Between Latitudes

By Edwin M. Woods

A travelogue with a personal touch relating day to day experiences of the author in essay form. The author tells of adventures in Mongolia and Siberia with smugglers on the train, visits nomads in the Gobi, Lake Baikal in Siberia, the Great Wall of China, and Forbidden City. He visits the Irish and backpacks in Tuscany; cruises across the Atlantic to visit England; explores the regions of France; and satisfies his curiosity about the Lapland provinces of Finland, Norway, and Sweden. In the developing countries of southeastern Europe, he sees Gypies, horse-drawn carts alongside automobiles, and Vlad's Castle in Transylvania; takes in the beautiful scenery of the Dalmatian Coast; visits Bosnia, with its bullet holes in buildings. "Between latitudes" from the top of Europe and the Arctic Circle to the bottom of South America, he visits the Chilean fjords and sails around Cape Horn and hikes along Iguazu Falls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462044450

Edwin M. Woods

Between Latitudes is the the third book, along with Sightseeing and You Go Home, Make More Money, and Come Back, in a series that tells of the author's travel on seven continents and eighty-five countries and territories. Mr. Woods was born and raised in Washington State. He received a BA in Geography from WSU in 1965. Most of his work years were as an investigator until his retirement in 2003. Woods has lived in Washington and California, and presently makes his home in Yakima, Washington. The author adds a personal touch to the travelogue, along with descriptive details, to give the reader an insight into his day to day experiences: the good and the bad.

Book preview

Illustrations

THE MONGOLIAN EXPRESS

FIONA’S IRELAND

VISIT TO TUSCANY

BLARNEY CASTLE

PASSAGE TO ENGLAND

LAPLAND

PARIS

THE BALKANS and TRANSYLVANIA

MID-ATLANTIC STATES

AROUND THE HORN

TOUR DE FRANCE

DALMATIAN COAST

In Loving Memory

Florence R Woods Mom

1909-1993

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Turtle Rock, Teretj Park, Mongolia

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A ger in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia

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Thatched Roof, Kingscourt, Ireland

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Blarney Castle, County Cork, Ireland

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Leaning Tower of Pisa, Italy

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Santiago de Compostela, Spain

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Tower of London, England

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Leeds Castle, England

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Drying codfish in northern Norway

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Scenic mountains in northern Norway

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Warehouses in Old Town Trondheim, Norway

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Parliament on the Danube, Budapest, Hungary

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People’s Palace in Bucharest, Romania

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Vlad’s Castle, Transylvania, Romania

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Mount Osorno, southern Chile

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Magellanic Penguins, Strait of Magellan, Chile

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Iguazu Falls, Argentina-Brazil

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Pont Neuf, Paris, France

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Louvre, Paris, France

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Cathedral of Rouen, France

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Honfleur, France

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Mont Saint Michel, France

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Chateau Chenonceau, River Cher, France

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Mostar Bridge, Bosnia-Herzegovina

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Zagreb, Croatia

THE MONGOLIAN EXPRESS

The new airport at Beijing is huge and ultra modern. The Chinese had been preparing for the 2008 Summer Olympics for some time now and I arrived a month before they were to start. Immigration was smooth and efficient and I found the train to the baggage claim area, met my guide, Gao Qi, and headed for the five-star Great Wall Sheraton downtown.

A hooker followed me into the elevator and I stalled. Don’t you want me? she said in English. No, I don’t, I replied. She left. It was late Monday afternoon, July 7; I had jet lag and was limping on a sore left foot. I had left home on July 5, stayed overnight in Seattle, departed early the next day to San Francisco, changed planes, and flew directly to Beijing.

Five of us would be on the tour: Shirley and John, Fiona, Maralee, and me. I met Fiona and we walked across the street to a Hard Rock Cafe for an expensive hamburger and Coke; she treated me.

July 8. At five in the morning, the five of us met in the lobby with our Chinese guide, nibbled on our boxed breakfasts, and drove to the airport. The flight from Beijing to Ulan Bator, Mongolia, was two hours. The original tour called for a train ride from Beijing to Ulan Bator but the Chinese had canceled the train for the general run and commandeered it for use in the Olympics for the summer. It was to shuttle people from Moscow to Beijing. I didn’t quite understand this until later, when I found out there are three trains: the Chinese train runs from Beijing to Moscow; the Russian and Mongolian trains operate between Ulan Bator and Moscow. It is a six-day trip, according to Gao, from Ulan Bator to Moscow.

After a restaurant lunch in Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, we boarded a Russian train and headed north at 1:45. Gao and our city guide grabbed some bottled water and cups of instant, dried noodles at a station convenience store for us because there is no dining car on the Mongolian side of the border. It doesn’t hook on until we reach Russia and the paper cup of noodles was to be our dinner.

The Russian train had a locomotive and ten cars. Our car had ten cabins, each about six feet by six feet with two benches, two feet by six feet, which you could sleep on. The pad on the bench was less than four inches thick and there was barely enough room to lie on your back. The bench lifted up for storage underneath. They furnished pillows and sheets and a towel. A small table between the two benches was next to the window. This was soft class. Hard class has four sleeping berths, with the other two consisting of shelves overhead that you had to climb to by a pull-out metal step attached to the wall. A narrow corridor ran the length of the car on the opposite side. A toilet was situated at each end of the car and, at one end, a samovar, which is a small hot-water tank with a spigot that furnished hot water for tea.

It was not a fast train, at least not here. We ambled on with the incessant click-click-clack of the rails, pulling off to a side rail, from time to time, for a freighter. This is the famous Russian Trans-Siberian Express. An hour later, we stopped at APWAAHT, a small village and station. You couldn’t tell the name of the towns in English as the signs were in Cyrillic. A log train was parked off to the side. It was taking logs from Siberia to China. In fact we had passed several log and lumber trains on the trip.

The scenery is rolling hills and small mountains to the sides of us with a wide valley that we were traveling through. The grass was green and grew in bunches close together. We passed gers, which are tents used by the nomads. Some were bunched together and some were scattered. Cattle, sheep and goats grazed. From time to time I saw cowboys—local people riding horses both for transportation and for herding the animals. It was a scene from our Old West.

We passed villages and made brief stops at some of the towns. Fences of unpainted wood, about four feet high, surrounded entire villages of small, mostly unpainted, weathered wood houses with corrugated metal roofs. Most had vegetable gardens. Sometimes gers were spaced among the wooden houses. One village had a brick factory where it appeared that the red bricks were handmade. This is steppe country with warm, rainy summers, at least enough to green the grass, and cold, snowy winters. It was warm and somewhat humid with a thunderstorm brewing.

We broke out the cups of dried noodles and added hot water from the samovar and ate dinner. Gao passed out some chocolate cupcakes for dessert. The clouded sky began to fade into darkness.

Gao mentioned that the first time he took a tour group to Russia, in 2001, he had tried three times to get a Russian visa and each time he was denied, with no reason given. He had no choice but to take the group to the border where he turned them over to a Russian guide who came down from Irkutsk to escort his charges on into Siberia. Gao stayed overnight at a hotel in the nearest town, Suhbator. He met a Mongolian army colonel, had a few drinks with him that evening, and found out he could get a taxi back to Ulan Bator for seventy dollars. It took five hours for the trip. He stayed at the hotel in Ulan Bator and, when the group returned after touring Siberia, Gao met them at Ulan Bator and completed the rest of the trip with them.

Last year, Gao related, three Americans, a husband and wife and another lady, showed up in Beijing with no Russian visa. They weren’t aware one was needed. Gao advised them to stay in Beijing and not to try to enter Russia without first getting a visa. It was not possible to get a visa at the Russian border. They said they would try, anyway. When they arrived at the border, the Russian border guards detained the three Americans. Gao tried to intercede and explain to the guards what happened, but one pointed a rifle at him and ordered him to remain in his cabin. The three were taken off the train. Gao and the others continued into Russia. He found out later the three were kept for thirty-six hours with no food or water. The husband had a stroke. Finally they found someone who could speak a little English to explain to the guards about the stroke; he was hospitalized but nearly died first. They did manage to get help and were returned to Beijing.

We had one person on this tour with only a one-entry visa for Mongolia but a double-entry visa was required for her. She is Irish; her nearest Mongolian embassy is in London. The rest of us, except our Chinese guide, were Americans and didn’t require a Mongolian visa. Fiona had sent her passport to London with the visa fee and application and invitation letter and had promptly been issued a one-entry Mongolian visa. She contacted them again and was told they couldn’t issue a double-entry visa, and that she would have to get another in Asia. She had no time in Beijing and, at the Mongolian airport, the man said he had no authority. She would try at Irkutsk at the Mongolian consulate (Siberia branch). Meanwhile, she had used her one-entry when we flew from Beijing to Ulan Bator at the airport immigration. The Mongolian tour company had been alerted and met us at the Ulan Bator airport with information they would work on it; and she could probably get it at the airport on our return flight to Ulan Bator from Irkutsk. I mentioned to Fiona, What if . . . the Irkutsk consulate is closed for a holiday when we get there. Fiona replied she was keeping optimistic that everything would work out.

She had the appropriate visas for China and Russia. Fiona related her troubles in getting those visas, particularly the Russian one, at the embassy in Dublin. She lives over fifty miles north and had to drive all the way through Dublin’s traffic to get to the embassies south of town. The first trip ended in failure. Both the Chinese and Russian embassies closed at noon. A long line was still waiting when they shut the doors. They are only open from nine till noon. The next trip, Fiona arrived at the Russian embassy at 7:30 AM and waited in queue where she made it to the window just before noon. She was told they weren’t giving any more visas that day. She ran to the Chinese embassy in time for them to take her passport and application, promising it would be ready in a few days with a Chinese visa. While this was going on, Fiona was planning a trip to Italy with her friend, Anita. She managed to pick up her passport two days before she was to go leave for Italy. After returning from a nine-day Italian holiday, Fiona returned to the Russian embassy where she finally got to the counter. The visa grantor was a Russian in his mid-thirties who said, Why should I give you a visa? and was mean spirited, according to Fiona. After giving her a hard time, the official finally took her application and told her to come back. He asked when she would be leaving; she told him the date and he said to return the day after she was to leave. She pleaded and he finally relented; agreeing she could pick up her passport and visa the last working day before she was to leave for her trip to China, Mongolia, and Russia.

We stopped at Suhbator where Mongolian border guards inspected our passports and exit declarations for customs and searched the train before allowing the train to continue to the Russian border further away. At 9:00 PM we stopped at the Russian border where the Russian border guards searched the train, inspected our passports and visas, gave us a good look-over, and examined our customs entrance declarations. A dining car was added to the train at this border town at one o’clock in the morning. The dining car remains with the train between Moscow and the Russian-Mongolian border where it is disconnected, or added, depending on which way the train is headed. The train runs on Moscow time, which is five hours behind the local time. At the border, you must add or subtract an hour for local time, depending on which way you are going. It gets confusing because meals are served at odd times of the day (on Moscow time).

July 9. I dozed off and on through the night, lying on my back on the bench with my street clothes on. At 7:15 AM, the train pulled into the station at Ulan Ude, in Siberia, the first big town we had seen since leaving Ulan Bator. Local women flocked to the train while it was stopped, bringing their food items for sale. I took a photo of a woman at the doorway with a box of smoked omul—a fish. One of the Russians on the train purchased a plastic bag of the smelly fish and took it to his cabin. Mangy dogs showed up on the railroad platforms at nearly every stop, hoping for a food handout from passengers.

The train continued toward Lake Baikal. We passed poor villages surrounded by unpainted, weathered wood fences. The houses were also unpainted, weathered wood with pitched gables and many with corrugated metal roofs. Each home had a large garden of potatoes and other vegetables. Some of the potato plants were in bloom with small white flowers. I could see television dishes on some of the houses. I would guess this to be a subsistence economy with gardens and some farm animals. If there were shopping areas or stores, I didn’t see any.

The dining car finally opened for breakfast—our first actual meal on the train. I had some bread with apricot jam, cheese, an egg omelet, yogurt, a breakfast bar (kind of stuffed cookie), and a cup of Nescafe. The Russians don’t seem to drink real coffee but, instead, serve instant Nescafe. Mostly they drink tea.

We continued through a birch forest, passing tiny villages from time to time. The weather was cloudy and humid and warm. At 9:30 AM, the first view of Lake Baikal appeared. One of the Russian car attendants had walked past the open door of our cabin and pointed and said, Baikal. We continued around the southern end of the lake for many miles. Yarrow, a weed with petite, white flowers, was sprinkled around. I saw a couple of families picnicking. Rip-rap, in the form of massive concrete blocks, had been placed on the shore, apparently to control erosion near the rail tracks.

At 12:30 PM, we had lunch in the dining car with a salad of tomatoes and cucumbers, a bowl of chicken-onion soup, beef chunks with rice, and a serving of cabbage. At 1:30, we crossed through taiga—a northern forest of conifers. At 2:30 in the afternoon, the train arrived at Irkutsk.

Irkutsk is the largest city in this part of Siberia with a population of six hundred thousand. I expected to see most of the people with oriental features but was surprised to notice that a significant number have European features. The city was founded on the banks of the Angara River that drains Lake Baikal, a few miles away.

We were met by Elena, our Russian guide, and taken to the Victoria Hotel to check in. The room was clean, small, had a private bath and twin beds, with a thin mattress. I called for laundry service.

Late in the afternoon, we went with Elena to the Church of the Savior that also served as an original fortress of the settlement near the bank of the Angara River; then to a statue of someone I can’t recall. There were several old, wooden buildings downtown, along with more modern ones.

July 10. In the morning, we went to a fine arts museum and checked out the farmer’s market downtown. I took a picture of an old lady dressed in old-fashioned clothes selling what appeared to be chocolate pieces, one at a time, that were kept in a pan of water (perhaps so they wouldn’t melt in the day’s heat). The vegetables for sale looked fresh and good. One stall offered thick, wool socks and knitted wool caps.

We had lunch at a small, but quaint, restaurant that featured a male accordion player and female vocalist with Russian songs. The food was good—boiled potatoes, a thin breaded pork chop, dumpling soup, cabbage slaw and crepes.

During the afternoon, we visited the house of Prince Segei Trubetskoy, an exiled Decembrist. The Decembrists were so-named because of a revolt occurring on December 14, 1825, against the czar. Decembrists were a group of people who wanted to limit the monarchy and establish more democracy. They were led by Trubetskoy and others. When Nicholas I was to assume the throne after the death of Alexander, a revolt involving three thousand soldiers took place in Senate Square in Saint Petersburg. The revolt was quashed and a trial held, which resulted in five of the leaders being hanged and the rest exiled to Siberia. Sergei Trubetskoy was sentenced to hard labor in a gold mine. He spent ten years here and was joined by his wife, Maria. He received permission to move to Yurik, thirty-five miles outside Irkutsk, and eventually moved to Irkutsk, so that the children could get a better education. Although allowed only minimum resources and money at first, Trubetskoy was able to accumulate enough resources to build a large wooden house in 1840 and to afford some of the finer things in life—except freedom. Three years after building the house, the family moved to Irkutsk. The house was taken down board by board and reassembled in Irkutsk. It has two floors and many rooms. It is heated by coal and wood fireplace on the first floor which, through a series of pipes, heats the second floor, also. Trubetskoy wasn’t allowed to attend concerts in Irkutsk, so he hired the singers and piano players to come to his home to perform in front of his family and invited guests. The finale of our visit was a performance of piano pieces and vocalists and a serving of champagne.

Dinner at the hotel was boiled potatoes and garlic-stuffed fish; my appetite was lost. After dinner, Fiona and I walked for several blocks around Irkutsk and took a few photos before resting at a little park behind the hotel. I couldn’t help but notice the many beautiful ladies in the area. It was light out until around 10:30 PM.

July 11. Breakfast at the hotel was oatmeal and smoked ham and cucumber slices and Nescafe. Yesterday morning it was cold bacon and tomatoes, crepes with jam, a fried egg, and bread without butter.

Fiona received word that the Mongolian consulate in Irkutsk was closed all week for the Naadam holidays; she would be unable to obtain a visa here. We also received word today that our flight on July 15, from Irkutsk to Ulan Bator, had been canceled. No reason was given for the sudden cancellation; no new flight was scheduled. That means Fiona would not be able to get a visa at Irkutsk—or at the airport in Ulan Bator. She would have to try at the land border of Russia-Mongolia… more risky. It also meant we would be taking the Mongolian train back to Ulan Bator.

We drove to Ust-Orda in Siberia, eighty-seven miles north of Irkutsk. The scenery continued to be grassy-green, rolling plains with spots of taiga forest and hills in the distance. Some crops of yellow-flowered canola were growing. We passed by a couple of wooden villages. The district has about one hundred forty thousand persons, most of whom are rural. The city of Ust-Orda has twenty thousand souls. It was cool and cloudy with occasional showers and sun breaks. This seems to be a horse and cattle economy with occasional herds of cattle being chaperoned by horse-mounted cowboys. We stopped at a holy obo, consisting of a couple of upright poles with a board between them. Strings of ribbons were attached to the poles. I made a small offering of a coin, and tied a short ribbon; and then, walked around the poles three times while making a wish. Three or four local people were picking wild strawberries across the road from us.

We arrived at the Ust-Orda Business Center Hotel to check in. This is a rather plain, no-frills, three-story building without elevators. We were on the third floor. The twin bed was hard, but okay, and there was a private bath. It was clean.

Lunch was typical with a salad, soup, a meat and potato dish with lots of dill, a dessert, tea or Nescafe, and bottle of water.

After lunch, we drove to a Buryat settlement to attend an outdoor folkloric show with music and dancing and a wrestling match between the local chief and Gao. The Buryat are nomadic people, mostly herders, but these folks live in apartments in town. A Buryat museum, built 1944-46, contained various artifacts of the culture. They claim to be descendents of the Genghis Khan crowd. Genghis Khan was born near the border of Mongolia and Siberia in 1167. The Buryat performers had Mongolian features and dressed in traditional costumes for the show, after which, they changed into western street clothes.

We next visited a shaman, as the people are animists and believe in shamanism. The shaman was a woman—very short, missing teeth, smiling and friendly. She demonstrated some rituals, witch doctoring, in a wooden ger that was still under construction. The lady was a grandmother who lived in a rather shabby-looking apartment building across the street.

After dinner, Fiona and I walked about four blocks from the hotel to the main street of Ust-Orda, in the rain, to get a little exercise, and returned to the hotel.

July 12. Breakfast at the hotel was brown bread, cheese, slices of bologna, salami, and two fried eggs.

At 8:50, we left Ust-Orda en route to Lake Baikal by way of Irkutsk. The two-lane road from Irkutsk to Lake Baikal passes through plains, and then through forest with purple fireweed growing in the meadows. We visited the Taltsy open-air museum, which was a log house fort and community built by Cossacks, who occupied the place from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. It had several houses, a school, church, and workshops, all made of logs and rough cut boards.

At noon, we stopped for a view of the Angara River where it exits from Lake Baikal. The river is fairly wide here and the only river that drains from the lake. A young Russian man stripped, and waded naked into the cold water. The ladies took his photo as he returned to the bank. We ate lunch at a restaurant in the village of Listvyanka of thin borscht soup, fish, potatoes and cabbage.

After lunch, we toured the Lake Baikal Museum. Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake in volume in the world: 5,481 cubic miles of water or 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. It is 12,108 square miles in area; 394 miles long; seventeen to fifty miles wide; and 1,768 feet deep. The lake is twenty-five million years old and was created by a fault-block earthquake. Baikal area contains 3,500 species of plants and animals and fish of which 2,600 are indigenous. Flowing into the lake are 336 streams; but only one flows out. It would take four hundred years to drain the lake, they say; if nothing were flowing in and, with only the one outlet.

We boarded a former fishing boat, KOPHET (Cyrillic letters), for a boat ride on the lake. The day was beautiful and we did not need jackets. The lake is clear and unpolluted. We set out from Listvyanka village past the outlet of the Angara River to a far shore where we turned and headed back—over an hour’s journey. We had nearly arrived when the engine shut down and we were dead in the water, maybe a half-mile from shore, and had to be towed in by another vessel from our port side. We had to, literally, crawl from boat to boat to get off at the landing.

Elena, our Russian guide, had been looking for a printer and, so far, the only one she found was not working. The Mongolian tour company had been in contact with her via e-mail on her mobile phone, and had transmitted their invitation letter with explanation that Fiona needed for her Mongolian visa. The problem now was that the e-mail attachment needed to be printed out on paper for the authorities. It was already getting dinner time and we had checked into our hotel. Elena would try one more time after dinner.

We stayed at Flagman’s Hotel, which consisted of modern cabins built on a hillside. It was nice, but we had to get up at three in the morning to head to Irkutsk to catch the train. The owner served dinner outside in courses. He brought a bottle of chilled Baikal vodka, which you drink straight in tiny glasses down the hatch. Bread with red caviar and a salad plate with baby mushrooms were served first. The caviar was good—very mild and not the salty, fishy taste I expected. The main course was boiled potatoes and smoked omul. Omul is a popular fish caught in Lake Baikal. He had been smoking the fish all day and it was fresh and tasty; served with head and tail on your plate.

July 13. Because of the flight cancellation, we were going back to Mongolia two days early. Elena had managed to find a printer last night to print Fiona’s invitation and letter of explanation for the Mongolian authorities and gave copies to her this morning. Fiona’s only hope now was to get a visa at the border… but there was no assurance.

We boarded the Mongolian train at Irkutsk at 5:00 AM. Gao had managed to reserve three cabins in car number twelve and we would be two persons per cabin. Squatters were sleeping in our cabins and they were asked to leave. It took some time for them to remove their goods from our cabins and return to their own. Gao said they were Mongolian smugglers, and he checked all of our cabins before we settled in, to make sure there was no contraband. Gao mentioned we were lucky to be only six, as the train was full and they wouldn’t have been able to accommodate more without us doubling up. The cabins were hard which meant they had four berths instead of two. The upper berths were simply benches overhead and it would have been crowded. There was no lounge car to sit in so we had to stay in our cabins. The Mongolians on the train were traveling four to a cabin in our car. We had brought along boxed meals, one for lunch and one for dinner, as there was no dining car until reaching the Russian border late in the evening. Actually, I just nibbled on the lunch and didn’t touch the dinner, because the box had been out all day, un-refrigerated.

Our train trip re-traced the route we took on the way up. It was twenty-seven hours; and none of us changed clothes. We went through poverty-stricken country, both in Siberia and in Mongolia.

About mid-morning, screams were heard throughout the car. The train cops had caught a thief and were torturing him in the cabin next door to Fiona and Maralee. They beat him, threw him against the cabin wall, tasered, and maced the young man. I could hear zaps from the tasers and loud yells. Fiona could hear the spray and felt the thuds of his body against the cabin wall next to her bench. This went on for some time before he was taken into the corridor and handcuffed to a railing. His face was bruised and swollen; yet, he was defiant. Another man, a Mongolian, came out of a cabin, passed Gao and me standing at a window in the corridor, walked up to the young man, yelled at him, and hit him; and then walked back. The cop took him back to the cabin for more beatings; and then down the hallway across from the toilet at the end of our car. After a while he disappeared.

At each stop we made that lasted more than one or two minutes, the Mongolian smugglers would take clothing onto the side platform and try to sell to local residents who happened by. The Mongolians had mostly clothing and household goods, even toilet seats, that they, apparently, had purchased on the Chinese market in Moscow (cheaper goods made in China and Korea imported into Russia) hoping to sell what they could on the way, and smuggle the remainder out of Russia and into Mongolia. At Ulan Bator, they would try to sell the remainder at the black market bazaar. They hid the goods in their cabins and in any space they could find on the train. There was a trap door with space under the hallway floor, which they filled with items.

We stopped at the Russian border for four hours, while the unsmiling, stone-faced border guards searched the train and inspected passports. Gao and I opened our luggage for them and they checked every nook and cranny in the compartment; even the trap door in front of our cabin. They took our passports to the office. They went through the train methodically, taking their time. John and Shirley had a problem; the guards found no entrance stamp in their passports and it looked as if they might be detained. A soldier verified their story with Gao and asked for additional proof that they had, indeed, come into Russia with our group on July 8. John had kept a copy of the Russian customs declaration that had a border stamp. The passports were taken and brought back with approval; even the placing of an entrance stamp, by back-dating it to July 8, and the exit stamp for July 13, for John and Shirley.

In the meantime, Fiona gave me the name and address of her parents for me to contact in case she were unable to get a visa at the Mongolian border and would be detained or jailed. If she were scared, she didn’t make it obvious. But she had to be worried; I sure was, and so were Gao and the others. He said the Mongolians weren’t too bad; you could deal with them. The Russians were another matter—you could not. The Russian guards made the smugglers unload everything they had onto the concrete platform into a pile—and it would make a truckload. They arrested two of them, a man and a pregnant woman, and made them stand, handcuffed, to a fence next to the platform. The dining car was hooked onto our train and we proceeded toward Mongolia.

At 11:00 PM, we approached the Mongolian border. At least Fiona had been allowed to leave Russia with no problems and our group was still intact. The moment of truth was nearing as the Mongolian border guards searched the train methodically and inspected our passports. They went to Fiona’s and Maralee’s cabin. Gao started to get up to see if he could help, but a guard ordered both of us to remain in our cabin. Fiona, accompanied by a female guard, nodded to us through the open door, as she left the train to the office. A few minutes later, the guard came back to speak with Gao, and asked for confirmation of some facts and a copy of our itinerary. Fiona returned, all smiles, and said that the lady guard was friendly and sympathetic; and also happened to be a consulate representative with visa-granting authority. She granted Fiona a 30-day visa, even though we only needed a few days. Gao let out an audible