Welcome to Mongolia

The language barrier at the border is sudden and absolute.

Chinese trains, buses and finally a taxi have brought us to the border, but we’ll be crossing in a jeep. And the jeep is most definitely Mongolian.

It’s an elderly vehicle, quite possibly dating back to Mongolia’s years as a buffer state between Communist China and other-sort-of-Communist Russia, and full to the gunnels with rice sacks.

Despite the fact they do their business crossing this border, not one of the jeepmasters speaks any Chinese. And their English begins and ends with, “Pay now.”

There’s space for us, it is explained in Mongolian and sign language, and Zac and I cram into one of the front seats, one guy shares the driver’s seat, two substantial Mongolian gentlemen fold themselves almost double on top of the rice sacks in the back, and my enormous backpack balances on the bonnet.

We are linguistically isolated again, and it’s an odd, sad feeling.

Not least because, at first blush, the Mongolian language sounds like Tolkien’s orcs. On the plus side, however, it’s written in Cyrillic, so I can read it.

Or, as Zac puts it, “It’s nice to be back in the land of the alphabet.”

The Chinese side of the border is spanking new and spiffily clean. We spend a while there, because Zac’s passport ran out of pages in China, so I got us both new passports.

This means that our Chinese visas are in our old passports, while our Mongolian visas are in the new ones, and this unprecedented situation so panics one of the officers that the others take it in turns to tell him to leave it.

The Mongolian side of the border? It’s a welter of Gobi dust, the patchy scrub of Chinese — “Inner” — Mongolia giving way to bright red sand.

We wait for hours among a horde of lorries, ferrying construction materials – steel girders, insulation, pipework – from China into Mongolia, where the construction season has just begun, while Zac, between a toddler and a puppy, is in heaven.

Our jeepmates teach us some basic Mongolian phrases – among them “margash”, Mongolian for mañana – and then usher us through customs, out the other side and onto a taxi for the border town, Zamyn-Uud, a main square with a train station, some “pubs”, a handful of “supermarkets”, a couple of cashpoints, some alfresco pool tables and a train station.

Our train – not, technically, the Trans-Mongolian, but a local train that covers the Mongolian bit of the route – is waiting in the station. It will take over fourteen hours to travel the 700k or so to Ulaanbaatar.

I find the ticket office – the Russian word for “ticket” works fine – and buy tickets, using sign language, load up on pickled cucumbers and sausages, and get us settled in our lovely bunks.

Just as on a Chinese sleeper train, it’s form to offer snacks around.

We establish, using the phrasebook in our guidebook and some sign language, that our companion has a four-year-old son.

Mongolians, I conclude, chowing down on our cabinmate’s dried fruit and wishing I’d brought more sharable snacks, are lovely.

Still under the general impression I’m in China, I pop out to the gap between the carriages for a restorative fag, as an absolutely splendid sunset begins to streak the vast sky over the empty plains. There are very few things as lovely as travelling across a landscape unsullied by roads.

“Smoking. NO!” says the stewardess, emphatically. (Customer service in Mongolia, I will learn, is stuck firmly in the Soviet era.)

Oooookkkkayyyy….

Central Asia is not known as a mecca of anti-smoking, Chinese train stations are hardly smoke-free, and accounts of journeys on the Trans-Mongolian typically feature a dense fug of nicotine, so I’m a little bewildered by this.

The train trundles to a stop at a settlement which comprises eight log cabins, the station and the stationmaster’s brick-built hut, with some gers in the distance – as in Bulgaria, Mongolian national railways are never knowingly understaffed – and aim for the platform.

“Smoking! NO!” says the stewardess, crossly, bodily yanking me back.

This is most unexpected. No smoking on the train? AND no smoking on the platform? Where the hell are we? The E.U.?

And why were all those burly Mongolian men stocking up with Esse Virginia Slims in the supermarket at the border town? And why?….

I will, I resolve, get to the bottom of this…

But first I need to find a stewardess sympatica enough to let me have a bloody cigarette on the platform of a train station that serves a town whose total population might just fill one floor of a small Chinese apartment block.