The crossing

Whereas one found all the ancient buildings in Beijing a much of muchness eventually (so what must it have been like before the early communists razed plenty to the ground), that could never be said about Ereen, though there were a few interesting Muslim-looking minarets. Throughout our entire time in Beijing, countless Chinese had talked Mandarin at Altaa, to our embarrassment, thinking her Chinese, but here in Inner Mongolia, Altaa could find people of her own language. She arranged the border crossing. As we drove towards the Chinese checkpoint, the Communist Party Headquarters loomed blandly classical, isolated and embossed against the streamingly flat desert background and blanketting, cloudless, light-blue sky.
It was seven people to three seats in the back of the jeep as we crossed the border. This had to be repeated as we had to get to get out at passport control, once for China, once for Mongolia. What impressed me at the duty free on the Chinese side was the 3 litres (!) of Jim Beam whiskey one could buy, firstly for its size and secondly because it busts the quota of liquor one can take into Mongolia or China. We finally reached the Mongolian border side only for our vehicle to be proverbially beached, since the Mongolians operating the barrier were on their lunch break. We walked across and gor in a taxi to take us to Zamyn-Uud, the Mongolian border town.
Zamyn-Uud has the standard dried-up park water feature, typical of ex-communist countries who could no longer afford the bills to keep such extravagance in operation (and looking at Zamyn-Uud, one wonders where the water would come from, with the Gobi on all sides). The town also has that Mongolian civic trait of cows walking about, free as you like. Hindus revere cows, but Mongolians are traditional nomads who can let their flock wander wide and still find them, but I wonder if these town cows are independent. Zamyn-Uud has some pretty one-storey houses, their colours reminisecent of Venetian fishing villages, but there is not much to see, apart from the widly over-the-top nouveau architecture of the train station. One of the billboards on the station portrays Zamyn-Uud as a gleaming metropolis, sprouting steel-and-glass skyscrapers by a sparkling blue oasis that camels mooch around. All in all, simply hilarious with the reality surrounding one.
Our train went on for so long that we had to dismount the platform to reach our carriage. Once moving, things were a little better. Taking sloping corners around the hills, the full glorious sweep of the train was joyous to behold as it curved along the rails, gushing like a river winding through the landscape. We were in coach B, the second to last carriage, but there must have been enough carriages to fill the alphabet, certainly the Roman one and it required a double diesel to pull the train. Despite getting sleeping berths (luxury service), the train was fairly ramshackle with a very short bed and incredibly stiff furnishing (for example, once the window had been pulled/wrestled down open, I realised immediately that it would be impossible to close. Duly, that was the case and though a makeshift curtain at night kept the dust out, the cold still billowed through). But however old and rattling the train was, incongruously there a small flat-screen high definition TV affixed to the table showing the latest movies (all dubbed), the best of which was a Korean comedy that sadly was only half-way through when the train pulled into Ulaan Baatar the next day.