . ahhhhhh, the best massage I have ever had, actually. No trendy new-age music or other mood-crap (the Simpons were even on the TV playing softly for the massage folks while they worked), just low lights, about six massage tables, and the strongest massage I have ever had. Cost for about 90 minutes: $20.

It helped a great deal with "train legs," a new phenomena for me, but a bit like "sea legs:" I still have this odd leaning and rocking sensation when I am sitting still-- after 6 days on the train, perhaps normal?

OK, enough for now. I miss all you guys and hope to hear from you.

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