All Aboard! A journey on the Trans-Mongolian Railway and through Eastern Europe: Come on a journey with me, #1

By Carrie Riseley

A tale of railways, nomads, ice, Soviets, food, culture, beauty, humour and excitement...

 

' I can't recommend this book enough! I feel like I'm on the journey with Carrie... it's engaging, funny, and I've learned so much already... '
- Keeley O'Hagan Montagu

 

Come on a journey with Carrie, a young Australian with a notebook and an evocative ability to bring places you may have never seen to life through her words. See stretching grasslands 100km wide; hear the music of ice by a beach; smell some rousing local cuisine; grapple with challenging political history; and watch the earth's surface change through a train carriage window.
Ten countries, tens of thousands of kilometres, and a whole lot of adventure.

 

Readers are DELIGHTED by All Aboard!:

 

Reading this book was like taking a trip in real time, narrated by your entertaining Australian mate... I felt I was right beside the author as she stared in wonder at the world flashing past the windows of her carriage.

- Jacqueline Lambert, travel author

 

This book is a great read. By page 5 I was laughing out loud. A thoroughly entertaining travel guide.
- Angie McGowan

This is a wonderful book for anyone with a curious mind about how other people live under different political systems, in different climates, languages and cultures... It's immediate and engaging as we learn as much about Carrie as the people she meets. It's as if I were in the backpackers with her as she shares each day's events.
- Alan Raby

 

I love it. Every time I sit down for a cup of tea, I read more and reluctantly put it down. It is so engaging to travel with you and learn things you never would. You really should be proud of what you have achieved - intrepid adventures on your own in very culturally different countries, writing intimately, frankly and honestly in journals and then producing such a readable book. Fabulous.
- Sally Ord

 

If either you or someone you want to buy a present for:

loves travel

can't travel but wants to experience the next best thing

is interested in the different countries and environments of the world

wants an easy but engaging read

Then this is the book for you.

The book is relatable, fun, interesting and easy to read and understand. It's presented in the style of Bill Bryson's travel books, following the author on the journey - with plenty of wit and humour. It was written in the moment while the author was travelling, so you'll feel like you were there too. You'll marvel as she marvelled, wonder as she wondered, and learn as she learned.

Stunning photographs of the places the author visited are presented at the beginning of each chapter. It's a thoughtful and entertaining travel book, full of adventure and curiosity.

The book's themes include: travel, culture, exploring, adventure, history, food, nature, railway, music, beauty, hiking, architecture, stories, religion, Mongolian nomads, Soviets, World War Two, the Holocaust, learning. These are presented in an entertaining read that takes the reader on a journey through a fascinating part of the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carrie's Travel Books
• Release date: Nov 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9798223403326

Book preview

Preface

Come on a journey across the world with me. See stretching grasslands 100km wide; hear the music of ice by a beach; smell some rousing local cuisine. Ten countries, tens of thousands of kilometres, and a whole lot of adventure.

I love travelling and have always kept a journal to record my experiences. After receiving some good feedback on my writing, I decided to edit some of my extensive volumes of travel journal notebooks into a book to publish. I hope you’ll have a great time travelling with me, seeing what I saw and feeling what I felt.

I particularly enjoyed learning about the history of the places I travelled through and how its impacts are still felt today. All the countries I travelled through were communist countries in the 20th century, and several were also subjected to Nazi occupation and the horrors of the Holocaust. Joining the dots between what I’d learned growing up in the West and the reality for those in the East was eye-opening.

This book is a casual record written through my eyes only. I wrote down facts about the places I was travelling through as I learned them along the way, but I could never hope to manage – and nor have I ever aspired to – unassailable political or historical analysis of the places I visited. I have simply recorded what I saw and learned along with my thoughts on it. One of the most important things I have learned is that we all (even those much more expert than me) view and understand things through the lens of our own upbringing and experiences. This book is written through the lens of a young Australian travelling through Mongolia, Russia and eastern Europe in the 2010s. It is a snapshot of that place in that time as it was seen by me. I hope you’ll enjoy the journey.

Carrie Riseley

Hobart, Tasmania

July 2021

The beginning

The Trans-Siberian Railway runs 9,289km from Vladivostok to Moscow. The Trans-Mongolian is the same line from Lake Baikal westwards, but from Lake Baikal it splits off to the south, running through Mongolia to Beijing. Mongolia sounded romantic and fascinating to me. I was intrigued by stories from a friend who had taken this journey and told me that in Mongolia people live in yurts with TVs and fridges in them and suburban fences around them. This I had to see. I booked my rail journey from Beijing to St Petersburg: 7,900 kilometres, one fifth of the circumference of the earth.

I’d been to Beijing before and hadn’t liked it much, so I spent two days escaping the city before boarding the train. This is my travel journal.

4th of May, 9:45am:

I’m now on a bus from Beijing to Miyun, hoping I can get from there to the Great Wall without being ripped off too badly. As usual, I have under-budgeted for China. The first time I went to China, I borrowed an old guidebook from the library which said, The Chinese view it as their patriotic duty to rip foreigners off. I later attended a seminar in my hometown about Chinese business culture, and basically, if you don’t know how to haggle effectively and politely, you’re stuffed. Which is why I always under budget for China.

So far, however, my experiences have been positive. I came out of Customs at 11:30pm last night, precisely 20 minutes after the airport train stopped running. Found a bus, and missed my stop because for some reason when the bus stopped the driver was yelling, Ruha, instead of Dongzhimen. I wasn’t too worried at the time because it was only the first stop, but a couple of minutes later I realised that the sign at the airport had said that Dongzhimen was the first stop. I asked first another passenger and then the driver and they both replied in Chinese, but they both shook their heads and pointed behind them, as in: No, Dongzhimen was back there!

But he’d said, Ruha! at that stop! I wonder whether ruha actually means, Oi foreigner, didn’t you want to get off here? He did say it twice.

So there I was at nearly midnight stuck on a bus in a strange city going further and further away from my hostel. I swore loudly.

I was really lucky, though. The driver was kind enough at the end of his route to turn around and take me back to Dongzhimen. So that was positive experience number one: nice bus driver. And he did not ask for an extra payment to do this!

Then when I got off the bus I had to find where I was on the map so I could start following my hostel’s directions. I asked a man at a bus stop, and he told me what road we were on and what direction it was going – all in Chinese, but I could understand the hand gestures and he seemed friendly. Positive experience number 2. Also, fortunately I can read the characters for east and west and they were marked on the road signs – otherwise I wouldn’t have understood what he was saying about the directions.

I felt completely safe, even though it was after midnight (closer to 1am at this stage) and I was carrying all my stuff. There were people around and lights and no-one was looking at me funny. Did not get lost. Met a foreigner right at the end who walked me right into the hostel. Win.

I’d known all along that the hostel had 24-hour reception, otherwise I would have been a lot more stressed out.

It’s been a while since my last trip and I’d forgotten about those little, Shit! Where am I? What do I do? experiences you have while travelling. I freaked out very slightly at the start when I swore on the bus, but after that I just found it invigorating!

...

4:45pm:

My taxi ride from Miyun to Jinshanling was expensive, but totally worth it to spend three amazing hours hiking on the Great Wall. The start at Jinshanling was a bit touristy, but the people lessened as I went on. The unrestored section further along was extra charming, but I liked seeing the restored bit too, because that’s what it was meant to be like when it was built and used. There’s incredible mountain scenery, with the wall snaking its way through as far as the eye can see. Even smog looks beautiful from the Great Wall.

One of the steepest parts of the unrestored section had steps going straight up: literally if I put my hand out I’d touch the steps ahead of me without having to bend over. There was a guard tower at the top and there was an old man sitting in its doorway. He was wearing darkish green old-style workers’ clothing and a striking army green engine driver hat with a big red communist star on the front of it, and he was smoking a pipe. It was amazing to see, high above the Great Wall, being firmly reminded that I was in China; possibly even China fifty years ago – Mao’s China. Then, when I finally got up the steps and walked past him, he said, Coca Cola! Ice water! Coffee! Beer!

Always a land of contrasts.

In the taxi on the way back, I got the front seat view of all the vehicles driving straight at me as we drove on the wrong side of the road to overtake all the trucks, and felt every acceleration and brake as the driver prepared to overtake and then decided that car coming towards us was too close after all – or, in one case, when he pulled out to go around a line of about six cars and two or three trucks which were going around a corner at the time. He got halfway through and then suddenly had to brake and swerve back into the middle of the line when, between two trucks around the corner up ahead, he spotted a car coming straight at us!

Well, at least he was watching ahead. So was I, believe me, and I saw it too and was quite relieved when we suddenly swerved back onto the right side of the road...

A traffic scenario I was flabbergasted by on a previous trip, vehicles ending up three abreast in two lanes because one’s decided giving way is for wimps and it’s just going to push right between the oncoming vehicle (and/or truck) and the vehicle it’s overtaking, happened at least four times in an approximately one-hour journey. One of those times it was us doing the overtaking and squishing between a truck and a car.

Fortunately for me, that previous experience I had meant that it didn’t bother me. I expected it. I took a sharp intake of breath a couple of times, but nothing more. I understand now that it’s just how they drive here. They do look up ahead and are prepared to slow down or swerve quite often without incident.

I also expected the driver to make three mobile phone calls – make them, not receive them, so he had to spend a lot of time with the phone on the steering wheel scrolling through his contacts list first. I didn’t react, other than a subtle roll of my eyes.

I did complain loudly when he started smoking, though. But he didn’t stop; he just wound the window down.

...

5th of May, 8:03pm:

Today I went to collect my train ticket, which was a novel experience in more ways than one. I booked a Trans-Mongolian tour through a travel agent in Melbourne, because I’d heard it was very difficult to get a Russian visa independently. I didn’t want to be stuck in a tour group the whole time, though, so I chose this company because their Trans-Mongolian and Trans-Siberian offerings are billed as still being independent travel. They book the train, the transfers, the accommodation and, in some places, local tours, but you aren’t with a tour group the whole time. They gave me some good choices of things to do along the train line, which I can’t wait to get started on!

Anyway, the first thing I had to do to kick it all off was to pick up my ticket for the first leg of the Trans-Mongolian: Beijing to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. My travel agent had given me written instructions to go to Room 801 of the CITS Building in Dong Cheng District. CITS stands for China International Travel Services, which, it turns out, is the biggest travel agency in the whole wide world. The first office I passed on the eighth floor was Hawaiian Airlines, and then there were lots of inbound travel offices in various corridors. Room 801 was labelled something like, Inbound Travel – Spanish and Portuguese-Speaking Nations. I walked in, and they said, Hola to me! I explained what I wanted, and it turned out I was in completely the wrong office.

Fortunately, there was a nice lady called Amanda there who spoke English as well as Spanish, and she proceeded to take me to at least three other offices desperately trying to find someone who could help me. First she took me to her boss, who phoned the number written next to the CITS address on my travel documents and found it went to an office on the seventh floor. We went to two offices on the seventh floor before finding out it was the wrong phone number.

I was getting worried that my ticket had been lost, which would have been an enormous disaster. However, though the facial expressions of the people Amanda was talking to (in Chinese) indicated they didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, they all seemed to have ideas on where we should go next. They were pointing toward other offices and nodding, so I didn’t worry too much. Amanda and her colleagues seemed determined to get to the bottom of it.

The man from office number three (four, if you count Room 801) took us to Room 701, which was the office for inbound travel for Oceania and/or some English-speaking countries or something (I’d stopped reading the signs by this stage). Finally, my train ticket appeared! I thanked Amanda and the man from office number three and they left. Two men from Room 701 told me about my ticket, how to get to the station in the morning etc., and checked my passport number.

The ticket doesn’t say my name, only my passport number! They told me that this was normal. They couldn’t tell me anything else because the woman who’d issued my ticket, someone called Diana, was out to lunch – as, indeed, was almost everybody else. The main reason why it had taken so long to find the right office was that each room had only one or two people in it, and scores of empty desks!

After that I had lunch at a restaurant which had a spectacular English picture menu offering things like:

−  Mushroom and rape

−  Husband and wife lung slice

−  Starch bath chap

−  Long in tomato burn beans

−  Pan wan MAO blood flourishing

−  Tofu pudding intestine

−  A knot in the soup

−  Hand bag food

−  Pickled duck blood

Then I went to the 798 Art District, which was just incredible. It’s in a disused electronics factory/industrial district, and it’s enormous. I was wandering down numerous laneways in several directions for two hours before I got back to somewhere I’d seen before, and even then there were still scores of unseen laneways and galleries left to explore.  I loved the art, but more than that I loved the location. Derelict buildings, some with bits clearly missing; huge pipes just above street level ducting something or other through the site; bunched up wires; many layers of grime. This was all coloured somewhere from dusty grey to deep brown and musky red, but it was interspersed with brightly coloured splashes of green vines and art in all the colours of the rainbow.

And the shapes. Tall, round smoke stacks; winding pipes; sawtooth-roofed factory buildings. I spent hours taking photos of the architecture, let alone the art! I saw one art gallery whose upper level went right up into two of the triangular sections of factory roof, which was made using that age-old Roman method of setting concrete between wooden boxing. I could see the grain of the wood – I could even see bits of wood – in this dark grey industrial concrete. The art in that gallery was amazing too – by someone called Cao Yong.

I’m intrigued by industrial architecture of bygone eras, particularly derelict buildings, as there’s something about the grime and the just so slightly tumble-down nature of it that’s endearingly mysterious and interesting to me. I would even say it’s beautiful. But the Chinese artists seemed to appreciate it for an entirely different reason. It’s an artists’ community, so you would think they would be a sub-culture, a counter culture, expressing non-mainstream ideas in creative ways because they’re artists, right?

Not really... There was a huge array of militaristic art and lots of communist stuff, including some propaganda postcards I really hoped were satirical but may not have been. They said things like, Make money is the highest glory! OK, not very communist, but representative of Chinese communism today. The communist stuff was all meant to look cool; the red star and khaki was a design feature of many of the products in the shops; there was a communist panda and other cutesy stuff that looked quite conventional; and then there was a lot of industrial stuff glorifying cars, planes and trains. There’s the wing of an enormous military jet in the main courtyard...

The themes were just so different from any art I have ever seen in the West. Back home, if you see military art it’ll usually be hauntingly tragic, showing the horrors of war, not just some soldier on guard looking cool. Kitschy things with cute pandas and car number plates are practically mainstream now – they’re not arty. The factory itself was being somehow celebrated, and even the very talented artworks of Cao Yong were so mainstream. They were celebrating nationalistic beliefs. He did one of the USA showing Mt Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, man on the moon, Iwojima and some fire-fighters raising the US flag at Ground Zero; and an enormous Chinese one showing the Great Wall, Tian’anmen Gate, the Terracotta Warriors, a famous waterfall, a giant Buddha: all the famous stuff that only represents the cultural majority. And, in the mountains in the background, the Potala Palace and Mt Everest, which are Tibetan, not Chinese. It’s amazing art – the execution is incredible – but it’s just so... mainstream. It’s propaganda, actually. That word popped into my head many times while I was there.

...

6th of May, 8:45am:

I’d been told that on the Trans-Mongolian Railway the toilets are always locked when the train is in a station, and I hadn’t really considered the reason why... It’s because they tip straight out onto the tracks! There’s a chute and a hole – you can see it through the bowl.

Well, here I am, 45 minutes into my 7,900km journey. I’m in a second-class cabin, which is pretty cramped with four beds, but fortunately there are only three of us in here: me and an American couple called Angie and Esra.

Industry really is booming in China – you see it everywhere. Buildings being built, rocks piled, cement laid, dust and rubbish strewn... waste laid... I haven’t seen anything beautiful apart from the mountains. The mountains are great. But they’re covered in smog.

...

11:50am:

We’re going through an industrial city now – the only settlement the train’s stopped at so far – and it’s so full of contrasts of old and new, tradition and progress, with progress clearly winning out. The smaller towns we’ve passed have been full of traditional hutongs: many small one-storey houses arranged in rows along laneways, built in brick with reddish brown tiles, all ochre-coloured and grimy. In the same area, you’ll see a handful of (usually derelict) traditional houses, behind them an old grimy apartment building that’s still being lived in, and behind that rows and rows of new apartment buildings – some so new they shine – and on the horizon more being built. I got a photo of a grimy old apartment building and a shiny white shopping centre behind it with a huge TV screen on the wall, and another of workers on the endless arid farm fields with a row of concrete pillars running through them, being built through this farmland. From the shape of the row, I’d say it’s going to be a highway or railway flyover of some kind. Quite close to the ground, running through the farmland.

And oh, there’s so much rubbish.

Still plenty of people employed in agriculture, though – and it’s manual labour agriculture. I’d imagine the industrialisation just isn’t reaching the poor. They don’t even seem to have horses.

...

2:50pm:

The landscape has changed a fair bit. Flatter, with rolling hills on the horizon rather than mountains. Less people. Less smog, but it’s still there on the horizon. There are still factories.

The traditional architecture changed a couple of hours back. The roofs became pointy and the blocks of apartments became less. And the villages look dirtier and more ramshackle.

And even here, they’re building flyovers.

Ah, another city with apartment buildings being built. They’re shiny and new and there are so many of them. And there are billboards and flyovers. Still a few hutongs though. This city is called Jining. The train station is new.

According to Esra’s map, we are in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. That means part of Mongolia is in China. I doubt it’s autonomous – they call Tibet an Autonomous Region too. Esra’s guidebook says Mongolians are only 15% of the population now, and China has made them assimilate and abandon their nomadic lifestyle. But we have seen Mongol script on the train station signs because they have been allowed to keep their language.

I was excited to see the book mention that we could see Mongol shepherds tending their flocks – we did see some shepherds, very close to the train.

...

9:50pm:

I watched the sun set over the Gobi Desert. It was magical. I guess we’re still in the desert now – we’re in a border town called Erlian, on the Chinese side. China and Mongolia have a different rail gauge, so right now we’re in a big industrial shed where they literally swap the wheels over. And we’re on the train while they do it! They’ve finished – wait, have they? We’re so confused. The train is still shaking everywhere, and we have no idea if we have wheels or not!

The grasslands were pretty majestic: fairly flat but with little hilly bumps, green and brown, with the odd ramshackle village and some of those shepherds the guidebook mentioned. I’d been worried about getting bored while I was on the train, but I had no problems at all. I had an endless parade of fascinating stuff right outside the window. I literally spent 12 hours today looking out the window. More, if you count the two hours I just spent watching the wheels being changed. Even when I was talking to Angie and Esra or writing in here, I was always looking out the window too. I’m loving this journey.

Dinner was the same as lunch: Chinese two-minute noodles and bok choy in yesterday’s takeaway container with hot water from the urn at the end of the carriage. As I was eating, sand appeared at the side of the tracks. Just a little bit at the start – barely noticeable. The sun got lower and lower, gently wrapped in thin cotton wool clouds that were making it glow in a softer, more muffled way. Then I realised that the whole air was muffled; that is to say, everything was a bit blurry. I thought we’d come into some low cloud or fog, but it was actually sand blowing around!

And so I watched the sunset over the Gobi Desert. I couldn’t see the desert clearly because of the light, but it was certainly sandy and flat and it went all the way to the horizon. It wasn’t sand dunes but flat sand covered in scores of tussocks of grass, exactly like the sand at the edge of beaches.

Changing the bogies

When I came back into my cabin after sitting on a little seat in the corridor watching the last rays of light fade, I found that a departure card and a customs card had appeared for me. I filled them in, put my boots on and attempted to get my belongings in order, but soon gave up and decided to simply hope that we didn’t have to take all our stuff off the train.

We arrived at Erlian Station at around 8:30pm, and I stepped into the corridor with my hand luggage only. Our carriage’s conductor quickly ushered me right back into the cabin, pointing out a woman in a military uniform who was now standing at the door of the next cabin, checking the passport of the Mongolian woman inside. I put my stuff back in the cabin – evidently we would have our passport check right here on the train.

The woman took my passport and departure card, asked my name and looked at my face. Then she did the same thing with Angie and Esra. When she opened Esra’s passport, he was on the floor getting something out of his bag. She said, What is your name? Please remove your glasses. This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a passport officer to request, but it seemed odd because I never thought I’d hear it requested of a man kneeling on the floor of a cabin.

Then she took our passports away. I did not enjoy this, but I had been warned it would happen. The passport officer left the carriage. We were left looking out onto the platform, from which what I will call communist music was blaring from loudspeakers: proud, patriotic ceremonial/marching music – I recall hearing similar stuff on Vietnamese trains. We watched various uniformed officers and guards (of which there are so many in China and they are always so young) marching, walking and running about – or, in one case, balancing on a stone paver at the edge of a garden bed! Told you they were young.

They were lining up in twos in front of an older officer who would ask them something and they would respond, and then he would send them running onward as the next two ran into their place. This continued for a couple of minutes until I saw one of the more experienced-looking (but still young) officers putting an enormous stack of passports into a bag and moving towards the station building. I noticed an Australian/Norwegian couple I’d been talking to at Beijing Station this morning walking along the platform behind him, which let me know it was OK for us to get off the train.

I got off, and was finally able to see the train’s full length. It’s... long! 10 or 14 cars, maybe? I took photos, and an engine driver deliberately scared me by pulling his horn. I know it was deliberate: he was looking right at me when he pulled it and he smiled when I jumped. Then there was an announcement saying that we would be at this station for some time and that we were welcome to go inside and use the loo, rest and, under the announcer’s encouragement, shop.

I found the shop on the upper floor. I’d been wishing I’d brought more snacks and getting jealous of Angie and Esra for having lots of them – and good Chinese ones, too, like chilli tofu. Fortunately, there were plenty in the duty-free shop. Small packets were only three yuan each, so I grabbed a few and a packet of preserved eggs, and a cold beer.

Aha! I’ve just been handed a Mongolian Arrival Card. At 12:23am.

...

12:29am:

That moment when you realise you don’t know what country you’re in...

Mongolia. We’re in Mongolia!

...

12:56am:

Still waiting for our passports back.

After making my purchases I walked back out of the station building and immediately noticed that the train was half as long as it used to be. I quickly got back on, as I knew they were taking bits of train away to have the wheels changed, and I didn’t want to miss that.

Our bit of train (the first bit, numbering about six carriages I think) rolled into an industrial shed that had two open tracks in the middle with red lifting mechanisms positioned about ten metres apart all the way along both sides of both tracks.  They were pretty modest-looking: just a red metal pillar with a control panel beneath it and a rubber hydraulic thingy inside. At the edge of the shed there were lots and lots of train wheel chassis. These are called bogies, and we were about to go through the changing of the bogies.

There was much shuddering and shunting that sounded like a rollercoaster and felt like a dodgem car or an earthquake. We didn’t really know what was going on until we saw the other half of our train pull in on the track next to us. After a good ten to fifteen minutes of hearing them being shunted around but seeing nothing visibly moving on their train, and workers moving around but not doing anything visibly much, eventually I became aware that the carriage in front of the one next to us had been separated and was now several feet in the air, with its wheels sitting disconnected below it. I went to the end of our carriage to get a better view, discovering when I got there that our carriage was now also several metres away from its neighbour. I was looking through a small window in its end door at a man’s face looking through the small window in the neighbouring carriage’s end door. The man looked rather like a vampire with the way the filtered light was shattering over his gaunt face; a vampire trapped in a spaceship that was moving away from me.

But the real action was going on next door, on the other track. One carriage was way up in the air. The other one, the one next to ours, began to move too, almost imperceptibly slowly. Through the window in the side door of that carriage I saw the Australian/Norwegian couple. We waved at each other. And then their carriage went up. It was disconnected from its bogies. A pulley inside one of the two railway tracks beneath it began to move. And then suddenly, a long line of bogies began pouring under the first carriage and through to the second. About halfway through the line, the bogies became visibly different. These new ones stopped and were placed in the required positions under the carriages. The cables and bolts were connected and the lifts disconnected. The other half of the train now had Mongolian wheels. But what about our half? We were a little miffed that we’d been in the warehouse first but that the other half of the train had got their wheels changed first...

We were shunted backwards a little way, and then forwards again. We went forwards, out of the shed, and then back into it again. There was more bumping, but we weren’t raised into the air. Then we went back into the dark again. For quite a way, forwards. Then we went quite a way backwards, still in the dark, eventually arriving back at the station platform. Up until that last sentence, we’d been convinced that we either didn’t have wheels at all or that we still had Chinese wheels, when all along the changeover must have happened more than an hour before – somewhere in between the dodgem car moves and rollercoaster noises and the appearance of the other cars on the track beside us. If I see that Australian/Norwegian couple again I’ll ask them if we were way up in the air when they came in. We didn’t even notice.

We sat at the station for a while again. There were no soldiers running around on the platform anymore. The military-uniformed