Having been granted your Mongolian visa, you are now free to head to the China-Mongolia border to cross from Erlian to Zamyn-Uud. The Chinese border crossing in Erlian opens at around 08:30 and closes around 18:00. It is no more than a ten minute drive from the centre of town. There are plenty of taxis buzzing about and it will only cost a few Yuan. Ask to go to the guómén (literally, nation door).
For those of you intending to cross the China-Mongolia border and travel from Erlian to Zamyn-Uud, the first thing to note is that, unless you are exempt, you will need a Mongolian visa in order to do so. I tried entering Mongolia without a visa in the mistaken belief that I didn’t need one. It didn’t work. Get one before you travel.
You can apply for a Mongolian visa before you reach the border, usually in Beijing or even in Hohhot. As of 2008, you can no longer apply for a Mongolian visa in Hong Kong. If it is not possible to get your visa before you travel, you should get one when you reach the China-Mongolia border in Erlian (Erenhot).
Getting a Russian Visa in Hong Kong for travelling the Trans-Siberian Railway shouldn’t be a problem. With the required documents correctly filled out, and assuming that your reason for visting Russia isn’t listed as espionage, terrorism or political assassination, you should be able to pay your fee and receive your visa within the allotted time.
As a UK passport holder, getting a Russian visa was a relatively painless affair. If you can negotiate the almost comically foul-tempered staff that work at the Russian consulate in Hong Kong, then whatever passport you carry, you should likewise have no problems getting everything in order for you Trans-Siberian trip.
It may have looked the unlikeliest thing on the agenda for the majority of the trip, but after all the drama of the previous two and a half weeks travelling through China, Mongolia, along the Trans-Siberian Railway and finally through Europe, I reached Manchester at the expected time, on the appointed day, on the train I’d originally intended. The immigration bureaucracies of several nations along the way had tried their best to thwart me, but whatever source of fortune had sustained me on my course, it held good enough to get me home on time and still (pretty much) alive.
My Berlin to Paris train arrived at Paris Gare de l’Est in the early afternoon. No need to book a hostel I’d thought. Peak season in Paris was coming to a close. And when was the last time I’d turned up at a hostel and been refused a bed? It had never happened. But after walking along the canal up to Rue La Fayette, predictably, there was no room at the inn.
I’d travelled six thousand miles over thirteen days, the Trans-Siberian Railway was successfully behind me, but this was the first time I’d felt nervous. Boarding the train as darkness fell for the Moscow to Berlin leg of my journey, speaking one word of a language I couldn’t escape from, about to spend twelve hours travelling overnight to Kiev with no relief.
After 90 hours of trans-Siberian incarceration, it was the last that lasted longest. All packed up with nowhere to go, bed made, sheets gone, shoes on and waiting, as we trundled through the outskirts of Moscow towards our journey’s end. We weren’t institutionalised quite yet, but after four days living by timetables and routines, doing whatever we could to pass the time, rejoining the real world would still be an eye-blinking experience. In less than forty minutes we’d be released into a new and disorienting capital. I had no idea what to expect.
What day is this? Is this our second or our third day? What time is it? Is that Moscow time, Beijing time or local time? It’s almost eight o’clock by my watch. Outside it’s as bright as if it were four. Maybe it is four. But it can’t be. In Moscow it’s four. And we’re still two Trans-Siberian days away. Maybe it’s six o’clock now, here, in Siberia, as we travel through what seems like the same forest of birch we’ve been travelling through for the past 2000 miles.
After Irkutsk the train had emptied. Most of the Mongolians that had been travelling Trans-Siberian train 005 from Ulaanbaatar had left us at the station. Since then, we’d been travelling less than half-full. But still, the majority of passengers were Mongolian and on their way to Moscow. They were Buryats, I suspected, a Mongol people comprising over 400,000, that is, about 30% of the population of the Buryatiya Republic near the Mongolian border. This made them the largest indigenous group in Russia.
We’d passed through Ulan-Ude before dawn and woke to a Trans-Siberian sunrise with over 5000 km still to go. The low-rolling hills and Mongolian pasture of the afternoon before – that had shone after the morning’s rain – had morphed into hillsides forested with fir and spruce as we approached Lake Baikal. We were in a different land now, where the taiga would soon stretch seemingly forever with the same despairing permanence and the faces outside were no longer Asian. But I was too hungry for such window gazing just yet. I felt like I hadn’t eaten a proper meal for at least four days and in truth, I probably hadn’t. I jumped off my top bunk bed and made my first tentative journey to the dining carriage.
Waking to Mongolia, land of the sky of endless blue, of steppe and ranging grasslands. But not today. We’d entered in dust and sun-parched nothingness on the Trans-Mongolian railway from Erlian to Ulaanbaatar. Now the vast magnificence of the Mongolian countryside had been reduced to a drizzling grey, bleak and thoroughly miserable.
Though we left Erlian at 17:10, it was 21:25 by the time train 685 departed Zamyn-Uud for Ulaanbaatar. The Chinese officials did their thing on the one side of the China-Mongolia border, while the Mongolians did theirs on the other. We then had a couple of hours waiting around at Zamyn-uud station while the train’s bogies were changed to fit the wider Mongolian rail gauge, before we were finally on our way again.