Crossing time

Posted 11/04/07 11.15am
However, other people spent their Easter Sundays, I don't think they could beat mine for bizarre - namely being stuck in a Chinese border town.
With Altaa, I had made my way down from Ulaanbaatar on the Friday by night on the train to arrive at the Mongolian border town of Zamyn-Uud at 8am, Saturday 7th April, the day my Mongolian visa expired. Going into China, was a means of renewing my tourist visa (though in effect, getting a new one).
Crossing the border was gruelling - a mammoth 3 and a half hours, mainly due to a rookie Chinese customs officer (while his counterpart on the desk across worked at twice the speed - something we didn't know at the tremendous crush of people at the rear of the hall, until we were in a semblance of a 70-person queue).
Eventually staggering through, we crossed into China proper. In the lead-up to the hall, we had indulged in five minutes of people-smuggling. In our jeep, we had five passengers including ourselves, but one had joined since we left the Mongolian border hall. The Chinese guard at the road gate to the Chinese hall didn't seem to like this, so our driver turned around, drove 250m and then stopped out of sight of the gate. The woman who had joined us lay down at the back of the jeep and then we put the removable back seat on top of her and covered her up with luggage. Then we drove back. This fooled the border guard. Though she entered the hall, on the other side we didn't see the woman again.
Once in Erlian (as the Chinese call it - Mongolians call it Ereen), we searched for a Mongolian-speaking taxi driver - we were in Inner Mongolia after all - who could take us to the Mongolian consulate. Upon reaching it, the security guard on duty told us it was closed until Monday. "How am I going to get back into Mongolia," I loudly exclaimed. He gave us a telephone number of an official, but, even with the offer of financial inducement, she refused to open up the consulate (or rather the small visa hut in the courtyard next to the perimeter wall).
After the initial shock, I took this turn of events with equanimity. Wisely, I had stocked up on plenty of yuan and we quickly found a decent hotel for 100 yuan (14 pounds) a night. I had my New Testament and Psalms to hand as well. Altaa would miss the busiest workday of the week and I too would have to forgo Monday's work, but it was an inconvenience rather than a calamity.
For the weekend, we pottered around Ereen, which is quite pretty with its wide boulevards and occasional art-deco structures that had a feel of Russia's Far East. At night, the edges of buildings are lit up - delineating the city with their bright colours far more than the dusty street lamps could. I did cough a lot on the first day but I put that down the fresh Gobi air removing the gunk that had built up in my lungs in UB.
In the hotel, Altaa had a good time watching TV since she had no opportunity to do this at home. One show was a Chinese comedy-drama series set in medieval Kazakhstan with Inner Mongolian actors speaking Chinese dubbed into Mongolian. This state-sanctioned Mongolian channel (MTV no less) also had an edgy police drama.
Ereen goes a bundle on dinosaurs and its dinosaur park in the south is far more impressive than Tiananmen Square, which is interrupted by Mao's mausoleum (the only human statue of the Chairman was a bold, whitewashed sculpture outside a bank). There were several dinosaur statues dotted around the park and appropriate dried, yellow grass, some of it burnt in places to give the impression of tar pits. It won't look right in the summer when it will probably be green. We came at the right time. Also in the south of the town are the cheapest stores where we did the majority of shopping on the Monday.
I handed my visa over to a now thankfully open consulate at around 11.15pm on the Monday, coming back at 3pm to collect it. Then it was to the border, which this time was largely pain-free. We met an American and two Mongolains at the consulate and traveled back with them. Entering the Chinese border check building, I joked with the American that our driver was heading back to China - with our bags! This prompted him to keep looking at the jeep until he could see it no more inside the hall.
Once in Zamyn-Uud, we were lucky to buy some tickets for the 5.50pm train - the first one out of town. Thye were cheap but it was in a hard-seat carraige and it was a sixteen-hour journey overnight. Though hard-seat, they had slim cushions and one could just about stretch out on them in the cramped conditions. Altaa and I curled up on one. Eventually, we arrived in UB around 10.15am. We got a taxi home, I changed most of my clothes I'd been wearing since Friday (I had at least taken a spare pair of socks) and went straight back out to the office.