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).
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.