Travel by Rail

Never before in my life have I felt so tall and so white. Chinese stop on the street and ask for my picture, grabbing my arm after I agree and then making those ubiquitous rabbit-ear signs. They have no qualms about staring at me, turning to those near them to say something and then staring again. While I will nod and smile, many times I get no reaction. I am apparently a freak.

Getting into Beijing at six in the morning on the red-eye from Bangkok, I checked into my hotel with the intention of getting some sleep. I had spent the night before on the train from Chiang Mai to Bangkok and two nights of traveling had nearly incapacitated me. After catching a second wind, I decided that it would be a shame to miss a day of sightseeing in Beijing so I headed out to The Temple of Heaven. Chatting with some Kiwi girls in line, I spent the next few hours with them walking through the temple. By the end of it I was again exhausted and so I said goodbye and got on the metro back to my hotel. The group meeting was at six that evening so I sat my alarm for 5:45 and promptly fell asleep. I slept right through my alarm and got a call from Laziz, the Uzbek tour leader at ten after and rushed down to meet the rest of the group that I will be spending the next three weeks with. A great first impression. What really solidified that impression was being the only one who did not have a Mongolian visa, so the next day Laziz and I headed for the Mongolian embassy. It turned out Laziz needed to get his visa as well, and since he told me he has traveled this route approximately 49 times, I felt assured that my application would be processed in time.

I have spent my time in Beijing rabidly sightseeing, taking in Tienanmen Square, The Forbidden City, Jingum Park, Olympic Park (including The Aquatic Centre and The Bird`s Nest), The Lama Temple and of course The Great Wall. Most of the time I have been moving solo as my visa application meant missing the guided tours, but the off-shoot of that is that I have become quite adept at navigating the metro system. What I did do with the group was the trip out to The Great Wall which was incredible - there are four sections of the wall that can be traveled to from Beijing, and we headed to Mutianyu, the second-furthest section from the capital. I tried to cover as much of the wall as possible, and by the end of the trek I had covered about five kilometers and I don't know how many hundreds of steps. One thing that shook me to my core was finding out that The Great Wall is not visible from space, contradictory to everything I had ever read or heard before. It is by far the most disappointed I have been on this trip. While the "fact" does show up in the occasional school textbook, the smallest thing discernible from the moon would have to be seventy meters wide, and the Wall is approximately six meters at its widest points. Regardless, seeing the Wall stretch on and on, winding its way over hill after hill was one of the most impressive sights of my trip to date.

The day after seeing the Wall, we caught our train out of Beijing the next morning at 7:35 AM, beginning the trip on the Trans-Mongolian Railroad. This track will take us north-west through Mongolia until we intersect the Trans-Siberian line which will take us to our final destination of St. Petersburg. I am currently in Ulaan Baatar, the capital of Mongolia and apparently the most remote capital in the world. And does it ever look it.