Beijing to Ulan-Ude by Train

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. I chant this line from My Fair Lady over and over to the rhythm of the train as we pass swaths of uninhabited arid land. It’s three days into January, and I am headed from Beijing to Ulan-Ude by train. This is day one of a 40-day journey across Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. 

Most of the time I look outside the train window to watch a different kind of world go by. I expect to see snow at this time of year, but the Eastern Gobi Desert making up the northern Chinese landscape is grayish brown. It’s barren and vast, and except for the grumbling of the train, quiet.

A couple of hundred miles north of Beijing, we pass a nursery of pine trees, a surprising touch of human existence in the middle of nowhere.

We arrive in Erlian at the China-Mongolian border after sunset the first day. The custom officers collect my passport, and I stay on board to watch them change the train’s bogie (set of wheels) to wider Mongolian and Russian ones.

The Chinese dining car is also replaced by a Mongolian one decorated with metallic tassels dangling from the ceiling and a Christmas tree in the window. Three hours later the bogies are changed, and the bathrooms are finally unlocked just as my bladder is about to explode.

We chug along into Mongolia and I drift into sleep.  

I wake with the sunrise over the Eastern Gobi Desert Steppe. The gray tones of northern China are now golden brown, and more signs of life appear. Little two-humped Bactrian camels roam freely, and adorable, blonde, goat-like animals that I learn from the Trans-Sibrian Handbook are gazelles, delicately graze on the Mongolian grasslands. 

Signs of nomadic life also appear in tiny communities of gers pitched along the railroad and herds of horses, too busy grazing rare treats of grass in this part of the world to lift their heads. Of the three million inhabitants of Mongolia, about a third are nomads who have been able to maintain their traditional way of life over the centuries. But nowadays, that number dwindles as their children go to schools in the city and stay for jobs that aren’t as harsh as life in the steppes. 

For lunch, I join Bob and Terry, an American couple traveling the world, in the retro dining car. We are served hearty plates of chicken, rice, potatoes, and vegetables that I wolf down as I listen to their story. 

They had just completed a 42-day cruise from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia. While on this side of the globe, they visited their daughter in Japan and their son in Papua New Guinea. They are taking the Trans-Siberian westward to the Bed and Breakfast they own in Colorado.

Bob sleeps with a breathing machine. He has been healthy his whole life, exercising and all, he explains, but his body is deteriorating and he needs the breathing machine so his muscles don’t stop working at night. But even in the first-class cabin, the electrical capacity is not strong enough to power his machine. The first night he blew the fuse. So, for the next five nights to Moscow Bob has to sleep sitting up. 

Bob and Terry used to travel with their kids when they were young; camping in Germany, long biking trips, collecting experiences that instilled the sense of adventure in them even as they near retirement. As we swap stories over lunch in the middle of the Mongolian steppes, they already have another 42-day cruise from Singapore to Scandinavia planned for next year. 

More snow covers the ground as we near Ulaanbaatar, the smoggy capital of Mongolia home to half the country’s population. Tiny communities of four or five single-story homes, painted with brightly colored geometric patterns, congregate near the tracks. These communities grow bigger and bigger as we approach the city. 

When I step onto the train platform during the stopover in Ulaanbaatar, the air smells of soot, more intense than the smell of pollution in Beijing. But the sky is clearer.

I go inside the train station to buy an electrical adapter. For a moment, I forget that I’m in a different country. The disorganized layout of stalls resembles train stations in China, and the Mongolian shopkeeper and her daughter could be confused for Chinese. But then I remember where I am and rely on a calculator, smiles, and body language to make the transaction.

It’s not as cold as I imagined, but it’s still not pleasant to stand around outside. I snap a couple of photos next to the train and run back to my cabin heated by old-school coal-burning stoves. Every so often our carriage attendant has to throw in more coal that we restocked in Erlian. 

A Mongolian family fills the cabin next to mine with suitcases and large garbage bags of winter boots. Later I learn that they are reindeer boots, as functional as they are fashionable in Siberia. Our Chinese attendant greets them in Russian like they’re old friends. He learned to speak Russian and Mongolian from working on the railway for twenty years and often meets passengers who frequent this route.

For twenty years he has been passing through Mongolia and Russia, but aside from the few times he wandered into Moscow during overnight stopovers, he has no idea what these places look like beyond the view from the train. But, he tells me, he can see how much Ulaanbaatar has developed in the last two decades.

As a carriage attendant on the Trans-Siberian Railway, he only sees his wife and daughter a few times a year. To make up for his aloneness, he seems to have made a family of train crew. During mealtimes, other attendants would join him in his cabin where he had a rice-cooker. They’d smoke (unfortunately, they smoked cigarettes) and chat with their pantlegs rolled up, just as they would do at home in China.

I guess after twenty years on the train, you do what you can to make it feel like home. 

On my last night before hopping off at Ulan-Ude, two Chinese college students invite me for dinner and drinks in their cabin. Like Bob and Terry, they are heading straight to Moscow, except they will continue on to Denmark for a semester abroad.

From a square-meter-large box, they pull out bread, pears, all sorts of Chinese snacks, hot sauce, a tea set, and even a bottle of wine. I contribute some Trader Joe’s cookies. We drink wine from little teacups and cheers to this shared moment on a voyage that will surely change our lives. 

The snow thickens as we trudge closer to Russia, steppes melding into tundra. I settle into my berth for the last few hours of sleep before I arrive at my first destination, Ulan-Ude. Day two of my 40-day journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway ends in Mongolia. When I wake up in a few hours, I’ll be in Russia.

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Want to plan your own epic journey across Russia? Click here to read my other post for tips and resources to help you plan your travels on the Trans-Siberian Railway.