China, Part I: The Trip There

In Midsummer I took a trip to China. Often people fly in on some package tour, but seeing as I'm adjacent to China, and I'm poor, a different route appealed to me. Drawing on the experience of other PCVs, I traveled entirely by land, taking a sequence of trains, cars, and buses to get from here to there. My goals were Beijing, and Shanghai, where I intended to visit a friend I hadn't seen since I studied abroad in Japan (and who was kind enough to write me the invitation letter I needed to get my visa).

July 27

My adventure starts on July 27. On this day, I took the overnight Mongolian domestic train to Zamyn Uud, a town by the Chinese border. I had a "hard seat," which means I have to sit up (or slouch) all night. There isn't much to say about that.

July 28

The train arrived in the morning. There are jeeps by the station to carry people across the border. Land crossing must be done in a vehicle. However, there are two checkpoints, a Mongolian and a Chinese one. At each one, everyone and everything must be taken out of the car and physically taken through the immigration office in the checkpoint, then put back in the car to continue on. At the Mongolian checkpoint, I discovered I had the wrong bureaucratic form with me. By the time I found and completed the correct form and went through the line again, my impatient driver had driven off. I had to flag down a new car to take me the rest of the way.

In this way I arrived in Erlian (Mongolian: Ereen), a border town in the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, and the counterpart to Zamyn Uud. After having traveled all this way, what was the first thing I ate in this brave new world? Mongolian food. In Inner Mongolia, I found myself instantly seeking out the ethnic Mongolians instead of the ethnic Han, so I stopped by a diner and demanded the Mongolian menu, to the waitress's surprise, and ordered huushuur. It was noticeably different from the huushuur I'm used to. The Mongolian spoken around here sounded strange, so that I was initially not sure that some people were actually speaking Mongolian, although they understood me well enough when I spoke standard UB Khalkh dialect. Actually, one woman at the diner jumped out of her seat and exclaimed, "Whoa, I've never heard a white person speak Mongolian before! Can I take a picture with you?"

Huushuur in Inner Mongolia

From Erlian, I took a bus to Beijing. The bus ran overnight, and had no seats, only bunk beds, as can be seen in the picture below.

Sleeper bus

July 29

The bus was supposed to arrive in Beijing at 5 AM or so, but it actually arrived at 2 AM and dumped in some dark parking lot in who knows where. I had to catch a taxi to Beijing Station. The central train station was one of the dirtiest places I've seen, although I was also seeing it for the first time at 2:30 AM. In front is one of those "We need to build a huge place for Socialist rallies" squares, which was covered in trash and people sleeping on the ground in cardboard boxes. Other people wandered around trying to hustle you for rooms. I bought a map off one of them for $3 (I would later find out this is 10 times the price I should've paid). Occasionally a guy with a straw broom would come along and push the trash up against a lightpole. Instead of waiting in the open, I went to the only place open at the time - McDonald's. A McDonald's which, I soon found out, had no fries.

Goodness, China has swamps!

After falling asleep inside the station for several hours, I boarded the slow train to Shanghai. This ran for 20 hours, and I had a hard seat here too. This brings us to July 30, Shanghai, and the next part of my adventure.